PR 
 
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 FROM THE INCOMK OF THE 
 
 FISKE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE BEQUEST OF 
 
 lyibrarian of the University 1868-1883 
 1905 
 
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PR 5513.W4r """"'""' '■"'"^ 
 Swinburne, a critical study. 
 
 3 1924 013 556 661 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis 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/cu31924013556661 
 
SWINBURNE 
 
SWINBURNE 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 T. EARLE WELBY 
 
 LONDON 
 
 ELKIN MATHEWS, CORK STREET 
 
 M CM XIV 
 Cff 
 
/(.Z^ssio 
 
 {ALL RIGHTS RESERVED] 
 
To 
 
 THE MEMORY OF 
 
 MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER 
 
The Author's thanks are due to the Executors of 
 
 the late Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton for 
 
 kind permission to make the various extracts 
 
 from the poems of the late A. C. Swinburne 
 
 in this book 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction 9 
 
 I. His Career . . . . . • 13 
 
 II. Personal Characteristics. . . - 152 
 
 III. Conclusion 163 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 It was the singular fortune of the great poet with 
 whom we are concerned in this book to be regarded 
 for a considerable part of his hfe as a pioneer, 
 whereas he was actually the last poet of an epoch 
 almost at its close when his earliest works were 
 published. As I am trying to point out elsewhere, 
 in a book on the poets of the generation next after 
 that to which Swinburne belonged, the error of those 
 who took him in the sixties for the forerunner of a 
 new movement was natural enough. Although the 
 youngest of his group, Swinburne was the first 
 member of it to attract general attention. The Germ 
 had appeared while he was yet a schoolboy, TJie 
 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine before he proceeded 
 to the University ; but neither of these short-lived 
 periodicals had been much heeded by the general 
 public. Morris had published "The Defence of 
 Guinevere" in 1858, but that very remarkable volume, 
 containing some of the strongest and most original 
 verse he ever wrote, had missed recognition outside a 
 
10 INTRODUCTION 
 
 narrow circle ; it was thirteen years before the small 
 first edition was exhausted. Rossetti's earliest verse 
 appeared in 1850, but even the "Blessed Damozel," 
 by common consent of one of his most typical and 
 consummate productions, gave him no wide reputation 
 as a poet. The publication of his " Poems " was long 
 deferred by circumstances of which too much has 
 been written, and only the volume of translations 
 from the early Italian poets was issued before Swin- 
 burne's "Atalanta in Calydon" enthralled and his 
 " Poems and Ballads " shocked and intoxicated a 
 public as wide as any which an English poet has 
 startled or delighted without being something more, 
 that is something less, than a poet. 
 
 The error was thus quite natural, but Swinburne, 
 far from being the herald of a new age of poetry, was 
 of all his group the most firmly bound by sympathy 
 to the past. As an artist he was working and was to 
 work under no modern influences but those of Hugo, 
 of Gautier, of Baudelaire, and of his elders in the 
 Pre-Raphaelite group ; no writer, English or French, 
 born after 1840 was to influence him at all, or even 
 seriously to interest him otherwise than through 
 occasional appeal to the old enthusiasms. As a 
 revolutionary he seemed to the young men of the 
 'sixties and early 'seventies the prophet of a revolt 
 that would sweep away the old world to create a new, 
 
INTRODUCTION ir 
 
 but his revolutionary theories and enthusiasms, derived 
 first from his grandfather, who had been a friend of 
 Mirabeau, developed by study of Shelley, Landor, 
 Hugo, and confirmed by intimacy with Mazzini, were 
 those of 1848 when they were not those of 1789, and 
 "The Songs Before Sunrise" were to be the very ' 
 last celebration of an ancient ideal, not the announce- . 
 ment of a new. A certain simplicity of attitude, I 
 undoubtedly an advantage to him poetically, however 
 assailable politically or philosophically, a naiveti 
 which made it possible for him to attack kings and 
 priests in " the fearless old fashion " as the authors of 
 all evil in human affairs, above all, an unquestioning 
 and heroically militant faith in his creed distinguished 
 Swinburne from the writers and thinkers of our time. 
 He belonged, in his own way, to the ages of faith, 
 and is far removed from us, with our confused values, 
 our inability to respond unreservedly to elementary 
 emotions, our incapacity to achieve a synthesis of our 
 complicated and doubtful and contradictory theories 
 and beliefs. 
 
 So it is that we may approach Swinburne's 
 achievement almost as impartially as Shelley's. No 
 doubt his " place " among poets is not yet settled in 
 the popular mind. Of all English poets the most 
 overpowering in fascination on a first acquaintance, 
 he is inevitably also of all the poets to whom an 
 
12 INTRODUCTION 
 
 uncritical homage is yielded for the shortest time. 
 He seizes us by a swift and brilliant coup de main, 
 and naturally the reader, conquered rather than 
 convinced, after the first rejoicing surrender questions 
 his title, whereas in the case of such a poet as 
 Wordsworth by the time we have really learned to 
 love him every question has been answered. Such 
 an examination of Swinburne's work as is attempted 
 in the following pages should reveal clearly enough 
 the fact that much of what in his verse is instantane- 
 ously compelling has a less enduring power than that 
 in it which takes us less rapidly by storm. One of 
 my purposes in these pages is to show that the 
 prominence usually given to certain of his achievements 
 is not quite just, and that though there can never be 
 any doubt as to the place in his work of the noble 
 and flawless tragedy of "Atalanta in Calydon," the 
 exaggerated importance given to some of his other 
 early triumphs is a serious wrong to him, for it 
 encourages the belief that his dominance over us is 
 as transitory as it is rapidly established. To disengage 
 and exhibit what is deepest and most universal in the 
 work of Swinburne, to indicate how far his work is 
 based on what in humanity is elemental and perduring, 
 is my chief object. 
 
SWINBURNE 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 I 
 
 HIS CAREER 
 
 For a poet so reticent in general as to the circum- 
 stances of his life, Swinburne has alluded surprisingly 
 often to the fortunes of his family. He refers to 
 himself as one born of exiles in the poem to Victor 
 Hugo in the first series of " Poems and Ballads," and 
 as a descendant of those who fought for her house in 
 the " Adieux a Marie Stuart '' which celebrate the 
 conclusion of his trilogy on that Queen, an $jt is the X 
 thought of the fervent and fatal devotion of his fore- 
 fathers to the cause of the Stuarts that inspires the 
 whole group of Jacobite poems in the third series of 
 " Poems and Ballads." /The p ride of b irth, which can 
 be a mean thing 'omy in mean natures, is indeed 
 almost as powerful in Swinburne as in Villiers de 
 risle Adam, and to ignore it in any study of the 
 genius and achievements of either would be inexcus- 
 
14 SWINBURNE 
 
 J able. Swinburne was an aristocrat in temperament, 
 ' haughtily contemptuous of the caprices and con- 
 ventions of the mob. Underlying his revolutionary 
 ardour and republican convictions there is a very 
 real conservatism, showing itself in matters of art also 
 in an unbounded reverence for the classics coexisting 
 with romanticism, and in the reversionary tendencies 
 which kept him aloof from his age. Even his 
 revolutionary enthusiasms were a heritage— on the one 
 hand from his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, the 
 friend of Mirabeau ; on the other from a line of 
 English poets from Milton to Shelley who had 
 championed liberty. Revolt was in his blood, for the 
 Swinburnes had been for. generations the enemies of 
 constituted authority, Roman Catholics and Jacobites 
 in a period of Protestant and Hanoverian domination. 
 The family was of note in Northumberland from a 
 very early period. It takes its name from Swinburne 
 Castle, which, however, passed into the possession of 
 others on the extinction of the senior branch of the 
 family in the male line at the death of Adam de 
 Swinburne in the reign of Edward II. Another 
 .)ranch of the family, deriving from Sir William de 
 jwinburne, who flourished in the reign of Henry III, 
 vas settled at Capheaton Castle in the same county, 
 md to this branch the poet belonged. The Swin- 
 jurnes of Capheaton took a considerable part in 
 
HIS CAREER 15 
 
 border warfare, Capheaton serving as a rendezvous 
 for the forces mustered to repel the moss-troopers, 
 and their descendants took pleasure in recalling their 
 wild doings. In 1660 a baronetcy was conferred on 
 the then head of the family, but his successors had 
 scant enjoyment of their dignities and possessions, for 
 having " poured forth blood like water and lands like 
 dust" in the rebellions of 1715 and 1745, they were 
 compelled to seek refuge in France. It was there 
 that the poet's grandfather was born, and he never 
 visited England until he succeeded to whatever 
 remained of the estates. Born and bred in France, 
 and partly French in blood, his mother having been 
 a lady of the house of Polignac, Sir John Swinburne 
 retained up to the end of his very long life much of 
 the manner and attitude of the French nobility of 
 the pre-revolutionary era. This extraordinary man 
 was of some note in his day as a patron of art who 
 was among the earliest admirers of Turner and as a 
 politician of advanced opinions and unrestrained 
 speech, but he lives in the gossip of the time chiefly 
 as a " character " and as a sportsman of whom it was 
 said that he and his horse were the two maddest 
 things in the north of England. He died at the age 
 of ninety-eight. His elder son was the father of the 
 present baronet. A younger son, Charles Henry, 
 entered the Navy, and rose eventually to the rank of 
 
i6 SWINBURNE 
 
 Admiral. He married in 1836 Lady Jane Henrietta 
 Ashburnham, daughter of the third Earl of Ashburn- 
 ham and sister of the famous bibliophile. To them, 
 on the sth of April, 1837, i" Chapel Place, Belgravia, 
 there was born Algernon Charles Swinburne. Of 
 their other children only Miss Isabel Swinburne 
 survived the poet. 
 
 It was the accident of a visit which made London 
 the poet's birthplace, for his parents were settled at 
 East Dene, Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, and it was 
 between that estate and his grandfather's seat of 
 Capheaton that his boyhood was divided. Sur- 
 roundings more likely to quicken an inborn love of 
 nature could hardly be imagined. Half-surrounded 
 by woods, with the St. Boniface Down behind it and a 
 slope of pasturage leading down to the sea before it, 
 East Dene is charmingly situated. Not less fortunate 
 in position and prospect were the neighbouring houses 
 of his relations, The Orchard and Northcourt, to 
 which he was a frequent visitor. The Orchard seems 
 specially to have fascinated him, and he has pictured 
 its delights in the dedication to his aunt. Lady Mary 
 Gordon, of "The Sisters." It was at Northcourt, 
 however, that he found the dearest friend of his 
 boyhood, his cousin Mary, now Mrs. Disney Leith, 
 who has recently recorded some very interestino- 
 memories of those early days. Possibly the peculiar 
 
HIS CAREER 17 
 
 closeness of their relationship may go some way 
 towards explaining the warmth of their brotherly and 
 sisterly attachment. Their mothers, daughters of the 
 Earl of Ashburnham, were sisters, while their fathers 
 were cousins to each other and to their wives. It 
 was, however, probably less to this close and com- 
 plicated relationship than to their mental kinship that 
 Swinburne referred in his dedication to Mrs. Leith of 
 his tragedy, " Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards " : — 
 
 Scarce less in love than brother and sister born, 
 Even all save brother and sister sealed at birth. 
 
 It is necessary to insist on the accuracy of this 
 description of their attachment, for foolish statements 
 have been made on the subject, and it is not 
 impertinent to do so, since Mrs. Leith has herself 
 judged it desirable to refute certain fictions. The 
 cousins were together not only in the Isle of Wight 
 but at Capheaton, where Sir John Swinburne liked to 
 gather his grandchildren every summer, and where the 
 boy rejoiced in the contrast to the southern scenery 
 of his own home and found endless pleasure in rides 
 across the moors. The influence of the old revo- 
 lutionary on his grandson in these early years was 
 powerful, and to it may be attributed no small part of 
 the poet's revolutionary enthusiasms and predilection 
 for France. 
 
 c 
 
i8 SWINBURNE 
 
 Swinburne was intended for Eton, and thither 
 after some preparation at Brooke Rectory, in the Isle 
 of Wight, he proceeded at Easter in 1849, being then 
 just twelve years old. The four and a half years he 
 spent at Eton were not happy. He was constitutionally 
 and temperamentally unfitted for much of whatever 
 makes school life agreeable to the average boy. He 
 had been delicate in childhood, and in fact his 
 condition at birth was such that it was hardly thought 
 he could survive ; he outgrew weakness, and was a 
 good swimmer and horseman from early boyhood, but 
 his appearance was frail, and he had neither aptitude 
 nor inclination for games. We have it on the authority 
 of Mr. Oscar Browning, his contemporary at Eton, 
 that it would be an exaggeration to say he was 
 ill-treated by his fellows, but he seems to have been 
 teased on account of his extraordinary and in some 
 ways beautiful appearance, and his fiery temper 
 impelled him to retaliate, with more vigour than 
 success. With his masters he does not seem to have 
 found much favour. Dr. Goodford is reported to have 
 told Admiral Swinburne that his son was the worst 
 boy in the school, but the remark, snapped out in 
 reply to an inopportune inquiry at a casual meetin"-, 
 is not to be taken too seriously. In classical scholarship 
 he was not particularly distinguished ; even his gift 
 for Latin verse missed adequate recognition, and 
 
HIS CAREER 19 
 
 when he performed the astonishing feat of producing 
 a set of galliambics in the ordinary course of school 
 work he was awarded a birching. A competent 
 scholar afterwards assured him there was only one 
 slip in his exercise after Catullus, but when he was 
 urged in later years to write galliambics his excuse 
 was that he had had one birching for them and was 
 determined not to risk another. His chief success at 
 Eton was winning Prince Albert's prizes for French 
 and Italian, open to the whole school. The French 
 prize, it is worth noticing, was a volume of his 
 extravagantly beloved Hugo, with whom, however, he 
 may have been acquainted even earlier. His know- 
 ledge of Italian was due to the teaching of his gifted 
 mother, who instilled into him the love for that 
 country which Mazzini was afterwards to set aflame. 
 
 Swinburne left Eton at Christmas, 1853. The 
 remainder of his education before proceeding to 
 Oxford was with a private tutor in France, and later 
 on he studied with Stubbs, afterwards Bishop of 
 Oxford, at Navestock, of which the historian was then 
 Vicar. Swinburne had no wish at this time to go to 
 Oxford. His imagination had been fired by the 
 events of the Crimean War, and particularly by the 
 charge of Balaclava, and he demanded permission of 
 hfis parents to enter the Army. His mother made 
 no objection, but his father, after some consideration, 
 
 C 2 
 
20 SWINBURNE 
 
 wisely prohibited any such ambition. Deeply dis- 
 appointed, Swinburne left East Dene and tramped 
 dejectedly along the shore till he came to Culver 
 Cliff, when it struck him that while it was well enough 
 to dream of heroic possibilities in the career from 
 which he had been shut off, there was at hand a test 
 of courage which he ought to accept in the scaling of 
 a cliff reputed unclimbable. He went about this very 
 hazardous enterprise, however, with more than the 
 impulsiveness of piqued virility which a high-spirited 
 lad whose fitness for a manly calling had been 
 implicitly questioned might be expected to feel. He 
 selected the place of assault on the formidable cliff 
 with care, and took a dip in the sea to steady his 
 nerves before beginning. His first attempt was a 
 failure ; three-quarters of the way up he found the 
 cliff jutted outwards, and was obliged to descend* 
 Choosing another starting-point, he had climbed 
 almost to the top, when his narrow foothold gave way, 
 and he swung for a few seconds by his hands until a 
 desperate effort enabled him to reach out sideways to 
 another narrow ledge with his feet. On reaching the 
 summit he was so exhausted that he fainted, and it 
 was long before he could return to a house filled with 
 anxiety on account of his absence. Satisfied of his 
 own courage, and assured that it was no doubt of it 
 which inspired his father's opposition to his entering 
 
HIS CAREER 21 
 
 the Army, he acquiesced in the plan of going to 
 Oxford. 
 
 He entered at Balliol College in 1857, when 
 Jowett's influence was beginning to be powerfully 
 felt. He had among his fellow-undergraduates T. H. 
 Green and Mr. A. V. Dicey, and was soon a member 
 of the famous reading society known, in jesting 
 allusion to the health of some of its supporters, as the 
 " Old Mortality." But his chief friend was the late 
 John Nichol, afterwards Professor of English Literature 
 at Glasgow, a clever, disappointed, quarrelsome man 
 with whom he maintained a cordial friendship to the 
 end. In 1858 Nichol founded a short-lived periodical, 
 copies of which are now of extreme rarity, called 
 " Undergraduate Papers," and it was in this that the 
 earliest published writings of Swinburne appeared.* 
 They consisted of three articles — " The Early English 
 Dramatists"; '"The Monomaniac's Tragedy" and 
 other poems by Ernest Wheldrake,' an ironical review 
 of an imaginary volume of verse ; and " Church 
 Imperialism," a furious attack on the clerical supporters 
 of the Second Empire — and a poem, " Queen Yseult, 
 Canto I." 
 
 In these writings, the work of his twenty-first year, 
 
 * Certain poems signed A.C.S. which appeared before this 
 in Fraser's Magazine have been erroneously ascribed to Swin- 
 burne ; they were the work of a Colonel Sterling. 
 
•22 SWINBURNE 
 
 the beginnings of the mature Swinburne are clearly 
 evident. His own estimate in later years of his 
 boyish work was very modest. " The article on the 
 Dramatists," he wrote, " as far as I remember, was the 
 only thing of any sort of value (except as showing a 
 youngster's honest impulses and sympathies and 
 antipathies), and that, I think, must have shown that 
 before leaving Eton I had plunged as deep as a boy 
 tould dive into the line of literature which has always 
 been my favourite. But when I think of the marvellous 
 work that Rossetti (whose acquaintance I made just 
 afterwards) had done at the same age, I am abashed 
 at the recollection of my own rubbish." 
 
 His introduction to Rossetti was due to Mr. Hatch, 
 who, as Dr. Birbeck Hill noted in his diary at the 
 time, brought " Swinburne of Balliol " to a gathering 
 of the young artists whom Rossetti had summoned to 
 assist him in that memorable enterprise of painting 
 frescoes in the Union, of which scarcely any memorial 
 remains. Swinburne had already made the acquaint- 
 ance of a member of what may be called the outer 
 drcle of the Pre-Raphaelites, William Bell Scott, at 
 Wallington, near Capheaton, where that poet and 
 painter was engaged in decorating the home of Sir 
 Walter and Lady Trevelyan. He was now brought 
 into contact with the leader of the whole great 
 movement for which Pre-Raphaelitism is too narrow a 
 
HIS CAREER 23 
 
 label, and he became at once one of the most fervent 
 of Rossetti's disciples, while he formed a close and 
 enduring attachment to Burne-Jones and William 
 Morris. 
 
 In i860 he left Oxford, without a degree. He 
 had followed up his Eton distinctions in those 
 languages by taking the Taylorian prizes for French 
 and Italian ; he had also obtained a second class in 
 classical Moderations ; and he was reputed to know 
 more of Greek literature than most of his instructors. 
 But it appears he missed his degree because he could 
 not satisfy the examiners in Scripture, a sufficiently 
 curious fact when it is remembered that he has drawn 
 on the imagery and phraseology of the Bible more 
 than almost any other modern poet, and that he was 
 afterwards Jowett's chosen assistant in editing a Bible 
 for the use of children. Jowett had from the first 
 lecognised Swinburne's genius, though it pleased him 
 at times to comment caustically enough on the young 
 poet towards whom he showed then and thereafter 
 so real and helpful a friendliness. " A very brilliant 
 youth, it's all youth," is one of his reported sayings, 
 and on Swinburne telling him that he had made a 
 bonfire of some of his poems he is said to have 
 replied encouragingly, " Some day you will make 
 another." 
 
 The year 1862 found Swinburne living in Rossetti's 
 
24 SWINBURNE 
 
 house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, No. i6, with Mr. 
 W. M. Rossetti and George Meredith as fellow- 
 occupants, and it was to Rossetti that he inscribed 
 fis first volume, " The Queen Mother and Rosamund," 
 hwo short plays. The book attracted very much less 
 J attention than it deserved, for though it was necess- 
 liarily immature, it displayed both real dramatic power 
 I' and fine poetic gifts. The blank verse is very care- 
 
 I fully studied after Shakespeare, whose influence is 
 more clearly visible here than anywhere else in 
 Swinburne's work, but it has individuality even 
 when most derivative. For example, there is some- 
 thing new and personal in a passage so Shakespearean 
 in cadence and sometimes in phrase as Catherine de 
 Medici's speech in the former play on the eve of the 
 Massacre of St. Bartholomew : — 
 
 Art thou so slow of purpose, thou great God, 
 The keenest of thy sighted ministers 
 Can catch no knowledge what we do ? for else 
 Surely the wind would be as a hard fire. 
 And the sea's yellow and distempered foam 
 Displease the happy heaven ; wash corn with sand 
 To waste the mixture ; mar the trees of growth, 
 Choke birds with salt, breach walls with tided brine, 
 And chase with heavy water the horned brood 
 Past use of limit ; towers and popular streets 
 Should in the middle green smother and drown. 
 And havoc die with fulness. 
 
 The. play of " Rosamund," dramatically perhaps 
 
HIS CAREER 25 
 
 less impressive, is richer in pure poetry and contains 
 some beautiful pictures, a little in Rossetti's manner, 
 of the bower of the mistress of Henry II. The poet 
 had not much to learn technically who could write 
 lines like those of Rosamund's speech, beginning 
 
 I that have held a land between twin lips 
 And turned large England to a little kiss . . . 
 
 A certain rigid formality in the verse of both plays 
 seems to me an oddly attractive grace as well as a x " 
 v4salutary restraint on a poet whose blank verse was 
 sometimes to suffer, though -with splendid compensa- 
 tions, from excessive pliancy and profusion in a 
 form which demands solidity and conciseness. 
 
 Swinburne did not remain long in Rossetti's house. 
 In 1862 and 1863 he was in Paris on visits, and in 
 the latter year was taken by Whistler, with whom he 
 was then and for some years later very friendly, to 
 visit Manet in his studio, and also saw something of 
 the French poets of his admiration. In London he 
 was the most brilliant figure in the Pre-Raphaelite 
 circle. These years were a period of immense 
 development, but the outer world had few signs of it. 
 A letter of dignified protest against a hostile review 
 of Meredith's " Modern Love " appeared in the 
 Spectator in 1862, another protest on behalf of a mis- 
 understood poet, Baudelaire, was contributed to the; 
 
26 SWINBURNE 
 
 same periodical in the same year, and a short story, 
 " Dead Love," which tells in archaic style the history 
 of the passion of Yolande for the slain body of 
 Messire Jacques d'Aspermont, was reprinted from 
 Once a Week in 1864. 
 
 In the winter of 1863-64 Swinburne spent some 
 months in Italy, and in the early spring of the latter 
 year took place the meeting with Landor so nobly 
 commemorated in one of the most beautiful of the 
 " Poems and Ballads." Here, as at a good many 
 other points, most of the biographical notices of 
 Swinburne in reference books and in memoirs pub- 
 lished in the newspapers at the time of his death are 
 in error. He did not visit Landor at his villa near 
 Florence, nor did he stay with "the most ancient of 
 demi-gods." Landor had moved five yeai's earlier 
 out of his villa at Fiesole into the house, No. 93, Via 
 della Chiesa, in which he was to die a few months 
 after the visit of his young admirer. It was there 
 that Swinburne, provided with a letter of introduction 
 from Lord Houghton, found the old man so weighed 
 down by some mood or malady that he scarcely 
 realised he had a visitor. At a second meeting, 
 however, Landor was as alert and vigorous as he 
 had been twenty years earlier, and Swinburne wrote 
 warmly to Lord Houghton, thanking him for the 
 " exquisite satisfaction " procured by means of his 
 
HIS CAREER 27 
 
 letter. "If both or either of us die to-morrow, at 
 least to-day he has told me that my presence here 
 has made him happy." Swinburne's visits were only 
 four or five in number, and did not exceed an hour at 
 a time in duration, but a real friendship sprang up 
 between the old poet and his boyish worshipper, and 
 Landor accepted the dedication of "Atalanta in 
 Calydon," which he did not live long enough to read 
 in print. 
 
 This great play on the Greek model was issued in 
 1865. It has been customary with critics of Swin- 
 burne to declare that it took the public by storm, but 
 the facts are that the first edition consisted of only 
 a hundred copies, and that though a second edition 
 appeared in the same year, a third was not called for 
 until 1875. By Swinburne's own circle, however, and ; 
 by some influential critics outside it, the play was \ 
 immediately hailed as a masterpiece which placed 1 
 its author in the first rank of English poets. "Thej 
 grandest thing ever done by a youth — though he is a 
 Demoniac youth," wrote Ruskin. With the passing 
 of years its fame has grown, and^ no one now 
 doubts that "Atalanta in Calydon" is the noblest 
 qf its author's achievements and one of the supreme 
 glories of English verse. 
 
 The play opens with the prayer of the Chief 
 Huntsman for success in the hunting of the boar 
 
28 SWINBURNE 
 
 which has ravaged Calydon. Then there follows 
 the famous chorus which celebrates with such blithe 
 music and light, swift movement the awakening of 
 the earth with the advent of spring : — 
 
 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 the green underwood and cover 
 Blossom by blossom the spring begins. 
 
 The full streams feed on flower of rushes. 
 Ripe grasses traimmel a travelling foot, 
 
 The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes 
 From leaf to flower and flower to fruit. 
 
 And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire, 
 
 And the oat is heard above the lyre. 
 
 And the hoofed heel of a satyr crushes 
 The chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root. 
 
 The speech of Althea, full of tenderness and maternal 
 
 jealousy, brings a deeper note into the play. Very 
 
 exquisite is her expression of her love for Meleager : — 
 
 I have seen thee all thine years 
 A man in arms, strong and a joy to men, 
 Seeing thine head glitter and thine hand bum 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 . . . 
 Fruitless, the fruit of mine own flesh, and blind. 
 More than much gold, ungrown, a foolish flower. 
 
HIS CAREER 29 
 
 The hunters gather, among them Atalanta and 
 
 Toxeus and Plexippus, the brothers of Althea, wroth 
 
 that a maiden should hunt with men. The narrative 
 
 of the hunting, put in the mouth of a herald, is 
 
 among the most brilliant and powerful passages in 
 
 the play. Hardly has he done telling how the boar, 
 
 first wounded by Atalanta, has been slain by 
 
 Meleager than a messenger breaks in on the rejoicing 
 
 with the news that Meleager has slain his kinsmen 
 
 Plexippus and Toxeus in revenge for an insult to 
 
 Atalanta. The dramatist has already shown how 
 
 strong on Althea is the hold of the past, how, in her 
 
 own words, 
 
 . . what lies light on many and they forget. 
 Small things and transitory as a wind o' the sea, 
 I forget never ; 
 
 and it is by insistence on this power of loving memory 
 that Swinburne conquers the supreme difficulty of the 
 tragedy, the reconciliation of Althea's love of her 
 son with her terrible vengeance on him as the slayer 
 of her brothers. Bowed over the bodies of Toxeus 
 and Plexippus, she thinks not of the violent folly that 
 precipitated their doom, but of early years. 
 
 I would I had died for these ; 
 For this man dead walked with me, child by child. 
 And made a weak staff for my feebler feet 
 With his own tender wrist and hand, and held 
 And led me softly and showed me gold and steel 
 
30 SWINBURNE 
 
 And shining shapes of mirror and bright crown 
 
 And all things fair ; and threw light spears, and brought 
 
 Young hounds to huddle at my feet and thrust 
 
 Tame heads against my little maiden breasts 
 
 And please me with great eyes ; and those days went . . , 
 
 There were no sons then in the world, nor spears, 
 
 Nor deadly births of women ; but the gods 
 
 Allowed us, and our days were clear of these. 
 
 Stung by these thoughts, made fierce by tenderness, 
 and musing if she takes no vengeance, 
 
 How shall I say, son, 
 That am no sister? but by night and day 
 Shall we not sit and hate each other, . . . 
 
 she determines to fire the brand with the burning of 
 which Meleager must die. No dramatist has found 
 words of more piteous eloquence than those here 
 given to Althea, torn between love of her son and of 
 her brothers, inexorable and exulting to be the 
 instrument of fate, and yet stricken at heart by agonised 
 regrets which are not remorse. 
 
 Ho, ye that wail, and ye that sing, make way 
 
 Till I be come among you. Hide your tears. 
 
 Ye little weepers, and your laughing lips. 
 
 Ye laughers, for a little ; lo, mine eyes 
 
 That outweep heaven at rainiest, and my mouth 
 
 That laughs as gods laugh at us. . . . 
 
 And then, with the return of the hunters bearing the 
 
 Wying Meleager, the tragedy is lifted out of the agony 
 
 /fof conflicting passions into a calmer and nobler mood 
 
HIS CAREER 31 
 
 of sorrowful acquiescence by the pure and stately 
 music of th e antiphonal lame aJL: — — ■" V 
 
 The gods guard over us 
 
 With sword and with rod ; 
 Weaving shadow to cover us, 
 Heaping the sod, 
 That law may fulfil herself wholly, to darken man's face before 
 God. 
 
 So the play moves to its conclusion in the sublimity 
 of pathos of Meleager's last speech, taking leave of 
 Althea and, in words of yet greater beauty, of 
 Atalanta : 
 
 But thou, dear, touch me with thy rose-like hands. 
 
 And fasten up mine eyelids with thy mouth, ''^^ 
 
 A bitter kiss ; and grasp me with ihine arms, ^' Jk-cf-' 
 
 Printing with heavy lips my light waste flesh, j!s£5^' '• 
 
 Made light and thin by heavy-handed fate, ,)i'"'' 
 
 And with thine holy maiden eyes drop dew. 
 
 Drop tears for dew upon me who am dead. 
 
 Me who have loved thee ; seeing without sin doze 
 
 I am gone down to the empty weary house 
 
 Where no flesh is nor beauty nor swift eyos 
 
 Nor sound of 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 ftuit. 
 
 It may be reasonably contended that the fatalism 
 of this great tragedy on the Greek model is Oriental 
 rather than Greek, and that it is less in the spirit of 
 any Greek poet or dramatist than in that of some 
 
32 SWINBURNE 
 
 Hebrew prophet that the Supreme Power is arraigned 
 in the fine chorus : 
 
 Thou hast sent us sleep, and stricken sleep with dreams, 
 
 Saying, joy is not, but love of joy shall be ; 
 Thou hast made sweet springs for all the pleasant streams. 
 
 In the end thou hast made them bitter with the sea. 
 Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men ; 
 
 Thou hast marred one face with fire of many tears ; 
 Thou hast taken love, and given us sorrow again ; 
 
 With pain thou hast filled us full to the eyes and ears. 
 Therefore, because thou art strong, our father, and we 
 
 Feeble ; and thou art against us, and thine hand 
 Constrains us in the shallow of the sea 
 
 And breaks us at the limits of the land . . . 
 Lo, with- hearts rent and knees made tremulous, 
 
 Lo, with ephemeral lips and casual breath, 
 At least we witness of thee ere we die 
 That these things are not otherwise, but thus ; 
 That each man in his heart sigheth, and saith, 
 
 That all men, even as I, 
 All we are against thee, against thee, O God most high. 
 
 But whatever in the play may be applauded or 
 condemned as resembling or contrasting with the 
 Greek model, what is greatest in it is wholly 
 Swinburne's own, and the critic who has rightly 
 apprehended the greatness of " Atalanta " will almost 
 \ y resent any attempt at comparisons. The blank verse 
 '' is for solemnity of music and stateliness of movement 
 the finest Swinburne ever wrote, but it is, of course, 
 the lyrical choruses which are the special glories of 
 " Atalanta." That which celebrates the birth of 
 
mS CAREER 33 
 
 Venus suffers perhaps from excessive variation of 
 metrical form, and that which questions the ways of 
 the Gods is not throughout on the level of the lines 
 already quoted. But the wonderful first chorus, in 
 which we hear indeed the "lisp of leaves and ripple 
 of rain '' of which it sings, but the famous 
 
 Before the beginning of years 
 
 There came to the making of man . , . 
 
 with its columnar beauty, but the less praised though 
 hardly less praiseworthy trochaics — 
 
 O that r now, I too were 
 By deep wells and water-floods, 
 Streams of ancient hills, and where 
 All the wan, green places bear 
 Blossoms cleaving to the sod . . . 
 
 with their cool grace, but the noble antiphonal lament 
 with its unvexed majesty of movement, are beyona 
 thanksgiving. 
 
 In the forty years of life that remained to him 
 Swinburne was to do many very great things, toy 
 display aspects of his genius which the keenest-sight^ 
 critic of "Atalanta" can hardly have suspected, to 
 create a stranger beauty, to develop a technique even 
 more elaborate, audacious and secure, but never to 
 inform any work with more lofty imagination or so 
 much of pure pathos, or to exhibit in any work of 
 
 D 
 
34 SWINBURNE 
 
 equal ambition and extent so perfect a balance of the 
 classical and romantic qualities of his genius. 
 
 The tragedy of " Chastelard," which followed in 
 the same year, was really a work of earlier date. 
 Some part of it had been written while Swinburne was 
 still at Oxford, and the whole was completed on the 
 day before he began "Atalanta." Compared with 
 the flawless Greek drama, the romantic tragedy of 
 almost insane passion has an air of immaturity. The 
 blank verse constantly reminds a reader of the verse 
 of the two earliest plays, but it is freer in movement 
 and has a passionate languor all its own and 
 exquisitely appropriate to the subject. The verse 
 floats, sways, rises and relapses to a drowsy, voluptu- 
 ous rhythm, and the writing has that monotony in 
 variety which is one of the inmost secrets of great 
 style. It is impossible within the limits here imposed 
 on quotation to convey an adequate idea of the 
 marvellous beauty of Chastelard's speeches, but let a 
 few lines serve as a sample. The Queen has asked 
 him if after death men shall remember love, and he 
 
 answers : — 
 
 Most sweet Queen, 
 They say men dying remember, with sharp joy 
 And rapid reluctation of desire, 
 
 Some old thing, some swift breath of wind, some word, 
 Some sword-stroke or dead lute-strain, some lost sight, 
 Some sea-blossom stripped to the sun and burned 
 At naked ebb — some river-flow that breathes 
 
HIS CAREER 35 
 
 Against the stream like a swooned swimmer's mouth — • 
 Some tear or laugh ere lip and eye were man's — 
 Sweet stings that struck the blood in riding — nay, 
 Some garment or sky-colour or spice-smell, 
 And die with heart and face shut fast on it, 
 And know not why, and weep not ; it may be 
 Men shall hold love fast always in such wise 
 In new fair lives where all are new things else. 
 And know not why, and weep not. 
 
 The French lyrics scattered about in the play are 
 altogether admirable. Mary Beaton's song 
 
 La navire 
 Est k I'eau 
 
 has something of Hugo's gracility ; even finer are the 
 simple 
 
 Qui sait ou s'en vont les roses ? 
 
 Qui sait ou s'en va le vent ? 
 
 En songeant k telles choses, 
 J'ai pleurd souvent. 
 
 and Chastelard's song. In these things there seems 
 to me, but I speak diffidently, as one knowing how 
 difficult it is to apprehend the last shades of style and 
 the last tremors of music in any language but one's 
 own, to be something which at that date was not 
 present in French verse, but which Verlaine, who 
 undoubtedly learned part of his secret from English 
 verse, was soon to bring into it. And there is one A 
 perfect English lyric, " Between the sunset and the ' 
 sea." 
 
 D 2 
 
S6 SWINBURNE 
 
 But it is not merely for particular speeches and 
 lyric interludes that " Chastelard " is to be praised. 
 It has very fine dramatic qualities, Chastelard 
 himself is a splendid creation, at once lover and artist 
 in life, an epicure in emotions very conscious of the 
 quality of his movements as they pass. He has no 
 illusions as to the character of the woman he loves. 
 
 Why should one woman have all goodly things ? 
 You have all beauty ; let mean women's lips 
 Be pitiful, and speak truth : they will not be 
 Such perfect things as yours. 
 
 Nor is he at any time unaware of where his insane 
 passion is leading him. " Why should your like be 
 pitied when they love ? " Mary Beaton, who loves him, 
 asks, and indeed Chastelard needs no pity. He has 
 chosen his doom ; he is merely scornful of Darnley, 
 who will have 
 
 This fare for common day's-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 ; 
 
 and the speeches in which he expresses his determin- 
 ation to die " in royal purple fashion " have for their 
 native the Neronian Qualis artifex pereo. The 
 Character of Mary Queen of Scots is studied with 
 ' ' extraordinary subtlety and insight, every mood of the 
 Ifcruel, vicious, hard, fascinating nature being seized 
 
HIS CAREER 37 
 
 with absolute certainty. When she argues whether 
 Chastelard should die to save her fame, when she 
 beseeches her lover to return the reprieve she has sent 
 him, when Mary Beaton cries out : 
 
 I knew one must be smitten through the neck 
 To die so quick ; if one were stabbed to the heart 
 He would die slower, 
 
 we hear the note of great dramatic speech. But the 
 supreme dramatic quality is attained in the dialogue 
 between the Queen and Chastelard, when she gives 
 words to her premonition that she will die somehow 
 sadly, and 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 Up is soft to lip ? 
 
 Is there anywhere in modern drama a finer use of 
 irony ? 
 
 In these years Swinburne was seeking inspiration 
 in strange places. The defence of Baudelaire was 
 written in a Turkish bath in Paris ; the poems which 
 were presently to be denounced as Baudelairean were 
 conceived in an atmosphere at least as unnatural. 
 There were curious resorts in Paris and London, and 
 the factitious life of the streets and theatres yielded 
 suggestions. It was at this time, too, that he 
 
38 SWINBURNE 
 
 made the acquaintance of that tawdry queen of the 
 underworld, Adah Isaacs Menken. This woman, the 
 wife at one time of a Jewish musician and afterwards 
 of Heenan, the pugilist, had been by turns a dancer, 
 an actress admired in American mining camps, and a 
 journalist engaged in combating anti-Semitism. Her 
 one real gift was her wonderful figure, and it was not 
 until she abandoned all pretence of appealing to the 
 public otherwise than through her physical perfection 
 that she achieved success. When she came to 
 London to perform as Mazeppa at Astley's Circus, 
 her beauty and her evil reputation ensured her all 
 the applause and attention that the most ambitious 
 circus artiste and light o' love could desire. But 
 Adah Menken was not satisfied. She had literary 
 leanings of a sort and a craving for the homage of 
 genius. Dumas in Paris, Charles Reade and Dickens 
 in London noticed her, and presently Swinburne was 
 drawn into her tinsel court. A good many very false 
 and foolish things have been written on the subject. 
 The fact, I believe, is that he did not seek her out, 
 but was introduced to her by a young man named 
 Thompson, who was for a while his secretary, and 
 who had reasons for wishing to gratify Adah Menken. 
 Doubtless Swinburne admired her splendid physique 
 and animal beauty : " Lo, this is she that was the 
 world's delight," he wrote, not quite seriously, in a 
 
HIS CAREER 39 
 
 copy of her posthumous poems. Doubtless she 
 offered him, unconsciously, the subtlest of all forms 
 of flattery to a creative artist, the assurance of the 
 truth of his vision of Faustine or Messalina dis- 
 crowned and degraded in "this ghastly thin-faced 
 time of ours." He was complaisant ; allowed himself 
 to be photographed with her, though he disliked 
 posing for the camera ; perhaps, though this is very 
 unlikely, wrote in her album the eight-line French 
 poem, " Dolorida," which in after years he repudiated, 
 as some of the collectors who have wasted money on 
 that curiosity have argued, in forgetfulness. But that 
 she was in any real sense an inspiration to him I, for 
 one, cannot bring myself to believe. Her verses, 
 " Infelicia," dedicated by permission to Dickens, 
 were considered by Swinburne, as he told Mr. 
 Watts-Dunton, the greatest rubbish ever published. 
 They are that ; in all the woman ever wrote I can 
 find only one touch of poetry, a quotation of two 
 words constantly on her lips and graven on her 
 tomb in the Jewish cemetery of Montmartre : " Thou 
 Knowest." That one thing may have touched Swin- 
 burne, for the words are quoted in his " Ilicet." For 
 the rest, she and her kind, casually encountered or 
 studied with the interest they must have for every 
 garnerer of forbidden fruit, can have been only an 
 assurance not a revelation. 
 
40 SWINBURNE 
 
 Imaginative experience, the study of Sappho and 
 Catullus, Baudelaire and Gautier, count for as much 
 in the "Poems and Ballads" as actual experience. 
 So much one may say confidently, but no more. 
 He has himself warned us in the '' Notes on Poems 
 and Reviews " that the book is " dramatic, many- 
 faced, multifarious ; and no utterance of enjoyment 
 or despair, belief or unbelief, can properly be assumed 
 as the assertion of its author's personal feeling or 
 faith," and in the preface to the collected poems, 
 written forty years later, he has expressed his 
 amusement at the blunders of critics who have 
 regarded as autobiographical poems purely imagina- 
 tive and as merely fanciful poems as faithful tran- 
 scripts of facts as they well could be. It is certainly 
 to the greater glory of a poet that in his work actual 
 and imaginative experience should be indistinguish- 
 able one from the other. He has not given us any 
 clue in his commentary, holding rightly that to parade 
 or disclaim experience is the sign of a school of poets 
 " pitifully contemptible." Let it be added that to 
 pry into a poet's work in search of the facts of his 
 private history is the practice of a school of critics 
 with which no one blessed with the least under- 
 standing of the nature of art or the least sense of the 
 dignity of life could possibly stoop to co-operate in 
 enterprises as futile as offensive. 
 
HIS CAREER 41 
 
 Had the amazed and scandalised critics of the 
 'sixties understood that what poets give us is neither 
 fact nor fiction, but imaginative truth, they might 
 have avoided certain insulting follies ; but it was 
 inevitable that they should turn furiously on the 
 author of the " Poems and Ballads," who burst so. 
 startlingly on their idyllic quietude. The poet of the 
 period was Tennyson. Now the greater Tennyson 
 that criticism has disengaged, or is disengaging, for 
 us from the debris of the mid-Victorian idol is a 
 delicate artist in the rendering of languid, complex, 
 morbid moods, and in the painting of landscape to 
 harmonise with them, a disciple in the main of Keats, 
 but with some pungent quality that pierces at rare 
 and fortunate intervals through the complacency and 
 suavity that were his weaknesses. But the popular 
 Tennyson of the 'sixties, probably also of to-day, was 
 a thinker and a poet of the simple emotions — a 
 thinker without real faith in thought, a poet who 
 never touched a simple emotion without collapsing 
 into the utter ignominy of sentimentalism, as in 
 " The May Queen " and " Dora and William " and 
 the rest. On the audience of such a poet Swinburne 
 burst terrifyingly. 
 
 It is difificult to convey any idea of the fury of 
 moral indignation provoked by "Anactoria" and 
 "Laus Veneris," "Dolores" and "Faustine." There 
 
42 SWINBURNE 
 
 had been nothing in the least like it since Byron 
 was driven out of England fifty years before, and 
 there has been nothing like it since, not because the 
 general public is any more intelligent, but because 
 it no longer pays poetry the compliment of regarding 
 it as potent enough to be a poison. Hatred of the 
 offending poet was carried to grotesque extremes, 
 as by the imbecile who, having purchased a picture 
 by Legros, insisted on having a cat represented in it 
 painted out because Swinburne, in some notes on 
 contemporary art written with Mr. W. M. Rossetti, 
 had praised the artist's treatment of that animal. 
 Swinburne's publisher, Moxon, who had been fined 
 many years before for issuing Shelley's "Queen Mab," 
 was so alarmed by the attacks on the " Poems and 
 Ballads " that he withdrew from all association with 
 the deadly book. It was transferred* to John Cam- 
 den Hotten, from whom some years later it and 
 Swinburne's other works were taken over by Messrs. 
 Chatto and Windus. Swinburne's opinion of Hotten 
 is on record, but may be more agreeably inferred 
 from the anecdote that when that piratical publisher 
 was reported, inaccurately it would appear, to have 
 died of a surfeit of pork chops, Swinburne trium- 
 phantly adduced that as a refutation of Sir Richard 
 
 * On Bulwer Lytton's advice. 
 
HIS CAREER 43 
 
 Burton's theory that cannibalism was a wholesome 
 mode of diet. Hotten, however, was of some service 
 to literature in his day, as Swinburne acknowledged, 
 and when he asked Swinburne to reply to the critics, y 
 the poet complied. The "Notes on Poems and y] 
 Reviews" are as complete a vindication as was 
 possible for a writer who would not lower himself to 
 argument with his baser slanderers. " It is of equally 
 small moment to me whether in such eyes as theirs I 
 appear moral or immoral, Christian or pagan. But, 
 remembering that science must not scorn to investi- 
 gate animalcules and infusoria, I am ready for once 
 to play the anatomist."*\ In the pages which follow^X 
 he analyses the more grievously offensive of the 
 poems, clearing himself of the charges that only the 
 purblind could bring against him.1 And then he 
 raises the real question, whethefrhe writing and 
 publication of a book is to be regarded as thrusting 
 it upon the world as fit and necessary food for female 
 infancy, whether the needs of the young person are 
 to be the limits of artistic endeavour. The pamphlet 
 confirmed the faith of those who were already con- 
 vinced, which, according to Blake, is all one ought to 
 aim at in a statement of principles, and Mr. W. M. 
 Rossetti's defence of his friend was of some service 
 in the same way. 
 
 Some well-intentioned meddler urged Ruskin, 
 
44 SWINBURNE 
 
 who was at that time intimate with Swinburne, to 
 lecture the poet of "Dolores." Ruskin was ready 
 enough, as a rule, to play the moralist, but to his 
 great honour he declined. " He is infinitely above 
 me,'' he wrote, " in all knowledge and power, and I 
 should no more think of advising or criticising him 
 than of venturing to do it to Turner if he were alive 
 again." A few days later : " As for Swinburne not 
 being my superior, he is simply one of the mightiest 
 scholars of his age in Europe — knows Greek, Latin, 
 and French as well as he knows English — can write 
 splendid verse with equal ease in any of the four 
 languages — knows nearly all the best literature of 
 the four languages as well as I know — well — better 
 than I know anything. And in power of imagination 
 and understanding simply sweeps me away before 
 him as a torrent does a pebble. I'm righter than he 
 is — so are the lambs and swallows, but they are not 
 his match." 
 
 Bitter opposition continued until Buchanan, in 
 J871, issued his venomous attack on Swinburne and 
 Rossetti, " The Fleshly School," and was destroyed 
 by Swinburne's terrible reply, " Under the Microscope." 
 It would be idle to pretend that even now there are 
 not numbers of intelligent and estimable people who 
 at heart agree with Buchanan's opinions as they were 
 before that fickle soldier of fortune changed them 
 
HIS CAREER 45 
 
 according to hJs fashion. The public of to-day is 
 tolerant enough in some ways, but it is as far as ever 
 from understanding that morality in art consists 
 entirely in intellectual honesty and immorality in 
 that dishonesty which sentimentalises sensuality in 
 the manner of certain unspeakable novelists of the 
 hour. But those who have not learned wisdom have 
 at least learned to keep silence. Why waste words 
 on a controversy absolutely dead ? Let us talk of 
 something real, as Balzac said when he turned the 
 conversation from an actual person to the character 
 of his Eugenie Grandet ; let us talk of the " Poems /JK 
 and Ballads '' themselves. 
 
 Their main theme is passion, and they render both ^ 
 the philosophy and the experience of it./vNote, what has 
 not been sufficiently observed, how|eyen in the poems 
 which are the record of sheer delirium, passion passes W^' 
 into thought./ The philosophy of these poems sums 
 itself up in the contrast of pagan and Christian ideals, 
 or more narrowly in the antithesis of Venus and the 
 Virgin which we find most fully and beautifully set 
 forth in the " Hymn to Proserpine." That great poem, 
 put in the mouth of a pagan after the proclamation 
 of Christianity at Rome, bears as its motto the reputed 
 last words of Julian the Apostate, VicisH, Galila, and 
 is the death song of paganism, though it affirms the 
 endurance of the pagan deities in the nature of man. 
 
45 SWINBURNE 
 
 New Gods are crowned in the city ; their flowers have broken 
 
 your rods ; 
 They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate 
 
 Gods. 
 But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare ; 
 Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were . . . 
 Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean ? but these thou shalt not take, 
 The laurels, the palms and the paean — the breast of the nymph 
 
 in the brake . . . 
 Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and 
 
 hidden her head. 
 Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down 
 
 to thee dead. 
 Of the maiden they mother men sing as a goddess with grace 
 
 clad around ; 
 Thou art throned where another was king ; where another was 
 
 queen she is crowned. 
 Yea, once we had sight of another ; but now she is a queen, say 
 
 these. 
 Not as thine, not as thine, was our mother, a blossom of 
 
 flowering seas. 
 Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair 
 
 as the foam. 
 And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of 
 
 Rome. 
 For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow ; hut 
 
 ours, 
 Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers, 
 White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame. 
 Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet 
 
 with her name. 
 For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected ; 
 
 but she 
 Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot 
 
 on the sea. 
 
 The poem is perfect in music, and hardly anywhere 
 
HIS CAREER 47 
 
 in Swinburne is there more magnificent imagery thao>d> 
 in the passage which figures the wave of the w'Sri^/ 
 
 rolling under the wind of the future. ,,^' \ 
 
 Tht^opposition of Christian and pagan ideals Is^ 
 again set out dramatically, from another point of view, 
 in " Laus Veneris," which deals with remarkable 
 originality with the legend of Venus " grown diabolic 
 in ages that would not accept her as divine" that 
 inspired Wagner and fascinated Baudelaire. For 
 Swinburne the tragedy begins where for others it 
 had ended, with the return of Tannhauser to the 
 Horselburg, and the tragedy, as he has said, is " that 
 the knight who has renounced Christ believes in him ; 
 the lover who has embraced Venus disbelieves in 
 her ; " that Tannhauser is '' desirous of penitential pain 
 and damned to joyless pleasure." The origin of the 
 poem has been recorded by Meredith. It was in the 
 days when Rossetti and Swinburne had just discovered ' 
 FitzGerald's great paraphrase of Omar Khayyam, and 
 Swinburne, visiting Meredith, insisted at the moment of 
 their meeting on reading " The Rubaiyat " to him, then 
 suddenly asked for writing materials, and in a little 
 while produced the opening verses of " Laus Veneris." 
 But he adapted perfectly to his own purpose the form 
 he borrowed from FitzGerald. The special capacity 
 of FitzGerald's quatrain for rendering meditation is 
 preserved, but Swinburne doubtless felt that the 
 
48 SWINBURNE 
 
 epigram-effect of the form was unsuited to a poem 
 wherein the thought had greater continuity, and the 
 
 y quatrains are linked in pairs by the rhyming of their 
 
 / \htrd lines. 
 
 A little apart ffom these two poems, with their 
 
 contrast of paganism and Christianity from the 
 
 classical and mediaeval points of view, are those in 
 
 one way or another studied after the antique. The 
 
 greatest of these is " Anactoria," which gfew out of 
 
 an attempt to translate the fragment by Sappho 
 
 generally known as the Ode to Anactoria. Judging 
 
 the task impossible, Swinburne decided to write a 
 
 poem Avhich should contain the spirit of Sappho, with 
 
 here and there her actual words as they have survived 
 
 for us. The conception of the cruelty of passion may 
 
 be Swinburnian rather than Sapphic, but it has 
 
 psychological j ustification. A more plausible obj ection 
 
 to the poem considered merely as a paraphrase of 
 
 Sappho may be taken to the fierce outcry against the 
 
 dealings of the Gods with men. But I do not know 
 
 that either criticism seriously affects the value of 
 
 "Anactoria." It opens with a passage of savage and 
 
 morbid exultation in that cruelty which is at the root 
 
 of all merely physical passion : — 
 
 I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, 
 Intense device, and superflux of pain ; 
 Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake 
 Life at thy Hps and leave it there to ache ; 
 
HIS CAREER 49 
 
 Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill, 
 
 Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill ; 
 
 Relapse and reluctation of the breath, 
 
 Dumb tunes and shuddering semi-tones of death . . . 
 
 Take thy limbs living, and new-mould with these 
 
 A lyre of many faultless agonies. 
 
 Then after the furious outburst against the Gods, the 
 poem rises to its greatest height as Sappho, no more 
 the slave of passion or a rebel against fate, thinks of 
 her imortality : — 
 
 Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine, 
 Except these kisses of my lips on thine 
 Brand them with immortality ; but me — 
 Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea. 
 Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold 
 Cast forth of heaven with feet of awful gold 
 And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind. 
 Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind 
 Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown — - 
 But in the light and laughter, in the moan 
 And music, and in grasp of lip and hand, 
 And shudder of water that makes felt on land 
 The immeasurable tremor of all the sea, 
 Memories shall mix and metaphors of me. 
 
 It is in a very different way that the slighter poem 
 of " Faustine " comes to be classed in this section of 
 the " Poems and Ballads." It is, as he explained in 
 the " Notes," " the reverie of a man gazing on the 
 bitter and vicious loveliness of a face as common and 
 as cheap as the morality of reviewers, and dreaming 
 of past lives in which this fair face may have held a 
 
 E 
 
so SWINBURNE 
 
 nobler or fitter station ; the imperial profile may have 
 been Faustina's, the thirsty lips a Maenad's, when first 
 she learnt to drink blood or wine, to waste the loves 
 and ruin the lives of men ; through Greece and again 
 through Rome she may have passed with the same 
 face which now comes before us dishonoured and 
 discrowned. . . . The chance which suggested to me 
 this poem was one which may happen any day to any 
 man — the sudden sight of a living face which recalled 
 the well-known likeness of another dead for centuries : 
 in this instance, the noble and faultless type of the 
 elder Faustina, as seen in coin and bust." That face, 
 momentarily seen, lives for ever in one terrible verse : — 
 
 You have the face that suits a woman 
 
 For her soul's screen — 
 The sort of beauty that's called human 
 
 In hell, Faustine. 
 
 Another group of poems may be regarded as por- 
 tions of a lyrical monodrama in which are rendered 
 successive phases of passion ; despairing and self- 
 consuming ; seeking consolation in perverse and light 
 love ; abandoned to the " violent delights " of the 
 senses ; balanced unstably between apathy and regret ; 
 weary at last and desirous of nothing but cessation 
 from being ; reviving faintly and reaching out between 
 hope and fear towards the refuge of a love that has 
 for its core pity and not desire. The first of these 
 
HIS CAREER 51 
 
 poems is " The Triumph of Time," one of the very- 
 greatest things in Swinburne's whole achievement. Mr^T' 
 Wratislaw, in his interesting study of Swinburne, has 
 ascribed it to Browning's influence, but without in- 
 dicating where traces of such influence are discernible. 
 The conclusion may indeed recall to some readers — 
 it never did to the present writer until he set about 
 searching for justification of a predecessor's criticism 
 — ^two lines of Browning's : — 
 
 I knew you once, but in paradise, 
 
 If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face. 
 
 For the rest, the poem is pure Swinburne. It opens 
 with the regretful thought of what might have been 
 and may not ever be : — 
 
 I have given no man of my fruit to eat ; 
 
 I trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine. 
 Had you eaten and drunken and found it sweet, 
 
 This wild new growth of the corn and wine, 
 This wine and bread without lees or leaven. 
 We had grown as the gods, as the gods in heaven. 
 Souls fair to look upon, goodly to greet. 
 
 One splendid spirit your soul and mine . . . 
 
 We had stood as the sure stars stand, and moved 
 As the moon moves, loving the world ; and seen 
 Grief collapse as a thing disproved. 
 
 Death consume as a thing unclean. 
 Twain halves of a perfect heart, made fast 
 Soul to soul while the years fell past ; 
 Had you loved me once, as you have not loved ; 
 
 Had the chance been with us that has not been. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 SWINBURNE 
 
 The bitterness of foiled desire which finds ex- 
 pression in the following verse passes into the longing 
 for death which inspires some of the most wonderful 
 verses in the poem as the speaker's thoughts turn to 
 the sea : — 
 
 I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships, 
 Change as the winds change, veer in the tide ; 
 
 My lips will feast on the foam of thy hps, 
 
 I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside ; 
 
 Sleep, and not know if she be, if she were 
 
 Filled full with life to the eyes and hair. 
 
 As a rose is fulfilled to the roseleaf tips 
 
 With splendid summer and perfume and pride. 
 
 This mood, too, passes as foreknowledge of the 
 evanescence of grief is borne in on the speaker, and 
 then after telling the story of that " singer in France 
 of old "* whose mistress kissed him at the moment of 
 his death, comes the superb conclusion : — 
 
 * The reference is, of course, to Rudel. The story is given 
 in the Provengal biography : — "Jaufre Rudel of Blaya was a 
 very noble man and Prince of Blaya ; he fell in love with the 
 Countess of Tripoli, in spite of never having seen her, because 
 of the good report of her he had from pilgrims from Antioch, 
 and he made many potms about her with good tunes but with 
 words that were inferior." The story goes on to the arrival in 
 Tripoli of the dying poet, to the visit of the Countess and to his 
 death in her arms, with thanks to God that he had lived long 
 enough to see her, and we are told he was given honourable 
 burial " in the House of the Temple " by the Countess, who 
 " took the veil." I am of those who like to believe that the 
 Countess of Tripoli was Melisanda, daughter of Raimon I ; but 
 the allusion to the House of the Templars is a difficulty, since 
 no historical Rudel of Blaya seems to be known between the 
 date of the building of that House and the absorption of Tripoli 
 
HIS CAREER 53 
 
 I shall never be friends again with roses ; 
 
 I shall loathe sweet tunes, where a note grown strong 
 Relents and recoils, and climbs and closes, 
 
 As a wave of the sea turned back by song. 
 There are sounds where the soul's delight takes fire, 
 Face to face with its own desire ; 
 A delight that rebels, a desire that reposes ; 
 
 I shall hate sweet music my whole life long . . . 
 
 I shall go my ways, tread out my measure, 
 
 Fill the days of my daily breath 
 With fugitive things not good to treasure. 
 
 Do as the world doth, say as it saith ; 
 But if we had loved each other — O sweet, 
 Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet. 
 The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure 
 
 To feel you tread it to dust and death — 
 
 Ah, had I not taken my lips up and given 
 
 All that life gives and the years let go. 
 The wine and honey, the balm and leaven. 
 
 The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low ? 
 Come life, come death, not a word be said ; 
 Should I lose you living, and vex you dead ? 
 I never shall tell you on earth, and in heaven. 
 
 If I cry to you then, will you hear or know ? 
 
 " Les Noyades," which recalls the murderous deeds 
 of Carrier at Nantes to regret that " not twice in the 
 
 in the county of Antioch. Some recent authorities on the 
 Troubadors incline to the belief that Rudel's passion may have 
 been a mystical adoration of the Virgin Mary. So far as I 
 have been able to discover, Swinburne did not know Provencjal. 
 He has taken a hint from the alba in " In the Orchard" and 
 "Before Dawn"; but the alba motive is after all one of the 
 great commonplaces of erotic poetry. 
 
54 SWINBURNE 
 
 world shall the gods do thus," deals with the same 
 theme of hopeless love, and the beautiful " Leave- 
 taking " closes this section of the poems. The next 
 phase of passion is exhibited in such things as the 
 exquisite poem entitled " Rococo," with its swift, 
 light, dancing movement and throbbing rhythm, and 
 in the unabashed raptures and light philosophy of 
 "Before Dawn," with its acknowledgment that "love 
 has no abiding " and its warning " look that no -man 
 see it," lest 
 
 All who love and choose him 
 See Love, and so refuse him ; 
 For all who find him lose him, 
 But all have found him fair. 
 
 Perverse intellectual curiosity leads the errant spirit 
 finally into the garden in whose shade it plucks the 
 ambiguous double "fleur du mal" of " Fragoletta." 
 The languor into which these fleeting emotions and 
 sensations lapse finds exquisite expression in " Felise," 
 with its faint stirring of outworn passion, its half- 
 mocking pathos and regretful but unrebellious acqui- 
 escence in the transiency of all things. The deeper 
 note comes with " In the Orchard," with its delirious 
 passion, its vehement outcry against the transiency of 
 delight that the nerves may not endure for more than 
 the moment in which it is recognised as not being 
 pain. 
 
HIS CAREER 55 
 
 Ah, do thy will now ; slay me if thou wilt ; 
 There is no building now the walls are built, 
 
 No quarrying now the corner-stone is hewn. 
 No drinking now the vine's whole blood is spilt ; 
 
 Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. 
 
 Nay, slay me now ; nay, for I will be slain ; 
 Pluck thy red pleasure from the teeth of pain, 
 
 Break down thy vine ere yet grape-gathering prune. 
 Slay me ere day can slay desire again ; 
 
 Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. 
 
 This poem, however, is not in the direct line of 
 those studies we are considering, and we must turn to 
 " Dolores " for the next stage or scene in the progress 
 or play. Here the spirit whose selfless ardour of 
 devotion has burned itself out, whose grief ephemeral 
 loves have failed to assuage, abandons itself to the 
 worship of the darker Venus, the goddess of pleasure 
 identified with " Our Lady of Pain " ; it no longer 
 "plays with light loves in the portal," but has "passed 
 to the shrine where a sin is a prayer," and it chants 
 before a veiled altar the litanies of its perverse and 
 mystical faith, crying out to the depths as the saints 
 have cried out to the heights. Metrically " Dolores" . >r 
 is one of Swinburne's chief triumphs, and it illustrates ^ 
 better perhaps than any other single poem his gift 
 of adapting existing forms to his own needs. There 
 are many examples of the three foot anapaest in 
 eighteenth century verse — in Gay, for instance — but it 
 
S6 SWINBURNE 
 
 is not until Byron employs the alternating double 
 rhyme that the jerk and jangle of the metre are 
 eliminated. Byron used the measures very vilely in 
 the verses to " Augusta," and finely, but still un- 
 certainly and with hardly a suspicion of the special 
 capacity of the form, in 
 
 I enter thy garden of roses. 
 Beloved and fair Haidee. 
 
 Praed handled it unerringly, but with merely comic 
 intention. Then Swinburne took it up, shortened the 
 last line to the immense gain of the stanza, gave the 
 verse that peculiar spin which is one of his secrets, 
 and made it this thing of flame and wind, of flashing 
 phrase and swirling movement. With him it becomes 
 the very daughter of Herodias among metres, and 
 can dance away the coolest critical heads. The 
 poem is built up, round the refrain in alternate stanzas 
 of " Our Lady of Pain," with an art much more akin 
 to the musician's than the poet's, and the music is the 
 most intoxicating in English verse. 
 
 Who has known all the evil before us, 
 
 Or the tyrannous secrets of time ? 
 Though we match not the dead men that bore us 
 
 At a song, at a kiss, at a crime — 
 Though the heathen outface and outlive us. 
 
 And our lives and our longings are twain — 
 Ah, forgive us our virtues, forgive us. 
 
 Our Lady of Pain. 
 
HIS CAREER 57 
 
 Who are we that embalm and embrace thee 
 
 With spices and savours of song ? 
 What is time that his children should face thee ? 
 
 What am I that my lips do thee wrong ? 
 I could hurt thee — but pain would delight thee ; 
 
 Or caress thee — but love would repel ; 
 And the lovers whose lips would excite thee 
 
 Are serpents in hell. 
 
 Who now shall content thee as they did, 
 
 Thy lovers, when temples were built 
 And the hair of the sacrifice braided 
 
 And the blood of the sacrifice spilt, 
 In Lampsacus fervent with faces, 
 
 In Aphaca red from thy reign, 
 Who embraced thee with awful embraces, 
 
 Our Lady of Pain ? 
 
 Where are Cottyto or Venus, 
 
 Astarte or Ashtaroth, where ? 
 Do their hands as we touch come between us ? 
 
 Is the breath of them hot in thy hair ? 
 From their lips have thy lips taken fever, 
 
 With the blood of their bodies grown red. 
 Hast thou left upon earth a believer 
 
 If these men are dead ? 
 
 They were purple of raiment and golden. 
 
 Filled full of thee, fiery with wine. 
 Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden, 
 
 In marvellous chambers of thine. 
 They are fled, and their footprinis escape us. 
 
 Who appraise thee, adore and abstain, 
 O daughter of death and Priapus, 
 
 Our Lady of Pain. 
 
 There follows inevitably on the riot and fever of this 
 poem that utter exhaustion in which the wearied 
 
58 SWINBURNE 
 
 spirit craves only for the perfect sleep, and it is this 
 which is rendered with rare beauty in " The Garden 
 of Proserpine." 
 
 From too much love of living, 
 
 From hope and fear set free, 
 We thank with brief thanksgiving 
 
 Whatever gods may be 
 That no life lives for ever ; 
 That dead men rise up never ; 
 That even the weariest river 
 
 Winds somewhere safe to sea. 
 
 Then star nor sun shall waken, 
 
 Nor any change of light : 
 Nor sound of waters shaken, 
 
 Nor any sound or sight : 
 Nor wintry leaves nor vernal. 
 Nor days nor things diurnal ; 
 Only the sleep eternal 
 
 In an eternal night. 
 
 With "Hesperia" comes the slow revival of the 
 desire for life, as there dawns on the eyes so fain of 
 sleep the pale vision of a love without fear or cruelty. 
 The long anapaestic (not dactyllic !) lines have a charm 
 of music subtly appropriate to the thought and feeling 
 of the poem. 
 
 Thine eyes that are quiet, thine hands that are tender, thy lips 
 
 that are loving, 
 Comfort and cool me as dew in the dawn of a moon like a 
 
 dream ; 
 And my heart yearns baffled and blind, moved vainly towards 
 
 thee, and moving 
 As the refluent sea-weed moves in the languid exuberant stream. 
 
HIS CAREER 59 
 
 With her alone is there refuge from the passions that 
 have tortured and worn down the suffering spirit, but 
 not easily may the escape be effected. The image of 
 Dolores is ever before her former slave, and it is only 
 by ceaseless flight with the redeeming love that her 
 pursuit may be evaded, and that hardly. 
 
 Apart from these poems dealing with passion, 
 there are many pieces in this wonderful first volume 
 of lyrical verse which deserve notice, but space fails 
 me, and I must be content merely to mention the 
 memorial verses on Landor, with their fine and fitting 
 purity of style and dignity of restrained pathos ; ^ 
 " The Sundew," remarkable as that very rare thing in\ j % 
 Swinburne's work, a direct and unconventionalised 
 transcript from nature ; " August," with its picture of 
 the approach of night in the orchard ; " An Interlude," 
 with its wistful backward glance and bright, boyish 
 mirth ; the famous lyric " Itylus," written in a garden 
 at Fiesole while the air was full of the songs of 
 nightingales ; and the charming narrative poems of 
 "St. Dorothy" and "The Two Dreams," with their 
 archaic savour and Keatsian sumptuousness of 
 phrasing. 
 
 That the first series of " Poems and Ballads " 
 should be to most readers the typical work of its 
 author is easy to understand. The greatest of his 
 volumes of lyrical verse it is not : the best of the 
 
6o SWINBURNE 
 
 " Songs Before Sunrise " and the second series of 
 " Poems and Ballads " rise out of a greater depth of 
 feeeling and are more informed with poetical thought 
 than all but two or three of the poems in this book. 
 But no other work of its author is so startling and 
 overwhelming. 
 
 In 1868 appeared the first of the long series of 
 critical studies which would have secured Swinburne 
 an enduring fame if he had never written a line of 
 verse. The noble essay on Blake is open to only 
 one reproach. Its writer is a little impatient in his 
 examination of the scattered splendours and confused 
 wreckage of Blake's philosophy. There, and at a few 
 other points, his criticism has been supplemented by 
 the labours of Messrs. Ellis and Yeats and of Mr. 
 Arthur Symons, but the book remains by far the 
 most illuminating eulogy of Blake's work as a whole. 
 At this time Swinburne's thoughts were turned 
 powerfully towards the political movements of his day. 
 In the 'sixties the Italian question dominated politics, 
 less by its actual importance than by its appeal to the 
 imagination, to an extent that is not very easy now to 
 understand. Swinburne's love of Italy, implanted in 
 early boyhood by his mother, strengthened by the 
 study of Italian literature and by travel, grew to its 
 full height under the influence of Mazzini, whose 
 acquaintance he made in these years, and whose 
 
HIS CAREER 6r 
 
 ardent admirer he remained to the end. He had 
 already given clear indications of vehement Re- 
 publicanism. In the "Poems and Ballads" he had 
 saluted Victor Hugo, and in " A Song of Italy," issued 
 in 1867, and afterwards included in "Songs of Two 
 Nations," he had paid splendid homage to Mazzini. 
 His enthusiasm needed no encouragement, but it was 
 encouraged by friends — Mazzini himself and Jowett — 
 who wished to divert him from the subjects he had 
 dealt with in the " Poems and Ballads." There was 
 even some idea of his entering Parliament, on the 
 strength of an invitation from a group of advanced 
 Liberals, but to Swinburne's great relief Mazzini 
 assured him that he could serve the cause more 
 efifectually as poet than as politician. It is the poet, 
 certainly, and none but he, that we have in the 
 "Songs Before Sunrise," published in 1871, and it is 
 this, among other things, which makes the book 
 unique as a volume of political verse. Never ,^r a 
 moment does he forget that the poet must admit 
 nothing into his work which is not absolute poetry, 
 that no "message" will compensate for any lapse 
 from artistic inspiration. 
 
 The contrast between the " Poems and Ballads " 
 and the "Songs Before Sunrise" is astonishing. 
 Sensuous passion has given way to an ascetic spiritual 
 passion for liberty. Swinburne himself was very 
 
62 SWINBURNE 
 
 conscious of the contrast, and the " Prelude " is 
 
 his apologia. 
 
 " Yet between death and life are hours 
 To flush with love and hide in flowers ; 
 What profit save in these ? " men cr)'. . . . 
 
 Play then and sing ; we too have played, 
 
 We likewise in that subtle shade. 
 
 We too have twisted through our hair 
 Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear, 
 
 And heard what mirth the Maenads made. 
 
 But now 
 
 Pleasure slumberless and pale, 
 And passion with rejected veil. 
 
 Pass, and the tempest-footed throng 
 
 Of hours that follow them with song 
 Till their feet flag and voices fail. 
 
 And lips that were so loud so long 
 Learn silence, or a wearier wail ; 
 
 So keen is change, and time so strong, 
 To weave the robes of life and rend 
 And weave again till life have end. 
 
 But weak is change, but strengthless time, 
 To take the light from heaven, or climb 
 
 The hills of heaven with wasting feet. 
 
 Songs they can stop that earth found meet. 
 But the stars keep their ageless rhyme ; 
 
 Flowers they can slay that spring thought sweet, 
 But the stars keep their spring sublime ; 
 
 Passions and pleasures can defeat, 
 Actions and agonies control, 
 And life and death, but not the soul. 
 
 The " Prelude " has generally been regarded merely 
 as a farewell to the themes of his earlier poems, but 
 
HIS CAREER 63 
 
 it is also a noble valediction to the high hopes cele- 
 brated in this verj' book. If the sun arose, it was in 
 a somewhat clouded sky, and to shine on a triumph 
 partly marred as the Italian monarchy took the place 
 of " the beloved Republic " Mazzini had dreamed of. 
 The steady envisagement of disillusion, the heroical 
 patience and proud resignation, the faith disappointed 
 but undaunted in these verses, give them moral as 
 well as artistic grandeur. 
 
 For what has he whose will sees clear 
 To do with doubt and faith and fear, 
 
 Swift hopes and slow despondencies ? 
 
 His heart is equal with the sea's 
 And with the sea-wind's, and his ear 
 
 Is level to the speech of these. 
 And his soul communes and takes cheer 
 
 With the actual earth's equalities. 
 Air, light, and night, hills, winds, and streams, 
 And seeks not strength from strengthless dreams . . . 
 
 He hath given himself and hath not sold 
 To God for heaven or man for gold, 
 
 Or grief for comfort that it gives, 
 
 Or joy for grief's restoratives. 
 He hath given himself to time, whose fold 
 
 Shuts in the mortal flock that lives 
 On its plain pastures heat and cold 
 
 And the equal year's alternatives. 
 Earth, heaven, and time, death, life and he. 
 Endure while they shall be to be. 
 
 There is the same union of spiritual and artistic 
 nobility in " The Pilgrims," which gives the final 
 
64 SWINBURNE 
 
 answer to all questioning of the profit of devotion to 
 
 Liberty : — 
 
 — And ye shall die before your thrones be won. 
 — Yea, and the changed world and the liberal sun 
 Shall move and shine without us, and we lie 
 Dead ; but if she too move on earth and live. 
 But if the old world with all the old irons rent 
 Laugh and give thanks, shall we be not content? 
 Nay, we shall rather live, we shall not die. 
 
 Life being so little and death so good to give . . . 
 
 — Pass on then, and pass us by and let us be. 
 For what light think ye after life to see ? 
 And if the world fare better will ye know ? 
 
 And if man triumph who shall seek you and say ? 
 — Enough of light is this for one life's spaix 
 That all men born are mortal, but not man ; 
 And we men bring death lives by night to sow, 
 That man may reap and eat and live by day. 
 
 The poems which hymn or lament the triumphs and 
 mischances of the Italian struggle for liberty and unity 
 are full of the rapturous enthusiasms of the time, and 
 ought to be read with Meredith's great novel on the 
 same theme. " Supra Flumina Babylonis," one of the 
 finest things in the book, a kind of chant, suggesting 
 extraordinary prosodic possibilities, written round the 
 Biblical phrase from which it takes its title, celebrates 
 the resurrection of Italy. " The Halt Before Rome " 
 deals with the check of September, 1867, "Mentana" 
 with the first anniversary of the disaster. Both are 
 perfect music, and if there is anyone who can read 
 
HIS CAREER ($ 
 
 them without throbbing pulses there is no blood in 
 his veins. " The Hymn of Man " is written in the 
 same metre as "The Hymn to Pi-oserpine" in the 
 first series of " Poems and Ballads," and is intended 
 to be in some sort a pendant to it, the celebration of 
 the birth of a new faith, as that was the funeral song 
 of an old faith. Here Swinburne proclaims the 
 collective divinity of man, but the finest and fullest 
 expression of his central ideas is in " Hertha," a poem 
 which at first glance may seem simply an elaboration 
 of the pantheism of Emerson's " Brahma," which itself 
 derives directly from the Sanskrit, but which has 
 originality of thought in its conception of man as the 
 highest product of the cosmic process. For weight 
 of thought, beauty and significance of imagery and 
 sustained majesty of style this great poem must 
 always have a very high position among the achieve- 
 ments of its author. 
 
 My own blood is what stanches 
 
 The wounds in my bark ; 
 Stars caught in my branches 
 Make day of the dark, 
 And are worshipped as suns till the sunrise shall tread out 
 their fires as a spark . . . 
 
 Though sore be my burden 
 And more than ye know, 
 And my growth have no guerdon 
 But only to grow, 
 Yet I fail not of growing for lightnings above me or death- 
 worms below. 
 
 F 
 
66 SWINBURNE 
 
 These too have their part in tne, 
 
 As I too in these ; 
 Such fire is at heart in me, 
 Such sap is this tree's, 
 Which hath in it all sounds and all secrets of infinite lands and 
 of seas . . . 
 
 I bid you but be, 
 
 I have need not of prayer ; 
 I have need of you free 
 As your mouths of mine air ; 
 That my heart may be greater within me, beholding the fruits 
 of me fair , . . 
 
 For truth only is living. 
 
 Truth only is whole. 
 And the love of his giving 
 Man's polestar and pole ; 
 Man, pulse of my centre, and fruit of my body, and seed of niy 
 soul. 
 
 One birth of my bosom ; 
 
 One beam of mine eye ; 
 One topmost blossom 
 That scales the sky ; 
 Man, equal and one with me, man that is made of me, man 
 that is I. 
 
 The poem which follows, "Before a Crucifix," has 
 probably been more misunderstood by careless or dull- 
 witted readers than any other in the book. To them 
 it may seem sheer blasphemy ; actually it is an 
 arraignment of those who have perverted Christ's 
 teaching and have indeed set up an image of their 
 own on the crucifix. 
 
HIS CAREER 67 
 
 When we would see thee man, and know 
 What heart thou hadst toward man indeed, 
 
 Lo, thy blood-blackened altars ; lo, 
 
 The lips of priests that pray and feed . . . 
 
 In the fine verses " To Walt Whitman in America " 
 he has expressed the conception of man crucified with 
 
 Christ : — 
 
 Not as one man crucified only 
 Nor scourged with but one life's rod. 
 
 It is this idea which is worked out in " Before a 
 Crucifix." 
 
 The dramatic element is almost entirely absent in 
 the " Songs Before Sunrise " ; the poet is speaking in 
 his own person, and his directly personal speech is 
 full of passionate conviction. In the grave and tender 
 poem of " Siena " he sings his own devotion to Italy. 
 In "Mater Triumphalis" he claims his place as the 
 poet of liberty. 
 
 I am the trumpet at thy lips, thy clarion 
 Full of thy cry, sonorous with thy breath ; 
 
 The graves of souls born worms and creeds, grown carrion 
 Thy blast of judgment fills with fires of death. 
 
 Thou art t^e 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 burn up before thee, pass and perish, 
 
 As haze in sunrise on the red sea-line ; 
 But thou from dawn to sunsetting shalt cherish 
 
 The thoughts that led and souls that lighted mine. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 SWINBURNE 
 
 It is difficult to make an end of commentary and 
 quotation, for the poems, apart from the three or four 
 greatest, are of singularly even merit. " The Eve of 
 Revolution," with its large movement and prophetic 
 utterance, " Genesis," with its mystical thought, 
 "Messidor," in which the very spirit of revolution 
 finds utterance, all claim notice, but I pass to the 
 " Epilogue," which echoes the noble music of the 
 " Prelude." The finest passage in those concluding 
 verses is that which brings before us the purity and 
 beauty of dawn over the sea : — 
 
 As one that ere a June day rise 
 
 Makes seaward for the da^vn, and tries 
 The water with delighted limbs 
 That taste the sweet dark sea, and swims 
 
 Right eastward under strengthening skies, 
 And sees the gradual rippling rims 
 
 Of waves whence day breaks blossom-wise 
 Take fire ere light peer well above, 
 And laughs from all his heart with love j, 
 
 And softlier swimming with raised head 
 Feels the full flower of morning shed 
 
 And fluent sunrise round him rolled 
 
 That laps and laves his body bold 
 With fluctuant heaven in water's stead, 
 
 And urgent through the growing gold 
 Strikes, and sees all the spray flash red. 
 
 And his soul takes the sun, and yearns 
 
 For joy wherewith the sea's heart burns ; 
 
 So the soul seeking through the dark 
 Heavenward, a dove without an ark. 
 
HIS CAREER 69 
 
 Transcends the unnavigable sea 
 
 Of years that wear out memory ; 
 So calls a sunward-singing lark 
 
 In the ear of souls that should be free ; 
 So points them toward the sun for mark 
 
 Who steer not for the scress of waves, 
 
 And seek strange helmsmen, and are slaves. 
 
 Dedicated to Mazzini, the " Songs Before Sunrise " 
 are permeated with his teaching, but Swinburne lays 
 more stress on revolutionary ideas than his master, 
 and in religious convictions they have nothing in 
 common. Swinburne has made no attempt to present 
 his whole philosophy in the book, and has thus 
 escaped the dangers which beset poetry that is in any 
 sort a criticism of political and religious ideas. He 
 has admitted those ideas into his verse only when they 
 rise into the ecstasy without which there is no poetry 
 but merely such thinking in verse as Wordsworth and 
 Tennyson too often allowed themselves. That there 
 is a certain naiveti in all these assaults on kings and 
 priests and in all these prophecies of a new world 
 must be admitted, but without that uncompromising 
 simplicity in the central ideas, which are often subtly 
 worked out in detail, we should not have had the 
 force and passion of this verse. For its exaltation of 
 feeling, its weight of thought, its rush of music the 
 book must always have a very high place among its 
 writer's work, and in English poetry it has a place 
 
70 SWINBURNE 
 
 apart. If it contains some of the most extravagant 
 and voluble denunciations and eulogies which even 
 Swinburne ever indulged in, it contains also some of 
 the severest, maturest, strongest verse he ever wrote, 
 and it reveals more clearly than any other of his 
 volumes the wider sympathies and nobler enthusiasms 
 of his nature. 
 
 The tragedy of " Bothwell," published in 1874, is, 
 one may safely suppose, the longest play ever 
 produced. It may well seem a wanton paradox to 
 describe a drama in which a single speech runs to over 
 a dozen pages and an act contains a score of scenes 
 as a marvel of condensation, but anyone who has 
 been at the pains to study the history of Mary 
 Queen of Scots will find himself obliged to acknow- 
 ledge that prolix as particular speeches may be, the 
 events of the period covered by this second portion of 
 Swinburne's trilogy have been compressed into the 
 limits of a single play with remarkable ingenuity. It 
 is not in the nature of things that such a drama 
 should have unity, but it abounds in magnificent 
 poetry, and in certain scenes, notably the last between 
 Mary and Darnley, probably comes nearer to strictly 
 dramatic greatness than any other of Swinburne's 
 plays. 
 
 In the next year Swinburne issued a volume of 
 verse and two of prose criticism. The "Songs of 
 
HIS CAREER 71 
 
 Two Nations " are a kind of supplement to the " Songs 
 Before Sunrise." By far the finest of the pieces is 
 "A Song of Italy," which exemplifies his weakness 
 of permitting expression to outrun the logical limits 
 fixed by the requirements of the substance, but to 
 which everything must be forgiven on account of the 
 splendid doxology of the cities of Italy. It is 
 followed by an Ode on the Proclamation of the 
 French Republic. The third section of the book 
 consists of a series of sonnets entitled " Dirae." In 
 one or two of these an anger noble in itself has found 
 expression in terms of ignoble vituperation. No such 
 reproach can be levelled against the terrible sonnets 
 on Napoleon III, with their prayer to Death : — 
 
 Nay, let him live then, till in this life's stead 
 Even he shall pray for that thou hast to give ; 
 
 Till seeing his hopes and not his memories fled 
 Even he shall cry upon thee with a bitter cry, 
 
 That life is worse than death ; then let him live 
 Till death seem worse than life ; then let him die. 
 
 But one is compelled to ask whether any man can 
 be permitted to speak of another, however con- 
 temptible and criminal, in words of such ruthless 
 wrath. Whether it be permissible or not, " our betters 
 should know better than we." But so much we may 
 say, that if permissible at all, the exemption can be 
 in favour only of one who has praised with equal 
 
72 SWINBURNE 
 
 ardour the noblest of his fellow-men. Swinburne 
 certainly was always more concerned to honour great 
 men and great causes than to condemn the unworthy. 
 '' I have never been able to see what should attract 
 men to the profession of criticism but the noble 
 pleasure of praising," he had written in the " Notes " 
 of 1866, and in the preface to the "Essays and 
 Studies" of 1875 we find him explaining, "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." The " Essays and Studies " consist mainly of 
 papers contributed to the ForUiightly Review during 
 the preceding seven years. The book opens with 
 two essays on Victor Hugo, in which there appears, 
 along with some discerning criticism, that extravagant 
 admiration, extending to Hugo's least admirable 
 things, which in the end wearies the most sympathetic 
 reader. There is extravagance also, as Swinburne a 
 few years later was willing to admit, in the review of 
 Rossetti's poems of 1870, but when the judgment is 
 in the main so sound it is impossible to regret a few 
 rather reckless superlatives inspired by the first 
 delighted reading of newly rescued treasures and by 
 affectionate sympathy for a friend and fellow-worker. 
 Here we have some of the most beautiful prose that 
 
HIS CAREER 73 
 
 Swinburne ever wrote, as in this ardent and musical 
 praise of " The House of Life " : — " 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-flake of its tears." The four poems 
 marked out for special praise are " The Burden of 
 Nineveh," "Sister Helen," "Jenny" and "Eden 
 Bower," and specially excellent in substance and style 
 is the eulogy of the third of these for " its plain truth 
 and masculine tenderness," its " divine pity, or a pity 
 something better than divine." But there is scarcely 
 anything praiseworthy in that precious volume which 
 is not given its due, or something more than its 
 due, and in such glorious words as these : — " 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 soundless 
 music that hangs about a serpent as it stirs or springs." 
 
74 SWINBURNE 
 
 The review of William Morris's " Jason " is not 
 more remarkable for its estimate of that poem than 
 for its rapturous and yet thoroughly discriminating 
 tribute to that wonderful earlier volume which even 
 now receives less than justice in most quarters, 
 and particularly to the passionate scene beside King 
 Arthur's tomb in the poem of that name and to the 
 Queen's speech, worth in its fierce, stammering 
 eloquence all the ornate rhetoric of all the Tennysonian 
 Idylls. There is a sense of the limitations of Morris 
 in this study as well as an enthusiastic appreciation 
 of his capacities : note the remark that his seascapes 
 are " the best possible to paint from shore " and 
 the criticism on the undue subordination of passion 
 to action. The essay on Matthew Arnold's verse 
 which follows has always seemed to me on the 
 whole the finest of Swinburne's briefer studies, for 
 here we have not only the learning, the grasp of first 
 principles, the brilliant intuitions and exalted eloquence 
 in praise which are present in all his critical work, but 
 a serenity of temper and judiciousness of estimate 
 which are rare in his writing. It is with equal 
 astonishment and satisfaction that one discovers the 
 perfect sympathy of such a critic with such a poet. 
 No two contemporaries had less in common as poets 
 than Swinburne and Matthew Arnold, but utter dissimi- 
 larity proved no obstacle to the younger poet's apprecia- 
 
HIS CAREER 75 
 
 tion, and nothing so just, so generous, so illuminating 
 has been written on the subject. Swinburne's first 
 tribute is to the clear vision and plain, strong 
 utterance of the great verses in " Empedocles," in 
 which Arnold escapes from the rather prim speculation 
 and meditation of his less fortunate hours. " Nothing 
 in verse or out of verse is more wearisome than the 
 delivery of reluctant doubt, of half-hearted hope and 
 half incredulous faith. ... To get at the bare rock is a 
 relief after acres of such quaking ground." He points 
 out gratefully what every reader must have felt — the 
 delicacy and natural charm of the cool light and 
 restful landscape which temper the severe beauty of 
 the philosophic verse in that poem. It is precisely 
 what Swinburne might be expected to notice and 
 applaud, for in his own " Songs Before Sunrise " the 
 austerest verse is softened and relieved by glimpses of 
 landscape and seascape, and the most transcendental 
 poem of all, the " Prelude," winds to its noble con- 
 clusion with the music of water hastening to "the 
 sacred spaces of the sea." Perhaps nothing in this 
 essay is more felicitous than the praise of the 
 " Forsaken Merman " : — " The song is a piece of sea- 
 wind, a stray breath of the air and bloom of the bays 
 and hills : its mixture of mortal sorrow with the 
 strange wild life that is not after mortal law or the 
 childlike moan after lost love mingling with the pure 
 
76 SWINBURNE 
 
 outer note of a song not human — the look in it as of 
 bright bewildered eyes with tears not theirs, and alien 
 wonder in the watch of them— the tender, marvellous, 
 simple beauty of the poem, its charm as of a sound or 
 a flower of the sea." And the whole of Arnold's verse 
 is summed up in this perfect image : — " His. poetry is a 
 pure temple, a white flower of marble, unfretted 
 without by intricate 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 air and rains. Into each alike 
 there falls on us as we turn a conscience of calm 
 beauty, of cool and noble repose, of majestic work 
 under fnelodious and lofty laws." Along with this 
 eulogy of Arnold's work in verse there is a 
 courteous and completely destructive criticism of the 
 errors as critic of that enemy of the Philistines who, 
 for all his services, may be more irreverently than 
 inaccurately described as David, the son of Goliath. 
 
 There follow some valuable notes on the text of 
 Shelley and an e.xcellent study of Coleridge, whose 
 " Kubia Khan " and " Christabel " are preferred to 
 
HIS CAREER 77 
 
 the "Ancient Mariner.'' In between these comes an 
 essay on Byron, containing a good deal that Swin- 
 burne afterwards recanted. The contradiction be- 
 tween the considerable, though for Swinburne rather 
 half-hearted, praise bestowed here on Byron's serious 
 work and the subsequent attack is, I believe, explic- 
 able by the fact that Swinburne's acquaintance with 
 his verse was made unusually late in life. Lady Jane 
 Swinburne had asked her son, when he gave signs of 
 rebelliousness against accepted ideas, to defer reading 
 Byron till he was twenty-one. He gave a promise, 
 and kept it. Now Byron, if his serious work is to be 
 heartily appreciated, must be read in early boyhood ; 
 by fifteen one has come under the spell of Keats and 
 Shelley, and they kill Byron as sunlight and moon- 
 light kill limelight. In Swinburne's case both the 
 enchantment and disillusionment came very much 
 later than they do for other readers, and the enchant- 
 ment was weaker, the reaction more complete, for 
 that reason. The Byron of the romantic Eastern tales 
 and " Childe Harold " is the one poet whose work 
 will not survive comparison. You may set Herrick's 
 verse beside Milton's, Campion's songs beside Shake- 
 speare's, and their charm will not be dimmed ; the 
 little things are as authentic as the great. But set 
 Byron's serious verse beside that of any authentic 
 poet and it is recognised at once as rhetoric, often 
 
78 SWINBURNE 
 
 enough mere rant, pretending to be poetry. He was 
 a great personal force, and there is vitality in his 
 worst things, but it is only in his comic verse that he 
 is genuine, incomparable. To this greater Byron, 
 the writer of that " Vision of Judgment " which is 
 assuredly the greatest poetical satire in English, and 
 of the great, flawed masterpiece, " Don Juan," Swin- 
 burne has done ample justice both here and in his 
 later essay. The study of Ford, the first of Swin- 
 burne's criticisms of his beloved Elizabethan drama- 
 tists, if we except the boyish article of Oxford days, 
 is not far from being the best. But space fails me to 
 do more than draw attention to the careful differentia- 
 tion of Ford from the dramatist with whom he is 
 usually and wrongly associated, and to the happy 
 phrase which describes Webster as a gulf or estuary 
 in the sea which is Shakespeare. 
 
 The two remaining essays in the book deal with 
 art. "Old Masters at Florence" exemplifies finely 
 the gift already displayed in the volume on Blake of 
 translating into words the impression made on keen 
 eyes and a vivid imagination. I do not know where, 
 except in a few passages of Walter Pater, to look 
 for anything to be set beside some of these descrip- 
 tions of drawings by the masters represented in the 
 Uffizi. Take this of a design by Leonardo da 
 Vinci : — " There is a study here of Youth and 
 
HIS CAREER 79 
 
 Age meeting ; it may be of a young man coming 
 suddenly upon the ghostly figure of himself as he 
 will one day be ; the brilliant life in his face is 
 struck into sudden pallor and silence, the clear eyes 
 startled, the happy lips confused. A fair, straight- 
 featured face, with full curls fallen or blown against 
 the eyelids ; and confronting it a keen, wan, mourn- 
 ful mask of flesh, the wise ironical face of one made 
 subtle and feeble by great age." Or, with more of 
 the fancy that we find in Pater's famous passage on 
 La Gioconda this of a drawing by Michelangelo :— 
 " Fear and levity, cruelty and mystery make up their 
 mirth ; evil seems to impend over all these joyous 
 heads, to hide behind all these laughing features : 
 they are things too light for hell, too low for heaven ; 
 bubbles of the earth, brilliant and transient and 
 poisonous, blown out of unclean foam by the breath 
 of meaner spirits, to glitter and quiver for a little 
 under the beams of a mortal sun." Remember, these 
 things were written in 1864, before Pater had pub- 
 lished his first piece of art criticism. " Some Pictures 
 of 1 868 " contains excellent descriptions and estimates 
 of characteristic works by Watts, Whistler, Rossetti 
 and Albert Moore. The catholicity of taste apparent 
 in these studies in an alien art which, alas ! Swinburne 
 did not continue, is even more evident inlthe literary 
 c.iticism of the other essays. The first volume of 
 
8o SWINBURNE 
 
 miscellaneous studies is as remarkable for breadth 
 as for penetration. 
 
 The criticism of George Chapman issued separ- 
 ately in the same year is the best thing yet written 
 on the dramatic rhetorician and inspired translator, 
 but lives in the memory less by its treatment of its 
 subject than by the splendid tribute paid in passing 
 to Browning. "If there is any great quality more 
 perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect 
 it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his 
 sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and 
 trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with 
 obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus 
 purblind or complain of the sluggish action of the 
 telegraph wire. He is something too much the 
 reverse of obscure ; he is too brilliant and subtle for 
 the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any 
 certainty the track of an intelligence which moves 
 with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise with 
 what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building 
 spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and 
 forward as it lives along the animated line of its labour, 
 springs from thread to thread and darts from centre 
 to circumference of the glittering and quivering web 
 of living thought woven from the inexhaustible stores 
 of his perception and kindled from the inexhaustible 
 fire of his imagination." To this period also belongs 
 
HIS CAREER 8i 
 
 the rather extravagant essay on Charles Wells, whose 
 remarkable play "Joseph and his Brethren "has in late 
 years been re-issued with Swinburne's introduction. 
 
 In 1876 appeared " Erectheus," written, I under- 
 stand, during a few weeks at the seaside. It is much 
 closer to the Greek both in form and spirit than 
 "Atalanta," but with all its splendours does not 
 reach home to the heart or remain in the memorj' as 
 the earlier and in a way less mature drama does, 
 The argument of the play is that the Pythian oracle 
 declares to Erectheus, King of Athens, that the 
 city must fall before the Thracian invaders unless 
 Chthonia, his daughter, is sacrificed : the sacrifice is 
 made, and Athens is saved. Whether it be that the 
 subject is too harsh and painful or that in parts the 
 play has something of the air of a tour de force, of 
 brilliant performance rather than creation, it leaves 
 one a little unsatisfied. Yet it is unquestionably a 
 very great piece of work. The choruses are in 
 metrical complexity and audacity far beyond those of 
 " Atalanta." The finest, perhaps, is that which 
 sjngs the North Wind's wooing of Oreithyia. 
 
 With a leap of his limbs as a lion's, a cry from his lips as of 
 
 thunder, 
 In a storm of amorous godhead filled with fire, 
 From the height of the heaven that was rent with the roar of 
 
 his coming in sunder. 
 Sprang the strong God on the spoil of his desire, 
 
 G 
 
82 SWINBURNE 
 
 And the pines of the hills were as green reeds shattered, 
 And their branches as buds of the soft spring scattered, 
 And the west wind and east, and the sound of the south, 
 Fell dumb at the blast of the north wind's mouth, 
 At the cry of his coming out of heaven. 
 
 Certainly all the winds that have ever blown into 
 rnusic fall dumb at the blast of this. There is a more 
 elaborate splendour in the powerful chorus of storm 
 and battle. The blank verse is worthy to accompany 
 the choruses. Constantly we hear the note of great 
 dramatic utterance, above all in the Queen's cry on 
 hearing of the death of Erectheus : — " I praise the 
 gods for Athens." And it is a fine dramatic instinct 
 which has made the chorus one of old men whereas 
 that of " Atalanta " was one of girls. But however 
 one may praise particular things in " Erectheus," of 
 the play as a whole it must be acknowledged that it 
 leaves a reader oppressed and discontented. Athena 
 herself may appear to speak words of healing, but 
 still the imagination recoils from the harsh motive of 
 the play. 
 
 Next year Swinburne published a brief " Note on 
 Charlotte Bronte" and a "Note on the Muscovite 
 Crusade." The former is interesting as the first of 
 his studies of the novelist's art, which include criticisms 
 of Charles Reade and Dickens, and it has moreover 
 very great value as an estimate of her art and of 
 Emily Bronte's, although it is open to the suspicion 
 
HIS CAREER 83 
 
 of being written almost as much to disparage George 
 Eliot, then taken at an exaggerated estimate, as to 
 eulogise Charlotte Bronte. To George Eliot's work 
 Swinburne was not on the whole unjust, and on her 
 death he wrote a sonnet which does homage to her 
 in no half-hearted manner. But he felt some antipathy 
 to her circle, and it would appear from remarks of 
 his to friends about this time that he suspected the 
 campaign against him was being directed from that 
 quarter. The "Note on the Muscovite Crusade" 
 was born amidst the fierce controversy over the 
 Eastern Question in 1876. It hardly needs notice 
 now, except as a proof that his violent detestation 
 of Gladstone was insj^ired by other things besides 
 opposition to Irish Home Rule. 
 
 It is with a certain relief that one turns from all 
 these things to Swinburne's next volume, the second 
 series of "Poems and Ballads," issued in 1878, his 
 forty-first year. Splendid as the " Songs Before 
 Sunrise " are, and they unquestionably contain some 
 of his very greatest work, every reader of them must 
 be sensible of some strain. They lead us into high, 
 bare places, swept by great winds, whence we may 
 watch the paling of tiie stars before dawn and thrill 
 with prescience of the sun. With the second series 
 of " Poems and Ballads " we descend once more to 
 the kindly earth and rejoice in a beauty less severe. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 SWINBURNE 
 
 The book is a turning point in Swinburne's 
 career. Some things in it echo the first series of 
 " Poems and Ballads " ; others like the fine poem, 
 " In the Bay," foreshadow the work of his later years. 
 Between these are a few poems of the rarest beauty 
 in which the ardour of his earlier work survives but is 
 curbed by something of the austerity of the best of 
 the " Songs Before Sunrise," present here as a purely 
 artistic, not as there a primarily moral quality. These 
 seem to me, with some of the " Songs Before Sunrise," 
 the very crown of his achievement as a lyrical poet. 
 They have his unparalleled impulse to song, but it is 
 more securely directed than in the earlier verse ; 
 profusion, not suffered to become prodigality ; fluidity, 
 but with contour, as if by some miracle a wave should 
 be at once water and marble, free and fixed, alive 
 and sculptured, buoyant and massive. I speak above 
 all — need I say it ? — of the superb elegy on Baude- 
 laire, " Ave atque Vale," which has already taken its 
 place with " Lycidas," "Adonais," "In Memoriam," 
 and " Thyrsis " among the greatest elegiac poems in 
 English and which certainly is not the least of the five. 
 The recollection of Baudelaire's verse has given 
 Swinburne's here something of its harder qualities, 
 and in the lines in which he rehandles Baudelaire's 
 material it is with at least an equal mastery. Often 
 i.s I have repeated to myself, one after the other. 
 
HIS CAREER 
 
 J'eusse aimd voir son corps fleurir avec son ame 
 Et grandir librement dans ses terribles jeux ; 
 Deviner si son cceur couve une sombre flamme 
 Aux humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux ; 
 
 Parcourir k loisir ses magnifiques formes ; 
 Raniper sur le versant de ses genoux ^normes, 
 Et parfois en 6t6, quand les soleils malsains, 
 Lasse, la font s'dtendre k travers la campagne, 
 Dormir nonchalamment k I'ombre de ses seins, 
 Comme un hameau paisible au pied d'une montagne, 
 
 and 
 
 Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over, 
 Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet, 
 Hast thou found place at the great knees and foet 
 
 Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover, 
 Such as thy vision here solicited, 
 Under the shadow of her fair vast head, 
 
 The deep division of prodigious breasts. 
 The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep. 
 The weight of awful tresses that still keep 
 
 The savour and shade of old-world pine-forests 
 Where the wet hill-winds weep ? 
 
 I have never known how to choose between them, 
 though, indeed, the English verse surpass the French 
 in sonorous suggestion. But it is hopeless to attempt 
 adequate praise of such verses as follow. 
 
 Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow, 
 
 Far too far off for thought or any prayer. 
 
 What ails us with thee, who art wind and air ? 
 What ails us gazing where all seen is hollow ? 
 
 Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire,! 
 
 Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire 
 
85 SWINBURNE 
 
 Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find. 
 
 Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies, 
 The low light fails us in elusive skies. 
 
 Still the foiled earnest ear is deaf, and blind 
 Are still the eluded eyes. 
 
 Not thee, O never thee, in all time's changes, 
 Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul. 
 The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll 
 
 I lay my hand on, and not death estranges 
 My spirit from communion of thy song — 
 These memories and these melodies that throng 
 
 Veiled porches of a muse funereal — 
 These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold 
 As though a hand were in my hand to hold, 
 
 Or through mine ears a mourning musical 
 Of many mourners rolled. 
 
 I among these, I also, in such station 
 As when the pyre was charred, and piled the sods, 
 And offering to the dead made, and their gods, 
 
 The old mourners had, standing to make libation, 
 I stand, and to the gods and to the dead 
 Do reverence without prayer or praise, and shed 
 
 Offering to these unknown, the gods of gloom. 
 And what of honey and spice my seedlands bear, 
 And what I may of fruits in this chilled air. 
 
 And lay, Orestes like, across the tomb 
 A curl of severed hair. 
 
 But by no hand nor any treason stricken. 
 
 Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King, 
 The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing. 
 
 Thou liest, and on this dust no tears could quicken 
 Their fall no tears like theirs that all men hear 
 Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear 
 
HIS CAREER 87 
 
 Down the opening leaves of holy poets' pages. 
 
 Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns ; 
 
 But bending us-ward with memorial urns 
 The most high Muses that fulfil all ages 
 
 Weep, and our God's heart yearns . . , 
 
 And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean, 
 
 And stains with tears her changing bosom chill : 
 
 That obscure Venus of the hollow hill, 
 That thing transformed which was the Cytherean, 
 
 With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine 
 
 Long since, and face no more called Erycine ; 
 A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god. 
 
 Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell 
 
 Did she, a sad and second prey, compel 
 Into the footless places once more trod, 
 
 And shadows hot from hell. 
 
 And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom. 
 No choral salutation lure to light — 
 A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night 
 
 And love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom. 
 There is no help for these things ; none to mend 
 And',none to mar ; not all our songs, O friend, 
 
 Will make death clear or make life durable. 
 Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine 
 And with wild notes about this dust of thine 
 
 At least I fill the place where white dreams dwell 
 And wreathe an unseen shrine . . . 
 
 For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother, 
 
 Take at rtiy hands this garland and farewell. 
 
 Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell, 
 And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother, 
 
 With sadder than the Niobean womb, 
 
 And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb. 
 
88 SWINBURNE 
 
 Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done ; 
 There lies not any troublous thing before, 
 Nor sight or sound to war against thee more, 
 
 For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, 
 All waters as the shore. 
 
 Of the poems which repeat or continue the first 
 "Poems and Ballads" with no impairment of gift 
 but with some loss of the first freshness and sting the 
 two finest are " Relics," with its delicate and regretful 
 evocation of Italian landscape, and " A Wasted 
 Vigil," with its tragical secret sung, as such things 
 always should be, in words that express everything 
 that matters from the point of view of art and ar& 
 reticent of merely personal experience. The very 
 powerful and beautiful " At a Month's End " may 
 seem to belong to somewhat the same class, and it 
 does indeed return to a theme like that of " Fclise," 
 but the deeper passion, the maturer exi>erience, the 
 severer and weightier and more intricate form give 
 it a place with "Ave atque Vale" among the few 
 very great achievements of that fortunate hour in 
 which the earlier and later impulses were mingled. 
 I have spoken of its intricate form ; at first sight the 
 form may seem simple enough. There is nothing 
 elaborate or extraordinary in a quatrain with the odd 
 lines double-rhymed. But supreme skill in the free 
 substitution of anapaests for iambs and in utilising 
 the slight recoil given to alternate lines by the 
 
HIS CAREER 89 
 
 additional syllable have made " At a Month's End " 
 one of the miracles of English versification. It is 
 infinitely varied from verse to verse and yet keeps 
 the dominant monotone throughout. Every wave 
 swings forward in an unfaltering advance, but each 
 has its own interior eddies and reluctant ripples, and 
 none is suffered to break until its successor has over- 
 taken it, so that there is no pause in movement and 
 music. Of all the poem's metrical triumphs this is 
 the greatest, this endless undulation. And this 
 marvellous form is exactly and exquisitely expressive 
 of the thought and emotion of the verse. The poem 
 is the musing of a man about to leave a woman who 
 cannot hold him, whom he cannot hold but cannot 
 ever forget. A fierce, voluptuous animal, the soul 
 with its hungers and maladies has no part in her ; 
 yet even in such a nature love might awaken a soul, 
 but to what end ? 
 
 Best leave or take the perfect creature. 
 Take all she is or leave complete. 
 
 And after all, is not belief in the possibility of diang- 
 ing her but the perilous illusion of physical passion 
 touched with the folly of sentiment } 
 
 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 ? . , . 
 
90 SWINBURNE 
 
 Should Love disown or disesteera you 
 For loving one man more or less ? 
 
 You could not tame your light white sea-mew, 
 Nor I my sleek black pantheress. 
 
 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 
 
 But this one broken foam-white feather 
 I throw you off the hither wing, 
 
 Splashed stiff with sea-scurf and salt-weather, 
 This song for sleep to learn and sing — • 
 
 Sing in your ear when, daytime over. 
 You, couched at long length on hot sand 
 
 With some sleek sun-discoloured lover. 
 Wince from his breath as from a brand : 
 
 Till the acrid hour aches out and ceases, 
 And the sheathed eyeball sleepier swims, 
 
 The deep flank smooths its dimpling creases. 
 And passion looses all the limbs : 
 
 Till dreams of sharp grey north-sea weather 
 Fall faint upon your fiery sleep, 
 
 As on strange sailds a strayed bird's feather 
 The wind may choose to loose or keep. 
 
 But I, who leave my queen of panthers, 
 
 As a tired honey-heavy bee 
 Gilt with sweet dust from gold-grained anthers 
 
 Leaves the rose-chahce, what for me ? 
 
 From the ardours of the chaliced centre. 
 From the amorous anthers' golden grime, 
 
 That switch and smutch all wings that enter, 
 I fly forth hot from honey-time. 
 
HIS CAREER 91 
 
 But I 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. 
 
 The book is fuller of natural beauty than the first 
 " Poems and Ballads," and it is chiefly in such things 
 as the " Songs of Four Seasons," " A Vision of Spring 
 in Winter," and " Ex Voto " that it foreshadows 
 Swinburne's later work. The last named of these 
 poems refers to his narrow escape from drowning at 
 Etretat in 1870. Swinburne was staying there with a 
 Mr. Powell, a gentleman whose eccentricities amazed 
 his simple neighbours. Swimming one day under the 
 Porte d'Amont, he was caught in the current and 
 swept far out to sea, but was rescued just when his 
 strength gave out, by a fishing-boat, on board of 
 which happened to be Guy de Maupassant. He told 
 Mr. Edmund Gosse some years afterwards that when 
 the end seemed at hand it was some consolation to 
 him to reflect that he had completed the " Songs 
 Before Sunrise/' and that his life was about to end in 
 much the same way and at much the same age as 
 Shelley's. The poem gives expression to his hope 
 that death when it came might be a mingling with 
 
92 SWINBURNE 
 
 the element of which in " Thalassius," and elsewhere, 
 he figured himself the child. Beautiful as all these afe, 
 the loveliest of all his nature poems is " A Forsaken 
 Garden," with its haunting music, its delicate evocation 
 of a ruined paradise about which the faded beauty 
 and faint perfume of long perished roses linger, its 
 strange vision of the death of death. There is a rare 
 magic in the words and cadences that summon up the 
 ghost of the vanished garden, showing us the dimmed 
 colours of flowers as one might see them reflected in 
 a silver mirror. 
 
 All all 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. 
 
 Here death may deal not again for ever ; 
 
 Here change may come not till all change end. 
 From the graves they have made they shall rise up never. 
 
 Who nought left living to ravage or rend. 
 Earih, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing, 
 
 While the sun and the rain live, these shall be ; 
 Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing 
 Roll the sea. 
 
 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, 
 
HIS CAREER 93 
 
 Here now in his triumph till 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. 
 
 The memorial verses contributed to " Le Tombeau 
 de Theophile Gautier," honour in many tongues the 
 memory and work of the author of " the golden book 
 of spirit and sense," as in a fine sonnet Swinburne 
 called "Mademoiselle de Maupin." The English 
 verses are the best, but both the French poems are 
 appropriately flawless, and the Latin verses have had 
 applause from the best judges. Another French 
 poem, the " Nocturne," has always seemed to me one 
 of the most beautiful of Swinburne's : 
 
 Je vais toujours cherchant au bord de I'onde 
 Le sang de beau pied blessd de I'amour. 
 
 In these days Swinburne cherished the project of 
 translating the choicest things of the classical and 
 French poets he most loved. All he actually did, 
 however, except some lines of Aristophanes to be 
 noticed hereafter, were a few versions from Villon. 
 Rossetti, as Swinburne most cordially acknowledged, 
 has rendered Villon with a subtler sense of words, and 
 one may add that Mr. John Payne has kept closer 
 to the original. These translations are admirable 
 nonetheless, and one, the lament of " la belle qui fut 
 heaulmi^re," is a very wonderful feat, for all that there 
 
94 SWINBURNE 
 
 is more Swinburne than Villon in such phrases as 
 " red splendid kissing mouth." Villon himself Swin- 
 burne has summed up perfectly in the ballade on him, 
 written as if on a friend and brother-poet personally 
 loved and pitied : — 
 
 Poor splendid wings so frayed and soiled and torn ! 
 
 Poor kind wild eyes so dashed with light quick tears ! 
 Poor perfect voice, most blithe when most forlorn . . . 
 
 There are many other poems which it would be 
 pleasant to linger over, the beautiful sestina and 
 double sestina ; the memorial verses on Barry 
 Cornwall, who was fortunate above all little poets in 
 winning the affection and admiration of greater men ; 
 the " Ballad of Dreamland," assuredly the best ballade 
 in English. But I must be content merely to quote 
 one verse of " At Parting " for its music. 
 
 For a day and a night Love sang to us, played with us, 
 
 Folded us round from the dark and the light ; 
 And our hearts were fulfilled of the music he made with us. 
 Made. with our hearts and our lips while he stayed with us. 
 Stayed in mid passage his pinions from flight 
 For a day and a night — 
 
 and to mention the sonnet " Two Leaders," * for its 
 nobility of feeling in reverent salute to great 
 opponents and its majesty of style. One would give 
 
 * Carlyle and Newman, undoubtedly. 
 
HIS CAREER 95 
 
 up pages of even the most magnificent denunciation 
 of men hateworthy for such words as these : 
 
 Honour not hate we give you, love not fear, 
 Last prophets of past kind, who fill the dome 
 
 Of great dead Gods with wrath and wail, nor hear 
 Time's word and man's : " Go honoured hence, go home. 
 
 Night's childless children ; here your hour is done ; 
 
 Pass with the stars and leave us with the sun." 
 
 During the thirteen years which separate 
 " Atalanta " and the second series of " Poems and 
 Ballads" Swinburne lived almost entirely in London, 
 having rooms at various times in North Crescent, 
 Great James Street and Guildford Street. His 
 creative activity was amazing throughout this period. 
 The lyrical verse alone, the two series of " Poems and 
 Ballads " and the " Songs Before Sunrise " and " Songs 
 of Two Nations," would seem no inconsiderable output 
 for a lifetime of labour, but there is also the tragedy 
 of " Bothwell," and the two volumes of prose criticism, 
 as well as the novel, "A Year's Letters," which 
 appeared in the Tatler, then conducted by his friend 
 Purnell, in 1877 and was reissued nearly thirty years 
 later as " Love's Cross Currents." And all this almost 
 feverish creation and criticism proceeded amidst 
 distractions and excitements which told on him. For 
 part of this time he was, as never before or after, to 
 be seen in society, and to a magnetic personality that 
 vehemently attracts or repels every other personality. 
 
96 SWINBURNE 
 
 contact with people is fatiguing. Then he was 
 indulging too in that " debauch of vitality," of which 
 Baudelaire has written subtly in one of the " Petit 
 Poemes en Prose," that intoxication which certain 
 natures find in the crowds of great cities. He seemed 
 until towards the end of this period almost incapable 
 of being tired out either mentally or physically. 
 Requiring very little sleep, he often allowed himself 
 even less than he needed ; we hear of him at the house 
 of Marston, where men of letters met at midnight to 
 discuss literature till dawn. This enormous expenditure 
 of energy could not continue indefinitely. Swinburne 
 had, moreover, contracted habits damaging to health, 
 and though, under the influence of Lady Trevelyan, 
 whose shrewd, amused, maternal interest in the poet 
 she had known from early boyhood was so helpful to 
 him, he shook them off, it was not before some injury 
 had been done. About 1878 he was noticeably worn ; 
 his buoyant spirit was touched with languor, and there 
 were moods of depression in which he came near to 
 I doubting the value of his work or anticipated 
 I weakening of his inspiration. Occasional visits to his 
 parents at Holmwood, near Reading, whither they 
 had moved from the Isle of Wight, benefited him, but 
 only temporarily. To add to his dejection there 
 began to be evident the first signs of the deafness 
 that grew rapidly after i88o and was early recognised 
 
HIS CAREER 97 
 
 as incurable. He had skilful treatment and wise 
 counsel from Dr. Bird, of Welbeck Street, but by 1879 
 he was on the verge of a nervous collapse from which 
 it was feared there would hardly be real recovery. 
 
 At this time there came forward the one man who 
 could save Swinburne. Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton 
 endeavoured to avoid the deep gratitude of every 
 lover of poetry for his devoted and unwearying 
 services to Rossetti and Swinburne as assiduously as 
 for years he tried to escape fame as a poet. The one 
 attempt has been about as successful as the other, and 
 there can be no intrusion on privacies in saying that 
 but for him we should probably not have had the 
 later work of Swinburne, certainly not had it in such 
 abundance. A few years earlier he had become one 
 of Swinburne's most intimate friends ; henceforth he 
 was to be a brother to him. It was arranged that 
 they should live together, and they were soon settled 
 at "The Pines," Putney, where the remaining years of 
 Swinburne's life were to be spent in the completely 
 sympathetic companionship and under the affection- 
 ate care of his fellow-poet. It was not merely that in 
 this new life Swinburne thoroughly recovered physical 
 health. Mr. Watts-Dunton gave him at the very time 
 it was most needed a new impulse. To be more 
 exact, Swinburne found in the philosophy of his friend 
 a reasoned basis for some of his own artistic convic- 
 
 H 
 
98 SWINBURNE 
 
 tions. It is only so that any man or book can help an 
 artist, for "no secret can be revealed to any who 
 divined it not before." To Swinburne in his youth, 
 as to most poets, the love of nature had been a 
 thing flowering up instinctively, a separate and 
 accidental delight. Mr. Watts-Dunton, a poet trained 
 originally as a naturalist, and a thinker who had 
 meditated much over the place of nature and of art in 
 life, offered him the suggestion of a synthesis which 
 knitted together his thoughts of nature, art and life. 
 And this philosophy was made out of poetry, not 
 needing to be translated into terms of art because 
 it was art. We have heard much of Mr. Watts- 
 Dunton's personal services to Swinburne ; he can 
 never be honoured too much for them. But hardly 
 anywhere has there been adequate recognition of his 
 intellectual service to his friend. Yet whoever com- 
 pares the earlier with the later nature poems, and 
 realises the difference between them, may measure 
 Swinburne's debt. Exaggeration would have been 
 resented by none more severely than by Mr. Watts- 
 Dunton himself. But it is no slight thing to have 
 revealed to a poet the organic connection of his own 
 thoughts, for as the years pass and mere impulse 
 weakens it becomes necessary for an artist to enter 
 consciously into that larger life of the universe in 
 which in youth he has lived instinctively. 
 
HIS CAREER 99 
 
 The two volumes of verse which Swinburne issued 
 in 1880 show unmistakably the exhaustion from which 
 he was soon to recover. The first poem in " Songs of 
 the Springtides" tells of that revival and return to 
 nature. " Thalassius " is an idealised autobiography, 
 recapitulating to some extent the Prelude to the 
 " Songs Before Sunrise." Perhaps the greatest 
 passage in it is that which describes the moods and 
 dreams of which the first " Poems and Ballads " 
 were born. But for quotation preference may 
 be given to the conclusion, with the song-god's 
 blessing. 
 
 " Child of my sunlight and the sea, from birth 
 A fosterling and fugitive on earth ; 
 Sleepless of soul as wind or wave or fire, 
 A manchild with an ungrown God's desire ; 
 Because thou hast loved nought mortal more than me, 
 Thy father, and thy mother-hearted sea ; 
 Because thou hast set thine heart to sing, and sold 
 Life and life's love for song, God's living gold ; 
 Because thou hast given thy flower and fire of youth 
 To feed men's heart with visions, truer than truth ; 
 Because thou hast kept in those world-wandering eyes 
 The light that makes me music of the skies ; 
 Because thou hast heard with world-unwearied ears 
 The music that puts light into the spheres ; 
 Have therefore in thy heart and in thy mouth 
 The sound of song that mingles north and south, 
 The song of all the winds that sing of'me. 
 And in thy soul the sense of all the sea." 
 
 There is much of the personal note again in "On 
 
 H 2 
 
loo SWINBURNE 
 
 the Cliffs," with its fancy or rather poetic truth of 
 Sappho heard in the singing of the nightingale. 
 
 We were not marked for sorrow, thou or I, 
 For joy nor sorrow, sister, were we made, 
 To take delight and grief to live and die, 
 Assuaged by pleasures or by pains affrayed 
 That melt men's hearts and alter ; we retain 
 A memory mastering pleasure and all pain . . . 
 
 The old fire and rapture are in the splendid praise of 
 Sappho. The book also contains "The Garden of 
 Cymdoce " and an Ode to Victor Hugo. 
 
 The poem given most prominence in the " Studies 
 in Song " is one written for the centenary of Landor. 
 That festival escaped Swinburne's notice till it was 
 too late to do anything on Landor's birthday, but 
 having recollected that Lamb was born only a few 
 days later, he hastened up to London to organise a 
 banquet in their joint honour. Landor was, however, 
 eventually left out, and the banquet, over which 
 Swinburne presided with charming and amusing 
 solemnity, took the form of an indifferent dinner at 
 an obscure restaurant with only four or five intimate 
 friends present. I do not know that the centenary 
 poem is more successful than the centenary celebra- 
 tion. It contains, indeed, two lines of criticism which 
 recur to the memory whenever one thinks of Landor's 
 Hellenics and which cannot be overpraised : — 
 
HIS CAREER loi 
 
 And through the trumpet of a child of Rome 
 Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece. 
 
 But as a whole the long poem is depressing. It was 
 one of Rossetti's admirable sayings that poetry should 
 be " amusing." No poetry is more consistently 
 " amusing " in Rossetti's sense than Swinburne's, but 
 these verses are among the exceptions. It is in the 
 poems of nature that the finest verse in the book is to 
 be found. " Evening on the Broads " is merely as a 
 metrical exercise one of the most remarkable things 
 accomplished by Swinburne. It carries further the 
 discovery made in " Hesperia " and gives us, not any 
 barbarous imitation of classical dactyllic measures, but 
 flawless equivalents in anapaests which certain persons 
 have been pleased to read as dactyls and spondees. 
 But it is far more than an ingenious piece of versifica- 
 tion. The lines are full of the very spirit of the 
 crepuscular landscape and seascape they call up. 
 
 Inland glimmer the shallows asleep and afar in the breathless 
 
 Twilight : yonder the depths darken afar and asleep. 
 
 Slowly the semblance of death out of heaven descends on the 
 
 deathless 
 Waters : hardly the light lives on the face of the deep. 
 
 The poems in that section of the volume entitled 
 "By the North Sea" have a yet rarer magic, a 
 stranger gift of imaginative suggestion rather than 
 description, and there is none that haunts the 
 
102 SWINBURNE 
 
 memory more than the weird picture of the church 
 and churchyard set on crumbling earth and devoured 
 by the sea. Of the other poems mention need be 
 made only of the sonnets on the launch of the yacht 
 that was to have been a refuge for the Czar and on 
 the three busts of Nero, and of the fluent and grace- 
 ful version of a chorus from Aristophanes' "Birds," 
 the more welcome because it is accompanied by the 
 one pronouncement on prosody that Swinburne 
 made. 
 
 The mastery of comic metre displayed in this last- 
 mentioned piece prepares a reader for the " Hep- 
 talogia," a volume of parodies published anonymously 
 in the same year and eventually acknowledged. Of 
 the seven, one, the " Last Words of a Seventh-rate 
 Poet," may be set aside as hardly worth doing : who 
 cares to mock a poetaster like Lytton .' To another, 
 that of Mrs. Browning, it may be objected that when 
 a poet has so parodied herself unconsciously as to 
 write certain stanzas of " Lady Geraldine's Court- 
 ship," it is somewhat superfluous to burlesque her 
 even so exactly and amusingly as in these lines : 
 
 For He grasps the pale Created by some thousand vital 
 handles. 
 
 Till a Godshtne, bluely winnowed through a sieve of thunder- 
 storms, 
 
 Shimmers up the non-existent round the churning feet of angels 
 
 And the atoms of that glory may be seraphs, being worms. 
 
HIS CAREER 103 
 
 But the five remaining poems are of an almost even 
 excellence. If one must choose, I should put first 
 the just and merciless Patmore, with its boisterous 
 Rabelaisean laughter, and next the delicious Tenny- 
 son of " The Higher Pantheism " : 
 
 Body and spirit are twins : God only knows which is which : 
 The soul squats down in the body like a tinker drunk in a ditch. 
 
 The Browning is devilishly clever in its malicious and 
 sympathetic mimicry, and probably no one has 
 caricatured Browning's cacophony better than Swin- 
 burne in such a line as 
 
 Ah, how can fear sit and hear as love hears it griefs heart's 
 grate's cracked screech ? 
 
 But the Swinburne is incomparable, except for Hogg's 
 marvellous self-parody, " The Good Grey Katte." 
 
 Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and 
 
 soul of our senses 
 Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the 
 
 semblance and sound of a sigh ; 
 Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and 
 
 triangular tenses — 
 " Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the 
 
 dawn of the day when we die." 
 
 Again it is only Hogg who has informed parpdy with 
 more of authentic poetry. 
 
 These things were the diversions, the rather 
 savage diversions, which relieved the labour expended 
 
104 SWINBURNE 
 
 on that "Study of Shakespeare" which is perhaps 
 the chief work of Swinburne as a critic. The design 
 of the book is "to examine by internal evidence 
 alone the growth and the expression of spirit and of 
 speech, the ebb and flow of style, discernible in the 
 successive periods of Shakespeare's work ; to study 
 the phases of mind, the changes of tone, the passage 
 or progress from an old manner to a new, the re- 
 version or relapse from a later to an earlier habit." 
 For this task Swinburne was perfectly equipped. 
 Coleridge in his fortunate moments had a philosophic 
 understanding of creative processes such as no one 
 else has possessed. Lamb, with less insight into 
 principles, had an unerring judgment in dealing with 
 any particular work or passage. In their own way, 
 both remain unapproached as critics of Shakespeare. 
 But Swinburne's ardent sympathy, his vivid realisa- 
 tion of poetry as a living thing, his unrivalled 
 knowledge of the whole of Elizabethan dramatic 
 literature, and his brilliant intuition make him the 
 most stimulating and one of the most suggestive of 
 all Shakespearean critics. Take the book all in all, 
 it is by far the best study of Shakespeare's work as a 
 whole ever written from the strictly aesthetic point 
 of view. Whether or not the plays were produced 
 by Shakespeare exactly in the order here fixed by 
 purely literary criticism does not matter: it is their 
 
HIS CAREER 105 
 
 spiritual succession that he has established, and 
 finally. 
 
 For students the most interesting portion of the 
 book may be the examination of the dubious plays, 
 of which "Arden of Feversham" is confidently, 
 and the present writer ventures to say, with ample 
 justification, ascribed to Shakespeare, as a youthful 
 work on the face of it, and the possible work of no 
 youthful hand but Shakespeare's. The mystery of 
 the terrible " Yorkshire Tragedy " is frankly ac- 
 knowledged insoluble ; the famous additional scenes 
 of " The Spanish Tragedy " are attributed to Webster. 
 The careful and skilful analysis of the first part of 
 " Henry VI " carries conviction in so far as the scene 
 in the Temple Gardens and Talbot's death are set 
 down to Shakespeare, but it seems to me that it was 
 a most natural reluctance to believe Shakespeare 
 guilty of atrocious libels on Joan of Arc rather than 
 critical reasoning that prompted the over-vehement 
 denial of the possibility of Shakespeare having 
 written what he evidently tolerated enough to re- 
 touch. The hardest and most attractive problem is, 
 of course, that of " Henry VHI." Swinburne's con- 
 clusions as to its dual authorship are admirably 
 argued and modestly presented, and appear un- 
 questionable. He contends that those passages 
 which most clearly suggest the handiwork of Fletcher 
 
io6 SWINBURNE 
 
 do not differ from the rest of the play by nearly so 
 much as the undoubted work of Fletcher from the 
 undoubted work of Shakespeare, and has no difficulty 
 in showing that whereas their respective parts in the 
 "Two Noble Kinsmen" are obviously discordant, 
 here the general effect is harmonious. 
 
 But let us turn from these questions to the pene- 
 trating study of Shakespearean characters. Hardly 
 anywhere else can be found a more sympathetic under- 
 standing of the inmost soul of Falstaff, of lago and 
 Othello and Hamlet. Even idolatrous reverence for 
 Hugo has not prevented Swinburne from protesting 
 against the monstrous description of the greatest and 
 most lovable of all comic creations of genius as 
 " centaure du pore," and his vindication of Falstaff is 
 a thing to rejoice over. When, however, in connection 
 with the same matter he speaks of Shakespeare's 
 godlike equity, one may take leave to reply that there 
 is something less than equity in the final disgrace of 
 the fat knight, and one may well share the feeling 
 of the critic who, shocked by the intolerable outrage, 
 tried to find consolation in the thought that at any 
 rate Falstaff would never repay the thousand pounds 
 borrowed of Justice Shallow. Of lago it might well 
 be supposed that Coleridge had said the final thing, 
 but Swinburne refines further on his predecessor's 
 acute remark on lago's " motive-hunting," and sums 
 
HIS CAREER 107 
 
 up the whole matter in these words : — " A genuine 
 and thorough capacity for human lust or hate would 
 diminish or degrade the supremacy of his evil. He 
 is almost as far above or beyond vice as he is 
 beneath or beyond virtue." Of Hamlet he says in a 
 loose sentence : — " The signal characteristic " of his 
 nature " is by no means irresolution or hesitation or 
 any form of weakness, but rather the strong conflux 
 of contending forces," and points out, what is indeed 
 obvious though often unobserved, the ample evidence 
 of Hamlet's capacity for vigorous and practical action 
 in such episodes as the sea-fight. Of " Lear " he 
 writes with equal justice and eloquence : — " It is by 
 far the most Aeschylean of his works ; the most 
 elemental and primaeval, the most oceanic and 
 Titanic in conception. He deals here with no 
 subtleties as in ' Hamlet,' with no conventions as in 
 ' Othello.' There is no question of ' a divided duty ' 
 or a problem half insoluble, a matter of country and 
 connection, of family or of race. 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 that give no man light ; 
 over a world full of death and life without resting- 
 place or guidance." The book concludes fittingly 
 with homage to " Cymbeline," but in dwelling upon 
 
io8 SWINBURNE 
 
 the delights of that " play of plays," Swinburne surely 
 passes much too lightly by the basest and ugliest 
 motive that ever defiled any work rich in pure and 
 noble poetry. That Imogen is "the woman best 
 beloved in all the world of song and all the tide of 
 time " one may agree ; the more nauseating is it that 
 the play her presence sweetens and illuminates should 
 turn upon her husband's wager on her honour, 
 questioned by the mere fact of expressing confidence 
 in it. 
 
 There is much here unnoticed which deserves 
 careful study, but an end must be made with a word 
 or two on the appendices. The first is an elaborate 
 examination of " Edward III," which effectually 
 disposes of the theory of its possible Shakespearean 
 authorship. The second is a paraphrase and bur- 
 lesque of the proceedings of " The Newest Shakes- 
 peare Society." This body Swinburne vehemently 
 and excusably detested ; with its clever and fiery and 
 crotchety head, Furnivall, he crossed swords to 
 deadly purpose, and he was inexpressibly pained 
 when Browning accepted the Presidentship. Whether 
 it was worth the while of such a man writing on such 
 a subject to waste words on the ignorance of certain 
 commentators, the arrogance and over-ingeniousness 
 of others, may well be doubted ; but the reader on 
 whom occasional and partly irrelevant violences jar 
 
HIS CAREER 109 
 
 should bear in mind that the book appeared at a 
 time of angry controversy over the theories of Fleay 
 and Furnivall. 
 
 In the following year, 1881, Swinburne concluded 
 his great trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots. He over- 
 valued " Mary Stuart " as much as in later years he 
 under-valued " Chastelard," and finding few to share 
 his preference for this play among all his dramatic 
 work, was the more deeply gratified by the praise of 
 Sir Henry Taylor and by the compliment implied in 
 the request of the editor of the " Encyclopaedia 
 Britannica " for the remarkable if not wholly con- 
 vincing monograph on Mary Queen of Scots in that 
 publication. Sir Henry Taylor's admiration is easily 
 understood : Swinburne's play has something of the 
 same grave power as " Phillip van Artevelde." But 
 like that sober and masterly closet drama it leaves on 
 the reader's mind an impression of dignified and 
 sustained effort rather than the feeling of contact with 
 vital tragedy. The thing to be done was difficult ; it 
 has been admirably done ; the shock and sting of life 
 are hardly in it. " Mary Stuart " does not live in the 
 memory as " Chastelard " lives, as passages and scene 
 of " Bothwell," if not the whole play, live. Its 
 greatest height is reached in the scene in which, 
 forsaking historical fact, Swinburne has invented a 
 situation and a motive which perfectly round off the 
 
iio SWINBURNE 
 
 trilogyr. The reader of "Chastelard" will have felt 
 that the most tragical figure in that fiery drama is not 
 the soldier poet but Mary Beaton. Here the woman 
 who loved Chastelard in vain tests the woman whom 
 he loved to his ruin, determined that if " all remem- 
 brance be dead as remorse or pity " she will forward 
 the fatal letter Mary Stuart has written to Elizabeth 
 but forborne to send. She sings Chastelard's love 
 song to the Queen, and when it evokes but the 
 remark, 
 
 Was it — but his rang sweeter — was it not 
 Remy Belleau ? 
 
 Mary Beaton seals the Queen's doom. Admirable in 
 itself, yet more admirable in that it binds the first 
 play of the trilogy to the last, this at least is a great 
 dramatic inspiration. 
 
 It has been said, and not without some justice, 
 that Swinburne's estimate of Mary Queen of Scots is 
 based rather upon his conception as a dramatic poet 
 of her character than upon the historical facts of her 
 career, which were thoroughly known to him.* The 
 creative artist heightens what is most characteristic in 
 the nature of the actual men and women whom he 
 bids live again. Art, as Merimee observed, is an 
 
 * It may be just worth noting that he made one extra- 
 ordinary slip in the " Adieux k Marie Stuart," about the colour 
 of her eyes. 
 
HIS CAREER iii 
 
 exaggeration a propos ; but note the qualifying word 
 of his definition. Mary Queen of Scots is more 
 herself in Swinburne's magnificent trilogy than she can 
 ever have been in any particular event or at any 
 particular moment of her life. Is that any discredit 
 to Swinburne ? Is it not rather the special glory of 
 his chief dramatic achievement ? 
 
 His summing up of her character in the monograph 
 contributed to the " Encyclopaedia Britannica " and 
 reprinted in the " Miscellanies " is as follows : — 
 " Mary Stuart was in many respects the creature of 
 her age, of her creed, and of her station ; but the 
 noblest and most noteworthy qualities of her nature 
 were independent of rank, opinion, or time. Even the 
 detractors who defend her conduct on the plea that 
 she was a dastard and a dupe are compelled in the 
 same breath to retract this implied reproach, and to 
 admit, with illogical acclamation and incongruous 
 applause, that the world never saw more splendid 
 courage at the service of more brilliant intelligence ; 
 that a braver if not 'a rarer spirit never did steer 
 humanity.' A kinder or more faithful friend, a 
 deadlier or more dangerous enemy, it would be 
 impossible to dread or to desire. Passion alone 
 could shake the double fortress of her impregnable 
 heart and ever active brain. The passion of love, 
 after very sufficient experience, she apparently and 
 
112 SWINBURNE 
 
 naturally outlived ; the passion of hatred and revenge 
 was as inextinguishable in her inmost nature as the 
 emotion of loyalty and gratitude. Of repentance it 
 would seem that she knew as little as of fear ; 
 having been trained from infancy in a religion where 
 the Decalogue was supplemented by the Creed. 
 Adept as she was in the most exquisite delicacy of 
 dissimulation, the most salient note of her original 
 disposition was daring rather than subtlety . . . For 
 her own freedom of will and of way, of passion and of 
 action, she cared much ; for her creed she cared 
 something ; for her country she cared nothing." 
 
 The Arthurian legend had an immense fascination 
 for the greater Victorian poets, and it is not the least 
 interesting task of any critic of the period to examine 
 and differentiate the treatment of it by Tennyson, 
 Matthew Arnold, William Morris and Swinburne. 
 Tennyson turned to it too late. If he had only 
 written the " Idylls of the King " when he wrote that 
 noble early " Morte D'Arthur ! " Si sic omnia ! 
 But he came to the legends after the high strung 
 poetry of " Maud " had been received with chilling 
 surprise by his public and when he had yielded 
 himself finally to two temptations — the temptation to 
 be idyllic at all costs and the temptation to allegorise. 
 There was never a subject less suited for idyllic 
 treatment than the wild old legends ; perhaps never 
 
HIS CAREER 113 
 
 one less fitted for allegorical treatment. And even if 
 this be set aside, the idyll is a lower form of poetry 
 than lyrical or dramatic narrative ; while the allegoiy 
 is at best the prose writer's substitute for the sym- 
 bolism of the poet, an attempt to make ingenuity do 
 the work of imagination. With all their " exqui- 
 site magnificence " of workmanship — it is Swinburne's 
 felicitous and paradoxical phrase — the " Idylls of the 
 King " remain half vitalised. It was not in the nature 
 of things that Mathew Arnold should do better in his 
 one attempt. His " Tristram and Iseult " is in part 
 sorry stuff; what is admirable in it is certainly not a 
 narrative or dramatic speech. William Morris had 
 the root of the matter in him. Immature and ill 
 composed as the Arthurian poems in " The Defence 
 of Guinevere" may be, they are full of passionate 
 poetry, of a strange, confused, half-delirious passion 
 hardly to be found in any of his later work. But it 
 cannot be doubted that none of these shaped the 
 material of the old romance to such high purpose or 
 with such perfect success as Swinburne in " Tristram 
 of Lyonesse " published in 1882, or its successor after 
 fourteen years, " The Tale of Balen." 
 
 A great narrative poem " Tristram " is not. The 
 figures are veiled, the action moves slowly for all the 
 hurry of the verse, the lyrical poet frequently interrupts 
 the teller of a tale. It is something rarer than that. 
 
 I 
 
114 SWINBURNE 
 
 Its subject is really not the love of Tristram and Iseult 
 but love itself, incarnated in them. For sustained 
 passion there is absolutely nothing in English verse 
 comparable to it, and there is no poem that leaves a 
 I'eader more exhausted, for the pitch of emotion in it 
 is that hardly to be maintained even in lyrical verse 
 for more than a few verses. It is the one thing in 
 poetry that competes with the music drama of 
 Wagner. Swinburne has followed the legend rather 
 more closely than Wagner, departing from it, 
 however, to give higher station to the second Iseult, 
 the maiden-wife, and choosing for the conclusion not 
 the version of Mallory, in which Tristram is slain 
 before Iseult, but that of Thomas of Brittany, in 
 which he dies before Iseult reaches him. More than 
 a passing word is due to the triumphant use of the 
 heroic couplet in the poem. The natural tendency of 
 that measure is towards the " stopped " form ; few 
 poets have been wholly successful in the free use 
 of enjambment, none has approached Swinburne in 
 making a measure which almost inevitably works up 
 to a clinching effect every few lines yield the effect of 
 a vast uninterrupted onward rush. The very greatest 
 example of this unique and astonishing accomplish- 
 ment is the superb opening. 
 
 Love, that is first and last of all things made. 
 The light that has the living world for shade, 
 
HIS CAREER 
 
 "5 
 
 The spirit that for temporal veil has on 
 
 The souls of all men woven in unison, 
 
 One fiery raiment with all lives inwrought 
 
 And lights of sunny and starry deeds and thought, 
 
 And always through new act and passion new 
 
 Shines the divine same body and beauty through, 
 
 The body spiritual of fire and light 
 
 That is to worldly noon as noon to night ; 
 
 Love, that is flesh upon the spirit of man 
 
 And spirit within the flesh whence breath began ; 
 
 Love, that keeps all the choir of lives in chime ; 
 
 Love, that is blood within the veins of time ; . . . 
 
 Nowhere in Swinburne is there more of natural 
 beauty than in this poem, glimpses of tragic or radiant 
 landscape, broad visions of the expanse of angry or 
 tranquil sea. The charm of the picture of " the 
 Queen's pleasance" and the freshness of that of 
 Tristram swimming are unmatched in their kind. 
 There is delicate fancy in such things as the identi- 
 fication of the months of the year with the heroines of 
 romance, delicate pathos in the whole episode of the 
 " maiden-marriage." But it is not for these incidental 
 merits that the poem is to be rightly praised but for 
 the ardour of self-consuming passion that flames 
 through every line of the verse that singing of the 
 love of Tristram and Iseult, sings also of the love of 
 which theirs is but a part. 
 
 Along with the narrative poems was issued a 
 body of lyrical verse but a little less precious. The 
 ode to Athens, which Swinburne himself wished to be 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 SWINBURNE 
 
 taken as the best product of his genius as a lyrical 
 poet of the higher sort, is certainly among the very 
 finest odes in English poetry, worthy of a place 
 between Coleridge's and Shelley's. But the distinc- 
 tive work in this volume is in the two sections which 
 are devoted respectively to the praise of books and of 
 children, and are more exquisitely expressive than 
 any previous or subsequent verse of his of the two 
 main passions, artistic and human, of his later years 
 after his passion for nature. The twenty-one sonnets 
 on Elizabethan dramatists, to which should be added 
 the earlier sonnet on Tourneur, are not all equally 
 fortunate as poems, though it would be hard to choose 
 between them as criticism, but seldom has a poet 
 honoured a predecessor with nobler homage con- 
 veyed through imagery more precisely appropriate or 
 magnificent than in the lines on Ford. 
 
 To pass from these poems to those on children is 
 to enter the heavenliest part of this paradise of poetry. 
 No man has ever done things comparable to Blake's 
 poems on children, but in Blake there is the divine 
 innocence and wonder and joy of infancy, and in such 
 poetry on children as men and women may write no 
 one has matched Swinburne. " A Dark Month," 
 wherein the absence of a child is mourned in thirty- 
 one beautiful lyrics, is doubtless the richest portion of 
 all this treasure of tender and lovely verse. 
 
HIS CAREER 117 
 
 But how shall one choose between " Herse," 
 "A Child's Pity," "A Child's Thanks," "A Child's 
 Battles ? " Yet perhaps for its loving laughter at the 
 adorable absurdity and heavenly breadth of a child's 
 pity the poem of that name may have preference. 
 And yet assuredly " A Child's Laughter " is un- 
 surpassed because unsurpassable. The quality of 
 feeling in these poems is altogether individual, a 
 worshipping love that declares 
 
 If of such be the kingdom of heaven 
 It must be heaven indeed. 
 
 Greater things than any in the second half of the 
 " Tristram " volume Swinburne did before and 
 afterwards, but hardly any over which one lingers 
 with more pleasure than these verses which give us 
 the lover of books and of children in his serenest 
 moods. 
 
 " A Century of Roundels," issued in 1883, consists 
 of a hundred poems in a form of Swinburne's devising 
 which may be regarded as a compromise or cross 
 between that of the rondeau, a tercet between two 
 quintains, and that of the rondel, two quatrains 
 followed by a quintain, the arrangement with Swin- 
 burne being a tercet between two quatrains. In too 
 many of these poems the refrain is ineffective, in 
 some absolutely insignificant ; but the best of them 
 
ii8 SWINBURNE 
 
 are as dexterous in workmanship as delightful in 
 substance. " In Harbour," " A Dead Friend," the 
 flower-pieces doubtless inspired by designs his friend 
 Burne-Jones was then working upon, the dedicatory 
 roundel to Christina Rossetti and a dozen others are 
 things of flawless beauty. A special interest attaches 
 to the tributes to Wagner, in one of which the splendid 
 possibilities of what might seem a form fitted merely 
 for graceful trifling are impressively exhibited. 
 
 There is a more personal interest in the roundel 
 which salutes Catullus — " My brother, my Valerius " 
 — and in the two on Rossetti's version of one of 
 Villon's : 
 
 Ages ago, from the lips of a sad glad poet 
 Whose soul was a wild dove lost in the whirling snow. 
 The soft keen plaint of his pain took voice to show it 
 Ages ago. 
 
 So clear, so deep, the divine drear accents flow. 
 No soul that listens may choose but thrill to know it. 
 Pierced and wrung by the passionate music's throe. 
 
 For us there murmurs a nearer voice below it, 
 Known once of ears that never again shall know. 
 Now mute as the mouth which felt death's wave o'erflow it. 
 Ages ago. 
 
 The variety of effects the form yields Swinburne is 
 wonderful. No verse is more playful than the lightest 
 of these roundels. The initial phrase is whirled round, 
 abandoned for a moment and re-captured in the final 
 
HIS CAREER 119 
 
 circling movement like a leaf in a blithe breeze, and 
 this breeze blows always into pure music. At other 
 times thought revolves sadly back upon itself, and 
 simple poignant things are said so directly as this, on 
 a dead friend : — 
 
 Where we went, we twain, in time foregone 
 Forth by land and sea, and cared not whether, 
 If I go again, I go alone, 
 
 and with such grave beauty as in the elegy on the 
 lover and expounder of Wagner who died just before 
 his master : — 
 
 All heaven rings back, sonorous with regret. 
 The deep dirge of the su:iset : how should one 
 Soft star be missed in all the concourse met ? 
 
 But, O sweet single heart whose work is done, 
 Whose songs are silent, how should I forget 
 That ere the sunset's fiery goal was won 
 A star had set ? 
 
 The poems which give its title to " A Midsummer 
 Holiday," published in 1884, are ballads of exceptional 
 elaboration. They record the impressions of Swin- 
 burne's yearly visits with Mr. Watts-Dunton to the 
 seaside for his favourite exercise of swimming, and 
 contain some admirable sea-poetry, but hardly call 
 for special notice here. The two best, perhaps, are 
 the seventh, which is full of the yearning of the 
 swimmer for the sea, and the last, " On the Verge," 
 
I20 SWINBURNE 
 
 which has a graver mood and music. The rest of 
 the volume is occupied by political verse inspired by 
 the rejection by the House of Lords of the Franchise 
 Bill, verse in praise of children, a fine poem on the 
 Casquet Rocks, the inevitable Ode to Victor Hugo, 
 and some tributes to writers past and contemporary. 
 In this last section there is nothing more charming 
 than the " Ballad of Appeal " to Christina Rossetti, 
 reproaching her for her silence as a p>oet. Mention 
 must be made too of the finely indignant sonnets, " In 
 Seplucretis," evidently referring to the sale of Keats' 
 love-letters, an outrage worse in the case of Keats 
 than it could be in that of any poet fit to be men- 
 tioned with him, for all that was weakest, sickliest 
 and most hysterical in a nature in many ways far 
 from weak or unmanly was revealed in his feverish 
 and pitiful correspondence with Fanny Brawne. But, 
 it is not rhyme, as Swinburne realised, that will scare 
 the ghouls of literature from digging up all of a man 
 of genius that they can appreciate. 
 
 The tragedy of " Marino Faliero," published fn 
 1885, is, with the possible exception of "Mary 
 Stuart," of all Swinburne's dramas the maturest, the 
 one which shows us his dramatic and poetic gifts not 
 indeed at their very highest, but most evenly baJanted. 
 It is not without defects ; the motive of the play is 
 not wholly convincing, and the fourth and fifth acts 
 
HIS CAREER 121 
 
 are dramatic speech rather than drama. But the 
 characterisation is admirable. Marino Faliero, with 
 his lofty severity disturbed by tempestuous anger, is 
 among the proudest figures of drama. For contrast 
 there is his much younger Duchess, standing to him 
 in a half-daughterly relation. And round these two 
 move many clearly seen and vigorously presented 
 characters. Hardly anywhere else in Swinburne is 
 there nobler eloquence than in Faliero's great 
 soliloquy. 
 
 In 1886 Swinburne published two volumes of 
 prose, " A Study of Victor Hugo," which, though full 
 of extravagant eulogy of his master's minor works, 
 contains some of the most illuminating and eloquent 
 criticism of Hugo's greater achievements that has 
 ever been written, and a collection of essays entitled 
 " Miscellanies." The latter volume shows some 
 advance even on the " Essays and Studies " in critical 
 faculty, while it is written for the most part in prose 
 of a more sober kind, perhaps less captivating than 
 that of the earlier book, but certainly more serviceable 
 for his purpose. The longest and most important of 
 the critical essays in the " Miscellanies " are those on 
 "Wordsworth and Byron" and "Tennyson and 
 Musset." In the former, Swinburne examines the 
 astonishing prediction of Matthew Arnold, that at the 
 end of the nineteenth century the two of all its poets 
 
122 SWINBURNE 
 
 who would be ranked highest would be Wordsworth 
 and Byron, and under his angry and searching scrutiny 
 the whole extent of Arnold's preposterous error is 
 revealed. To Byron, Swinburne is here a good deal 
 less than just, but by over-emphasis on his defects 
 rather than lack of appreciation of his merits. That 
 Byron was in many ways an incompetent craftsman, 
 and at all times a careless one, must be evident to 
 every reader with the slightest feeling for form. He 
 had a bad ear and bad taste ; the lyrical cry is not in 
 his lyrics, and a great deal of his blank verse, with its 
 artificial stresses and weak monosyllabic endings, is 
 technically as vile as it could be. But to liken the 
 muse of the man who used ottava rima with such ease 
 and fluency and point as we find in " The Vision of 
 Judgment " and " Don Juan " to "the screaming wry- 
 neck " is unjust. There are not a few other points 
 at which Swinburne's condemnation is too sweeping. 
 But what it concerns us to note is the essential justice 
 of the criticism which give us as the two main truths 
 about Byron the fact that, "setting aside mere 
 instances of passionately cynical burlesque, and per- 
 haps one or two exceptional examples of apparently 
 sincere though vehemently demonstrative personal 
 feeling, we find little really living or really praise- 
 worthy work of Byron's which has not in it some 
 direct or indirect touch of political emotion," and 
 
HIS CAREER 123 
 
 the fact that Byron was " a king by truly divine 
 right " only in " a province outside the proper domain 
 of absolute poetry." Apart from their value as 
 criticism, the pages on Byron must always have a claim 
 to attention as the most terrific piece of invective ever 
 written by one poet on another. They are as full of 
 devastating anger as the succeeding pages on Words- 
 worth are of serene and sympathetic appreciation. 
 Only one better estimate of Wordsworth has been 
 written, Walter Pater's, and that is better only because 
 it is a completer and more patient study, not because 
 it gives us more of the vraie verity about Wordsworth^s 
 special and unique power. For Swinburne it is 
 Wordsworth's "sublimity of tenderness " which is his 
 " crowning quality," but to the marvellous gift, of 
 which Wordsworth was barely conscious and which 
 he could not command, of making verse in diction and 
 rhythm so flawlessly felicitous that at times he seems 
 the greatest master of style that English poetry has 
 known, Swinburne does equal justice. " There is 
 nothing in style, in the highest sense, more Shakes- 
 pearean in Shakespeare than such a turn of expression 
 as ' the engines of her pain, the tools that shaped 
 her sorrow ' : there is nothing outside Aeschylus so 
 Aeschylean as the magnificent and daring accuracy of 
 the single epithet (trampling) which brings before us 
 a whole charge of storming breakers as they crowd 
 
124 SWINBURNE 
 
 and crash upon each other," he writes, and of the 
 magnificent Hne on Chatterton, "The sleepless soul 
 that perished in its pride," he says : — " The unspeak- 
 able greatness of its quality is Wordsworth's alone : 
 and I doubt if it would really be as rash as it might 
 seem to maintain that there is not, and will never be, 
 a greater verse in all the world of song." 
 
 The conjunction of the names of Musset and 
 Tennyson in the essay which bears their names for 
 title is surprising enough. If, as Swinburne asserts, 
 there was ever hot debate of the question of 
 precedence between those poets, records of it have 
 not remained. The just and inevitable comparison 
 is that of Musset with Byron, and it is not the least 
 remarkable point of resemblance between them that 
 the fame of both flourishes better out of their own 
 countries. So profound a scholar and so skilful a 
 writer of French verse as Swinburne cannot have 
 failed to discern those faults of Musset's verse as verse 
 which to his own countrymen are as intolerable as 
 Byron's to English readers, and it can only have been 
 the memory of boyish pleasure in Musset's poetry 
 which makes his critic on the whole so tolerant towards 
 the author of " Rolla " and " Namouna," though he 
 speaks plainly enough of the puling and whining and 
 sneering of the boy poet grown man in nothing but 
 years. " Delicious " a very few of Musset's songs are, 
 
HIS CAREER 125 
 
 but nothing of his best work deserves higher praise. 
 The criticism of Tennyson gave offence in some 
 quarters at the time, and indeed it may still seem to 
 some preposterous that the writer of the first " Poems 
 and Ballads '' should question Tennyson's attitude to- 
 wards women ; but for those who can judge honestly in 
 these matters, is any doubt possible that Swinburne was 
 justified in his strictures on the sham chivalry, veiling 
 egotism and priggish condescension, which disfigures 
 so many of Tennyson's poems ? The pitiful spitefulness 
 of such lovers as he who in " Locksley Hall " heaps 
 curses on the woman whose sole fault is not loving 
 him, the pitiful complacency of the righteous King, 
 forgiving Guinevere with a full sense of his own 
 magnanimity : what can be said of such things but a 
 word of regret that fine workmanship should be 
 lavished on mean subjects ? The " Idylls " are dead 
 and damned, for all their exquisite felicity of phrase, 
 and it was Swinburne more than anyone else who 
 destroyed them. He destroyed also the superstition 
 that Tennyson was in any sort a great thinker. But 
 to the finest part of the Laureate's work he did the 
 most generous justice. " Whatever the early im- 
 perfection of his ear, no man was ever born with a 
 truer and more perfect eye. . . . Many years ago, as 
 I have always remembered, on the appearance of the 
 first four ' Idylls of the King,' one of the greatest 
 
126 SWINBURNE 
 
 painters now living pointed out to me, with a brief 
 word of rapturous admiration, 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 ' . . . 
 
 But he must have learned the more splendid lesson of 
 the terrors and 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.' 
 
 ... It has all the faithful subtlety of Shelley's, and 
 all the heavenly majesty of Milton's." 
 
 Of the other essays, those on Landor, on Emily 
 Bronte, on Charles Reade, all deserve the notice that 
 must here be denied them, but it is impossible to 
 pass over the admirable study of William Collins, 
 originally contributed to Ward's "English Poets," 
 the essay on the poetry of the eighteenth century, and 
 the notes on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and 
 Milton without some attempt to indicate the wealth 
 of fine criticism they contain. The protest against 
 the coupling of the names of Collins and Gray is as 
 just and effective as that in the brief article on the 
 former dramatist against the invincible folly which 
 jumbles together Congreve and Wycherley. It is but 
 
HIS CAREER 127 
 
 the bare truth to say that " as an elegiac poet, Gray 
 holds for all ages to come his unassailable and 
 sovereign station ; as a lyric poet, he is simply un- 
 worthy to sit at the feet of Collins," and I do not 
 know anything in the very few really discerning 
 criticisms of Collins by other writers which approaches 
 for insight and justice and felicity these few words : — 
 " Poetry was his by birthright : to the very ablest of his 
 compeers it was never more than a christening gift. . . 
 His range of flight was perhaps the narrowest but 
 assuredly the highest of his generation. He could 
 not be taught singing like a finch : but he struck 
 straight upward for the sun like a lark. Again, he 
 had an incomparable and infallible eye for landscape ; 
 a purity, fidelity and simple-seeming subtlety of tone, 
 unapproached until the more fiery, but not more 
 luminous advent of Burns. Among all English poets 
 he has, it seems to me, the closest affinity to our great 
 contemporary school of French landscape painters. 
 Corot on canvas might have signed his ' Ode to 
 Evening' ; Millet might have given us some of his 
 graver studies, and left them as he did no whit the 
 less sweet for their softly austere and simply tender 
 gravity." And of the immediate predecessors and 
 the contemporaries of Collins there is much acute 
 criticism in " A Century of English Poetry," with its 
 excellent estimates of Dryden, classified here with 
 
128 SWINBURNE 
 
 the latter of the two classes into which Swinburne 
 divided poets, the Gods and the Giants, and of Pope, 
 with its splendid praise of what is not always warmly 
 enough i-ecognised in the cleverest prose writer who 
 worked in verse, his "indomitable force of heroic 
 spirit" in the "good fight of sense against folly." 
 From the notes with which the book opens I can 
 make room for but one quotation, which shall be 
 such as to exhibit Swinburne's grasp of the larger 
 significance of writers as types as well as of their 
 peculiar qualities : — " It is a notable dispensation of 
 chance . . . that the three great typical poets of the 
 three great representative nations of Europe during 
 the dark and lurid lapse of the Middle Ages should 
 each afford as complete and profound a type of a 
 different and alien class, as of a different and alien 
 people. . . . Dante represents, at its best and highest, 
 the upper class of the dark ages not less than he 
 represents their Italy ; Chaucer represents their 
 middle class at its best and wisest not less than he 
 represents their England ; Villon represents their 
 lower class at its worst and best alike, even more 
 than he represents their France." Note the des- 
 cription of Chaucer as " in the main a French or 
 Italian poet, lined and thoroughly warmed with the 
 Substance of an English humourist," correcting any- 
 thing that may be misleading in the assertion that he 
 
HIS CAREER 129 
 
 is representatively English ; note, too, the remark that 
 Villon is the first of the modern and the last of the 
 mediaeval poets : but if one begins to point out what 
 is noteworthy in this book there will be no end to a 
 task which must now reluctantly be abandoned. 
 
 It was perhaps unfortunate that the volume of 
 verse which Swinburne published in 1889 should have 
 been entitled " Poems and Ballads," third series, for 
 it thus challenges a comparison with the first two 
 series which it cannot altogether sustain. Not only 
 is there no single piece in the later book which equals 
 the very greatest of the poems in its two predecessors, 
 but the general level is somewhat lower. Neverthe- 
 less, it contains a great deal of very beautiful and 
 powerful poetry, and has had a good deal less than 
 justice in most studies of Swinburne's work. The 
 most ambitious poem in the book is " The Armada," 
 for which, however, the present writer must confess 
 himself unable to feel any special enthusiasm. There 
 are splendid things in it ; the exultant verse is 
 sometimes full of the very spirit and soul of the 
 stormy waters that whelmed the Spanish fleet ; but 
 there is too little of the heroic sea-fight, too much 
 of vituperative eloquence directed against Roman 
 Catholicism ; and if you will contrast it with such 
 simpler things as Campbell's great and imperfect 
 battle-piece, and Tennyson's " Revenge," its vagueness 
 
 K 
 
i^o SWINBURNE 
 
 and diffuseness will become rather painfully evident. 
 But there is nothing in the whole range of English 
 patriotic poetry that surpasses in temper or style the 
 noble verses written for the jubilee and entitled 
 " The Commonweal." The solemn passion of its 
 patriotism, haughty and unboasting and confident, 
 is not more praiseworthy than the unvexed beauty 
 and unfailing dignity of its firm and severe style. 
 The promise of peace with which the reign of Victoria 
 opened, and which was so speedily falsified is recalled 
 in verse such as this — 
 
 Love armed with knowledge, winged and wise. 
 Should hush the wind of war, and see, 
 They said, the sun of days to be 
 
 Bring round beneath serener skies 
 A stormless jubilee . . . 
 
 War upon war, change after change. 
 
 Hath shaken thrones and towers to dust, 
 And hopes austere and faiths august 
 
 Have watched in patience stern and strange 
 Men's works unjust and just. 
 
 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. 
 
 And then the poem passes into such stately and 
 heroical eulogy of England as has been heard only 
 once before, from Wordsworth's lips. 
 
HIS CAREER 13 f 
 
 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 . i . 
 
 She, first to love the light, and daughter 
 Incarnated of the northern dawn. 
 She, round whose feet the wild waves fawn 
 
 When all their wrath of warring water 
 Sounds like a babe's breath drawn, 
 
 How should not she best know, love best, 
 And best of all souls understand 
 J The very soul of freedom, scanned 
 
 Far off, sought out in darkling quest 
 By men at heart unmanned ? . . . 
 
 From light to light her eyes imperial 
 Turn, and require the further light, 
 More perfect than the sun's in sight, 
 
 Till star and sun seem all funereal 
 Lamps of the vaulted night. 
 
 She gazes till the strenuous soul 
 
 Within the rapture of her eyes 
 
 Creates or bids awake, arise. 
 The light she looks for ; pure and whole, 
 
 And worshipped of the wise. 
 
 Such sons are hers, such radiant hands 
 Have borne abroad her lamp of old. 
 Such months of honey-dropping gold 
 
 Have sent across all seas and lands 
 Her fame as music rolled . . , 
 
 That there is no excellent thing, however obscured 
 by folly or soiled by ill usage or staled by custom, 
 
 K 2 
 
132 SWINBURNE 
 
 wliich poetry cannot restore and reilluminate it is our 
 delight to believe, but rarely has there been seen so 
 triumphant an instance of this power of poetry as in 
 the glorious verse which turns the most battered clichi 
 of hack writers to this :— 
 
 Time, a wandering cloud, 
 Is sunshine on thy sea. 
 
 The elegy on Inchbold, the painter, is among 
 the very finest things in the book and not far from 
 being the finest of all Swinburne's work in that kind, 
 always excepting the incomparable verses on 
 Baudelaire, and there is charm and grace and some- 
 thing which makes the verses live in the memory as 
 much of Swinburne's most charming and graceful 
 verse does not in the lines " To a Sea-mew " — 
 
 When I had wings, my brother. 
 Such wings were mine as thine — 
 
 and " Neaptide " deserves a high place among his sea- 
 studies for its evocation of sad, dim seascape, ebbing 
 waters and fading light. 
 
 But it is time to turn to the poems which are the 
 special distinction of this volume. The ballads in 
 border dialect in the first series of "Poems and 
 Ballads " are of little importance ; with perhaps one ex- 
 ception, they might be excised without affecting in the 
 ' 1st the value of that book. It is far otherwise here, 
 
HIS CAREER 133 
 
 and it is surely among the most remarkable instances 
 of a poet finding n6w inspiration in late life that 
 Swinburne should have developed in his fiftieth year 
 the power of vivid, simple, concentrated ballad writing 
 that we find in these poems. There is strength in 
 the dreadful "Witch-Mother," and in "The Bride's 
 Tragedy," one of the very few pieces in which 
 Swinburne has really mastered the secret of the 
 refrain as Rossetti did ; but it is rather the poems in 
 which he has displayed a depth of simple pathos very 
 unusual in his work that claim special attention. The 
 quiet regrets and touching nostalgia of " A Jacobite's 
 Exile," inspired by his own family history, are not 
 beyond the reach of some lesser poets, but hardly 
 shall we find anything in ballad writing for direct and 
 concentrated pathos to match "A Jacobite's Fare- 
 well." 
 
 But there remains a yet greater thing, the most 
 human and moving verses that Swinburne ever wrote, 
 " The Tyneside Widow." I know only one other 
 poem of such penetrating pathos, Wordsworth's 
 " Affliction of Margaret," and that, like so many of 
 Wordsworth's successes, is contrary to his theory of 
 simplicity, while here the means are of the simplest, 
 for there is not a word that might not come from the 
 lips of any Tyneside fisherwoman, not an image that 
 exists for merely " literary " purposes. Commentary 
 
134 SWINBURNE 
 
 may well seem impertinent, as it would certainly be 
 inadequate, and fragmentary (pfctation cannot convey 
 any idea of the growing and deepening passion of 
 grief to which all the happiness of the world is pain. 
 
 The two plays of "Locrine," J 887, and "The 
 Sisters," are experiments. In the former the 
 experiment is absolutely successful ; the play, written 
 in a great variety of rhymed measures, the heroic 
 couplet, terza rima, ottava rima and others, possibly 
 after the model of the unimportant Elizabethan 
 tragedy of " Selimus," and on the story of another 
 Elizabethan play, is rich in delightful poetry and 
 contains some of the most beautiful speeches in 
 Swinburne's dramatic work. " The Sisters " seems to 
 me a total failure. That Swinburne, who so cordially 
 detested the realistic school, should have attenlpted 
 realism in poetic drama is inexplicable. The theory of 
 realism is that the ideas and emotions of people must 
 always be given as nearly as possible in such words as 
 they would actually have used. Now, it is arguable 
 that in the prose drama, even at its best in Ibsen, 
 whom Swinburne disliked, the search for realism is a 
 mistake, for most people are dumb or say inexpressive 
 tilings in the moments when they make a fatal 
 decision or thrill to a great passion or challenge 
 destiny or bow to it, and to give us merely their 
 dumbness or their inexpressive chatter or inarticulate 
 
HIS CAREER 135 
 
 outcry is to leave unsaid precisely those profound 
 things which it is the business of the dramatist to say 
 if we are to know his characters in any real sense. 
 But when we come to the poetic drama there is no 
 longer anything to argue about. The mere fact of 
 using verse has made realism impossible, and the 
 attempt to be realistic is now not only mistaken but 
 futile in a way that in prose drama it is not. The 
 greatest drama has always been, will always be 
 written in verse, because verse speaks the more 
 intimate language of the soul. Well, is it not doubly 
 an error to sacrifice the privilege of verse in the quest 
 for an immediate illusion of reality, while retaining 
 the form of verse, which makes any approach to that 
 illusion impossible .' To say this is not to deny 
 Swinburne's play, in which early nineteenth centuiy 
 personages talk slang, the interest of a curious 
 experiment ; but " The Sisters " is nothing more than 
 that. 
 
 In his next play, " Rosamund, Queen of the 
 Lombards," 1899, based on a story in Gibbon, Swin- 
 burne was much more successful. It is of all hiS 
 dramatic work the severest in style and the one in 
 which he has most resolutely concentrated his effort 
 on properly dramatic effect. Whether the loss of 
 much of the splendour and luxuriance of poetry one 
 expects from him is adequately compensated by what 
 
136 SWINBURNE 
 
 is thus gained is, however, doubtful. It is certain 
 that in his last play, " The Duke of Gandia," the loss 
 is much greater than the gain, and the blank verse in 
 this case is for the most part marred by a perverse 
 asceticism amounting at times to an almost complete 
 sacrifice of that rhythmical beauty of which he was 
 whenever he chose so great a master. 
 
 The "Study of Ben Jonson," which appeared in 
 1889, is on the whole the best estimate of his work 
 that we have. To all that is said of Jonson as a poet 
 and almost all that is said of him as a dramatist we 
 may well bow ; but the eulogy of Jonson's prose is 
 surely very extravagant. Certainly, as a kind of link 
 between Bacon and Dryden in the evolution of 
 English prose the " Discoveries " have their historical 
 importance, and Ben Jonson's achievement of an 
 almost Latin conciseness and solidity without violence 
 to the nature of English prose is worthy of honour ; 
 but the coupling of him with Landor, with a hint 
 that few things in any third writer surpass his best 
 passages, leaves one reader at least stupefied. Is 
 there anywhere in the "Discoveries" a pjissage 
 comparable in the higher qualities of imaginative 
 prose with even the second best of Donne or the third 
 best of Sir Thomas Browne ? 
 
 Swinburne's next volume of miscellaneous lyrical 
 work, "Astrophel and other Poems," 1894, contains, 
 
HIS CAREER 137 
 
 besides the verses in honour of Sidney which give 
 the book its main title, a number of elegies on friends 
 and brother poets and many nature poems. Of the 
 elegies the finest, perhaps, is that on William Bell 
 Scott, but there are admirable things also in the 
 poems on Sir Richard Burton and the sonnets on 
 Browning's death, and the many pieces that lament 
 Phillip Bourke Marston — "O my friend, O brother, 
 a glory veiled and marred " — have a touching beauty 
 rather unusual in Swinburne. This section of the 
 book is summed up in " Epicede." 
 
 Among the nature poems, full of delight in the 
 sea, there are many which repeat the achievement of 
 earlier years with but little variation and no advance, 
 but the superb verses entitled " A Nympholept " must 
 be set apart as not only by far the greatest in the book 
 but among the very greatest in all Swinburne's work. 
 His nature poetry is all simple at root and renders, 
 through whatever conventions and with whatever 
 complexity and involution, a passion and a vision 
 that are primitive, and nowhere has this primordial 
 feeling for nature been so evident as here. In its 
 marvellous evocation of the oppression of noon in the 
 forest under "the fearful charm of the strong sun's 
 imminent might," it satisfies as no other verse has 
 done Mallarme's requirement that in writing of the 
 forest the poet should give us not the dense intrinsic 
 
138 SWINBURNE 
 
 woods of the trees but only the silent thunder afloat 
 in the leaves. Noon broods over the woodland, the 
 silence is heavy with some momentous and in- 
 communicable secret, and the spirit is aware of the 
 immanence of the god and strung tense with ex- 
 pectancy till it thrills with rapture and trembles with 
 terror as in the dusk of the pine-woods there looms 
 and lightens the terrible and radiant vision that may 
 bless or destroy. 
 
 The naked noon is upon me ; the fierce dumb spell, 
 The fearful charm of the strong sun's imminent might. 
 
 Unmerciful, steadfast, deeper than the seas that swell, 
 Pervades, invades, appals me with loveless light. 
 With harsher awe than breathes in the breath of night. 
 
 Have mercy, God, who art all ! For I know thee well, 
 
 How sharp is thine eye to lighten, thine hand to smite. . . . 
 
 What light, what shadow, diviner than dawn or night, 
 
 Draws near, makes pause, and again, or I dream, draws 
 near? 
 
 More soft than shadow, more strong than the strong sun's light, 
 More pure than moonbeams — yea, but the rays run sheer 
 As fire from the sun through the dusk of the pine- wood clear 
 
 And constant ; yea, but the shadow itself is bright 
 
 That the light clothes round with love that is one with fear. 
 
 Above and behind it the noon and the woodland lie, 
 
 Terrible, radiant with mystery, superb and subdued. 
 Triumphant in silence ; and hardly the sacred sky 
 
 Seems free from the tyrannous weight of the dumb fierce 
 mood 
 
 Which rules as with fire and invasion of beams that brood 
 The breathless rapture of earth till its hour pass by 
 
 And leave her spirit released and her peace renewed. 
 
HIS CAREER 139 
 
 I sleep not : never in sleep has a man beholden 
 
 This. From the shadow that trembles and yearns with light 
 Suppressed and elate and reluctant— obscure and golden 
 
 As water kindled with presage of dawn or night — 
 
 A face, a form, a wonder to sense and sight, 
 Grows great as the moon through the month : and her eyes 
 embolden 
 
 Fear, till it change to desire, and desire to delight 
 
 I lean my face to the heather, and drink the sun 
 
 Whose flame-lit odour satiates the flowers ; mine eyes 
 Close, and the goal of delight and of life is one : 
 
 No more I crave of earth or her kindred skies. 
 
 No more ? But the joy that springs from them smiles and 
 flies : 
 The sweet work wrought of them surely, tb e good work done, 
 
 If the mind and the face of the season be loveless, dies. 
 
 Thee, therefore, thee would I come to, cleave to, cling, 
 If haply thy heart be kind and thy gifts be good. 
 
 Unknown sweet spirit, whose vesture is soft in spring 
 In summer splendid, in autumn pale as the wood 
 That shudders and wanes and shrinks as a shamed thing 
 should, 
 
 In winter bright as the mail of a war-worn king 
 Who stands where foes fled far from the face of him stood. 
 
 My spirit or thine is it, breath of thy life or of mine. 
 
 Which fills my sense with a rapture that casts out fear ? 
 Pan's dim frown wanes, and his wild eyes brighten as thine. 
 
 Transformed as night or as day by the kindling year. 
 
 Earth-born, or mine eyes were withered that sees, mine ear 
 That hears were stricken to death by the sense divine. 
 
 Earth-born I know thee : but heaven is about me here. 
 
 The terror that whispers in darkness and flames in light 
 The doubt that speaks in the silence of earth and sea. 
 The sense more fearful at noon than in the midmost night. 
 
140 SWINBURNE 
 
 Of wrath scarce hushed and of imminent ill to be, 
 What are they ? Heaven is as earth, and as heaven to me 
 Earth : for the shadows that sundered them here take flight ; 
 And naught is all, as am I, but a dream of thee. 
 
 Before taking leave of the book a word must be 
 spared for " England an Ode," for two slighter poems, 
 the graceful verses "To a Cat'' and the charming 
 " Old Saying," and for the weird " Ballad of Dead- 
 man's Bay." 
 
 The " Studies in Prose and Verse," published in 
 1894, is a slighter book than the two previous 
 volumes of critical essays, and the excessive attention 
 given in it to the minor works of Hugo may be re- 
 sented by a reader who has already had something 
 too much of Swinburne on Hugo. It contains, how- 
 ever, the very interesting review of Messrs. Locker 
 Lampson's and Coulson Kernahan's " Lyra Eleganta- 
 rium," notable for a few precious words on Rochester, 
 for the just eulogy of the greatest and grimmest of 
 English songs to the tune of " eat, drink and be 
 merry, for to-morrow we die," and for many 
 acute criticisms of things more familiar. The book 
 contains, too, brief and admirable essays on Webster 
 and Herrick, the agreeable reminiscences of Jowett, 
 the ingenious if rather heavy parody of Baconian 
 follies which proves " In Memoriam " to be the work 
 of Darwin. The most memorable critical passage in 
 
HIS CAREER 141 
 
 the book is that in which, after reviewing the revolts 
 of the Cowleys and Tuppers, Emersons and Whitmans 
 against the laws of art, he vindicates those laws : — 
 " 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 workmen 
 in any other more or less plastic material) who can 
 understand, accept, embrace and rejoice in the rules 
 and conditions of their art : content in the recognition 
 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." But there is also a very beautiful passage 
 of description inspired by memories of a visit to 
 the Lac de Gaube, in the papers on Hugo. 
 
 " The Tale of Balen," published in 1896, is far more 
 successful as a narrative poem than "Tristram of 
 Lyonesse." If the splendour and ardour of the 
 earlier poem are lacking, the lyrical impulse here aids 
 instead of distracting the poet. The story moves 
 unfalteringly, not through a luxuriant tangle where 
 "still more labyrinthine buds the rose," but straight 
 down woodland ways, with many glimpses of wild 
 landscape, to the tragic meeting-place where brother 
 slays brother. The metrical form of this poem seems 
 
142 SWINBURNE 
 
 to me one of Swinburne's happiest discoveries or 
 adaptations. It resembles that of Tennyson's " Lady 
 of Shallot " with a shortened last line, and it is one 
 of the many unending delights which Swinburne's 
 prosody affords to note in verse after verse how the 
 flow and rise of the initial quatrain and the ebb of the 
 succeeding tercet with the fall in the shortened ninth 
 line render the buoyant aspiration and underlying 
 sense of doom which are the dominant moods of the 
 poem. 
 
 As the east wind, when the morning's breast 
 Gleams like a bird's that leaves the nest, 
 A fledgling halcyon's bound on quest, 
 Drives wave on wave on wave to west 
 
 Till all the sea be life and light, 
 So time's mute breath, that brings to bloom 
 All flowers that strew the dead spring's tomb. 
 Drives day on day on day to doom 
 
 Till all man's day be night. 
 
 There are exquisite vistas of bright landscape. 
 But always there is the hint of impending tragedy, 
 and it is this undernote of doom and the keen feeling 
 for natural beauty that make the poem something 
 much greater than the fresh and vigorous narrative 
 that it would otherwise have been. 
 
 The poem which gives its title to "A Channel 
 Passage and other Poems," published in 1904, recalls 
 the impression made on Swinburne fifty years before 
 
HIS CAREER 143 
 
 by the storm encountered on his first journey as a boy 
 to France. It has in full measure the characteristic 
 merits and in over-full measure the characteristic 
 defects of the more elaborate of his nature poems. 
 There are lines and passages which render with 
 wonderful power and beauty the troubled splendour 
 of sea and sky, but as a whole the poem suffers from 
 diffuseness and vagueness. The piece that really 
 deserves foremost place is " The Altar of Righteous- 
 ness." From the first the idea of the passing of the 
 Gods had possessed Swinburne. It is in the '' Hymn 
 to Proserpine," where the mourner for the old 
 divinities prophesies the evanescence of their suc- 
 cessors ; it is set forth in " Hertha " in splendid 
 imagery ; and here is the final statement, in the 
 contrast between the ephemeral domination of 
 religious and the eternal endurance of the rule of 
 righteousness. 
 
 On the stone that the close-drawn cloud which veils it awhile 
 
 makes cloudlike stands 
 The word of the truth everlasting, unspoken of tongues and 
 
 unwritten of hands ... 
 The faces of Gods on the face of it carven, or gleaming behind 
 
 or above, 
 Star-glorified Uranus, thunderous Jehovah, for terror or worship 
 
 or love. 
 Change, wither and brighteii as flowers that the wind of 
 
 eternity sheds upon time, 
 All radiant and transient and awful and mortal, and leave it 
 
 unmarred and sublime, 
 
144 SWINBURNE 
 
 As the tides that return and recede are the fears and the hopes 
 
 of the centuries that roll, 
 Requenched and rekindled ; but strong as the sun is the sense 
 
 of it shrined in the soul. 
 
 There is freshness in the poems which celebrate the 
 coming of spring, and " The Lake of Gaube " has 
 special interest as affording an opportunity for 
 comparison between verse and prose treatment of the 
 same subject — comparison which may well leave us 
 doubting which is the more beautiful. Among the 
 political poems are included several of a much earlier 
 date, written during the first Irish Home Rule 
 agitation but for some reason excluded from the 
 third series of " Poems and Ballads " and " Astrophel." 
 Bitter as these are, there exists still more vehement 
 and caustic criticism of the promoters of disunion in 
 Swinburne's unprinted prose, for example in a letter 
 to Mrs. Lynn Linton which was not long ago offered 
 me by a London bookseller. The attack on Glad- 
 stone has become famous : 
 
 . . . the lust of life, the thirst for work and days with work to 
 
 do in. 
 Drove and drives him down the road of splendid shame, 
 
 and the mordant irony of certain passages in " The 
 Question" has been appreciated in quarters where 
 literary approval has to overcome political prejudice. 
 There is a larger utterance in the fine " Word for tiie 
 
HIS CAREER 145 
 
 Navy." With this must be read the two poems in 
 honour of Nelson. Beautiful homage is paid in " A 
 New Year's Day " to Christina Rossetti. But apart 
 from all these are the two poems on his mother's 
 birthday and her death, poems of such utter purity 
 of feeling and perfection of style that criticism would 
 be impertinent. There is something of the same 
 quality of tenderness in the lines " To a Baby 
 Kinswoman." And so we pass to those poems 
 which do honour to writers of the past. Of these 
 the ode on Burns seems to me the finest both as 
 criticism and as verse. For Swinburne, Burns is 
 greatest not as the singer but as the passionate 
 humorist. 
 
 But love and wine were moon and sun 
 For many a fame long since undone, 
 And sorrow and joy have lost and won 
 
 By stormy turns 
 As many a singer's soul, if none 
 
 More bright than Burns, 
 
 And sweeter far in grief and mirth 
 Have songs as glad and sad of birth 
 Found voice to speak or wealth or dearth 
 
 In joy of life : 
 But never song took fire from earth 
 
 More strong for strife . . . 
 
 Above the storms of praise and blame 
 That blur with mist his lustrous name, 
 
 L 
 
1.46 SWINBURNE 
 
 His thunderous laughter went and came, 
 
 And lives and flies ; 
 The roar that follows on the flame 
 
 When lightning dies. 
 
 Earth, and the snow-dimmed heights of air, 
 
 And water winding soft and fair 
 
 Through still sweet places, bright and bare, 
 
 By bent and byre, 
 Taught him what hearts within them were : 
 
 But his was fire. 
 
 The prologues for Elizabethan plays which bring 
 the book to its conclusion are without exception 
 admirable as criticism, but as poems they seem to the 
 present writer to fall short of absolute success. 
 Nevertheless, with the sonnets on the dramatists in 
 the second series of " Poems and Ballads," they make 
 up by far the most eloquent tribute ever rendered to 
 the old masters by any successor. It is appropriate 
 that the last volume of poems by Swinburne should 
 close with noble praise of the dramatists to the study 
 of whom his life was devoted, and not less appropriate 
 that by way of epilogue there should be appended to 
 the book the dedicatory verses to the memory of the 
 two chief friends of his early manhood, Burne-Jones 
 and William Morris : 
 
 No sweeter, no kindlier, no fairer, 
 
 No loveher a soul from its birth 
 Wore ever a brighter and rarer 
 
 Life's raiment for life upon earth 
 
HIS CAREER 147 
 
 Than his who enkindled and cherished 
 
 Art's vestal and luminous flame, 
 That dies not when kingdoms have perished 
 
 In storm or in shame. 
 
 No braver, no trustier, no purer, 
 
 No stronger and clearer a soul 
 Bore witness more splendid and surer 
 
 For manhood found perfect and whole 
 Since man was a warrior and dreamer 
 
 Than his who in hatred of wrong 
 Would fain have arisen a redeemer 
 
 By sword or by song. 
 
 In 1905 he reissued, with the title "Love's Cross- 
 currents," and in a considerably altered form, the 
 novel he had published under a pseudonym in the 
 Tatler in 1877 as "A Year's Letters." This book 
 revealed a power of keen and dose analysis of 
 character and motive and a subtlety and pungency of 
 ironical humour which few can have suspected. By 
 the testimony ol all who knew him well, Swinburne 
 was possessed of a mischievous humour and of a 
 brilliant wit in conversation, but it is only in this 
 novel, of all his writings, that much of his humour and 
 wit can be found. The " Heptalogia " exhibits both, 
 but only in parody. The criticism abounds in irony, 
 but it is usually both too obvious and too elaborate. 
 Here, in " Love's Cross-Currents," the irony is subtle, 
 the touch light. The difficulty of the form of narrative 
 in letters is admirably overcome, and there is delightful 
 
 L 2 
 
14-8 SWINBURNE 
 
 comedy in the presentation of the different points of 
 view. 
 
 The last of his prose writings were appropriately 
 the final additions to the series of criticisms on the 
 dramatists of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. 
 No critic has done more for a particular period or a 
 particular form than Swinburne for the " Age of 
 Shakespeare " and the drama of that age. So great 
 and precious is the treasure of his criticism indeed 
 that even two such books as the " Age of Shakespeare," 
 1908, and the essay on " Shakespeare," written in 
 1905 and published in 1909, are not specially 
 conspicuous in it. The latter is, of course, no more 
 than a rapid survey of Shakespeare's work broadly 
 considered ; it does not aim at adding anything to 
 the earlier " Study of Shakespeare." The former, 
 however, is at many points very valuably supple- 
 mentary to the criticisms in preceding volumes. 
 
 The end was now clpse. For over twenty years 
 Swinburne's life had been almost unvexed by outward 
 events. Withdrawn altogether from society, enjoying 
 the daily companionship of his friend of friends, 
 absorbed in the unflagging activity of creation and 
 criticism, he had lived through these years with more 
 serenity than could have been expected from one of 
 his temperament. His fame had not increased, and it 
 may even have seemed that his hold on public attention 
 
HIS CAREER 149 
 
 had weakened. Though every work of his was 
 received with general respect, it had become customary 
 to temper rather perfunctory eulogy with stock phrases 
 suggesting that his inspiration was spent, though the 
 impulse to sing and the marvellous technique remained. 
 It is significant that apart from reviews of his successive 
 books there were very few criticisms of him in the 
 periodicals of the time. The truth was, of course, 
 that Swinburne was not a contemporary in any real 
 sense, for he belonged, as I have pointed out already 
 and shall again, to a generation that had done most 
 of its best work when he was still a new writer. 
 Other movements were in progress, and the temper 
 of the age had changed. To him all this mattered 
 nothing. 
 
 In 1909 he celebrated his seventy-second birthday. 
 It found him still in physical as well as mental vigour. 
 A day or two afterwards, however, he was struck 
 down with influenza and pneumonia, and at ten 
 o'clock on the morning of Saturday the loth April he 
 died at The Pines, Putney, his home for thirty years. 
 Mr. Watts-Dunton was himself ill at the time and was 
 unable to minister to his friend. 
 
 The news of Swinburne's death evoked notices in 
 the Press inspired by a sense of his greatness which 
 can hardly have been expected to be so general as it 
 proved, but for the most part it was wondering homage 
 
I50 SWINBURNE 
 
 from a generation alien in its habits of mind. His 
 own age spoke only in the voice of Meredith, stunned 
 by the loss — " a part of our life torn away." In what 
 was his last letter, Meredith wrote to Mr. Watts- 
 Dunton words of incredulity at the extinction of that 
 so vital energy, and of praise of the genius of 
 "the greatest of our lyrical poets — of the world's, 
 I could say, considering what a language he had to 
 wield." 
 
 On the 15th April the poet was buried amongst 
 his family at Bonchurch. Tennyson's son and the 
 daughter of William Morris were there to do him 
 honour ; on the coffin was a laurel wreath from Mr. 
 Watts-Dunton ; among the flowers were some from 
 children who were accustomed to meet him during the 
 long daily walk of later years across Putney and 
 Wimbledon. His isolation was made evident by the 
 absence of all the leading men of letters of the day 
 and of any formal national recognition. The country 
 for which he had written "The Commonweal," the 
 people whose speech he had fashioned into such 
 music as had never before been heard, gave no public 
 sign. But all was as it should be when for the last 
 time he traversed " the sacred places of the sea," to 
 his final home among his own, amid scenes that " On 
 the Cliffs " and " A Forsaken Garden " have made 
 enchanted places to the imagination. By his known 
 
HIS CAREER 151 
 
 desire, there was no religious ceremony ; but the 
 Rector of St. Boniface received the coffin with all 
 reverence and delivered a short and simple address in 
 praise of the dead poet as " a creative genius of the 
 first order," and one of "the most lovable of great 
 men." 
 
152 SWINBURNE 
 
 II 
 
 PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 Few men of genius have exhibited more clearly and 
 surprisingly in their personal appearance the measure 
 of their difference from the mass of their fellows 
 than Swinburne did. The physical characteristics even 
 ofVerlaine were hardly more remarkable. He was 
 short of stature and slightly built, the impression of 
 slimness being accentuated by the marked slope of 
 the shoulders, but there was astonishing vigour in 
 that slender body ; his carriage was upright even to 
 excess, his movements rapid, and his lightness and 
 springiness of step even in later years always caught 
 the attention of observers. The head was very large, 
 and about it floated and flashed an aureole of lux- 
 uriant reddish-gold hair of which Swinburne was 
 naively proud. ) When W. B. Scott, in dedicating a 
 volume of verse to Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne, 
 referred to him as 
 
 " the youngest, with the rainbow wrought 
 About his head, a symbol and a dower," 
 
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 153 
 
 Swinburne, although unwell at the time the book 
 reached him, hastened to Scott's house, and on arrival 
 burst out : — "Tell me now, mon cher, tell me exactly 
 what you alluded to as the rainbow wrought about 
 my head." " Well," said Scott, " you know you are 
 hailing in the new time hopefully ; you are assisting 
 at the advent of the brighter day ; you are writing 
 ' Songs Before Sunrise.' " "Ah, is that all .' " was 
 Swinburne's dejected inquiry. " I was in hopes you 
 meant the glory of my hair, which used to be so 
 wonderful, you know." The only person in the Pre- 
 Raphaelite set who could rival Swinburne in beauty 
 and luxuriance of chevelure was Eleanor Siddal 
 Rossetti, and there is a pleasant story of how, when 
 the Rossettis and Swinburne were at a theatre one 
 night, a boy coming round with programmes shrank 
 away from Mrs. Rossetti only to find himself con- 
 fronted by Swinburne, and retreated speedily, ejacu- 
 lating, "There's another of them !" J Swinburne's 
 forehead was immense and seemed even larger than 
 it was, because the under-face narrowed markedly. 
 The features were aquiline ; the eyes, deep set and 
 of an unusual colour that seemed to vary from 
 blue to green, gazed out fixedly and as if beyond the 
 object of their immediate regard ; the mouth was 
 exquisitely sensitive. 
 AThere are admirable portraits of Swinburne by 
 
154 SWINBURNE 
 
 Rossetti and Watts, a displeasing but rather remark- 
 able portrait done in the early 'sixties by W. B. Scott, 
 at least one etching by Whistler which deserves 
 mention, and he appears in other pictures, for instance 
 as one of the shepherds in the triptych done by 
 Burne-Jones for St. Paul's, Brighton. Apart from 
 these there is an astonishingly accurate portrait by 
 anticipation of the young Swinburne in the National 
 Gallery, the head of Galeazzo Malatesta in the picture 
 of the battle of Sant' Egidio by Ucello. If art had 
 anticipated him, nature nearly reproduced him in the 
 person of JVI. Paderewski. The resemblance between 
 the musician in youth and the poet as he had 
 been at the same age amazed Burne-Jones, when 
 M. Paderewski sat to him for the beautiful and 
 familiar drawing. " He looks so like Swinburne 
 looked at twenty," Burne-Jones wrote in 1890, "that 
 I could cry over past things, and has his ways too — 
 the pretty ways of him — courteous little tricks and 
 low bows and a hand that clings in shaking hands." 
 
 /it is Burne-Jones who has summed up most 
 vividly Swinburne's appearance and the impression 
 he made in early years : — " His sensitive face, his 
 eager eyes, his peculiar nervous excitability, the 
 flame-like beauty of his wavy mass of hair, his swift 
 speech and extraordinary swiftness of thought and 
 apprehension, and a certain delightful inconsequence 
 
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 155 
 
 all his own, made him quite the most remarkable, 
 ceitainly the most poetic personality I have ever 
 known." There is a portrait of him in words by 
 Lady Burne-Jones, referring to a rather later period : 
 — "His appearance was very unusual and in some 
 ways beautiful, for his hair was glorious in abundance 
 and colour and his eyes indescribably fine. When 
 repeating poetry he had a perfectly natural way of 
 lifting them in a rapt, unconscious gaze, and their 
 clear green colour softened by thick brown eyelashes 
 was unforgettable : ' looks commercing with the skies ' 
 expresses it without exaggeration. He was restless 
 beyond words, scarcely standing still at all and almost 
 dancing as he walked, while even in sitting he moved 
 continually, seeming to keep time, by a swift move- 
 ment of the hands at the wrists, and sometimes of 
 the feet also, with some inner rhythm of excitement." 
 Still later, by about eight years, is the very 
 brilliant sketch by Guy de Maupassant, in which, 
 however, what was most unusual in a sufficiently 
 strange personality is exaggerated : — " Le front etait 
 tr^s grand sous des cheveux longs, et la figure allait 
 se retrecissant vers un menton mince ombre d'une 
 maigre touffe de barbe. Une tr^s leg^re moustache 
 glissait sur des l^vres extraordinairement fines et 
 serrees, et le cou, qui semblait sans fin, unissait cette 
 t^te, vivante par les yeux clairs chercheurs et fixes, a 
 
IS6 SWINBURNE 
 
 un corps sans 6paules, car le haut de la poitrine 
 paraissait k peine plus large que le front. Tout ce 
 personnage presque surnaturel etait agite de secousses 
 nerveuses. II fut tr^s cordial, tres accueillant ; et le 
 charme extraordinaire de son intelligence me seduisit 
 aussitot." 
 
 The extreme nervous excitability to which 
 reference is made in each of these personal impressions 
 was the characteristic that most struck all who met 
 himJj''No one can ever have been more responsive to 
 the stimulus of literature, art, nature, life, or have 
 lived more intensely with the whole of his mind and 
 his nerves. His vitality was at times almost pain- 
 fully vivid, and it was, as such electrical energy 
 always must be, first of all physical. Except for a 
 short period about 1878-79, he was well into later 
 life practically exempt from all the minor ailments 
 which harass most people. Of physical fatigue for 
 the greater part of his life he seemed to know as 
 little as of mental weariness. The popular impression 
 of him as for ever at the highest pitch of emotional 
 exaltation is indeed exaggerated, but closer to the 
 truth than one might think possible. It was not that 
 he was incapable of calm ; on the contrary, between 
 his fits of vehement enthusiasm of wrath, there were 
 often long spells of trance-like immobilit}' and 
 absorption. But there was energy in this complete 
 
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 157 
 
 rest ; he was one of those for whom, in Rossetti's 
 phrase, "to do naught is in itself almost an act." It 
 has been said that Swinburne's excitability, his 
 consuming anger, were like Landor's ; the comparison 
 would not have displeased him, and indeed, when he 
 had been reading a passage of invective to Mr. 
 Edmund Gosse he hinted at it with a certain satis- 
 faction. But there is really all the difference in the 
 world between Swinburne's wrathful excitement and 
 Landor's irascibility. Landor was a man with a 
 noble and powerful and austere mind and a fine and 
 weak and irritable nature. His anger is a nervous 
 irritation that disturbs the grandeur of a classic 
 attitude. It is generally generous in motive and 
 sometimes as amusingly forgivable as in the case of 
 the man he threw out of a window into the garden, 
 only to cry out in an agony of remorse, " Good God ! 
 I forgot the violets." But it is always a weakness. 
 Now the anger of Swinburne is hardly ever a weak- 
 ness ; it is the devastating fury of an avenger of 
 beauty and freedom, and it is part of his genius, not 
 some troubling weakness of the man conflicting with 
 the aims of the artist, as in the case of Landor. 
 Swinburne was a great hater because he was a great 
 lover. His anger is but the other side of his en- 
 thusiasm, and capacity for enthusiasm is his most 
 notable characteristic. 
 
158 SAVINBURNE 
 
 It was these fervent enthusiasms and fierce hatreds ' 
 that made his conversation the most stimulating that 
 has been heard in our time. His range of interests 
 was limited. On literature he was always ready to 
 talk, and always with the same vivid sense of its 
 transcendental value. His interest in the larger 
 political movements of his period was unflagging. 
 Apart from these things, there was little on which 
 Swinburne cared to speak. To science he was in- 
 different ; of music, like most poets, he had practically 
 no appreciation, unless, as in the case of Wagner, his 
 imagination was stirred by something, not the music, 
 in it ; painting and sculpture he enjoyed whole- 
 heartedly, and I cannot help thinking that an art 
 critic was lost in him, but he neither wrote nor talked 
 much of them except with reference to the artists who 
 were his friends. Of himself, more frequently of his 
 family, he was willing enough to talk with intimates. 
 But literature was the subject of three-fourths of his 
 conversation. If the talk turned on the ordinary 
 matters of desultory discussion, he soon lapsed into 
 polite indifference. 
 
 His courtesy was exquisite ; he had all sorts of 
 charming, unaffected ways of showing his deference 
 and affection in utterance and gesture. Towards 
 women he bore himself with the utmost chivalry of 
 manner, and his regard for the greatest of his 
 
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 159 
 
 contemporaries who were among his friends or 
 acquaintances was very evident in his intercourse 
 with them. Of any attempt to dominate the society 
 in which he found himself he was entirely innocent ; 
 indeed, when it included those whom he specially 
 respected he was apt to be a little too self-effacing. 
 A contradiction was usually welcome to him, and he 
 would declare that a difference of opinion gave a 
 zest to agreement on other points. But on no 
 account would he suffer any of the objects of his 
 peculiar adoration to be slighted, and the offender 
 would find himself overwhelmed with fierce eloquence, 
 ior which sometimes, and not unnecessarily, Swin- 
 burne would apologise with ironical reference to his 
 own usual placidity and mildness. A sort of child- 
 like mischievousness, as of one aware of the 
 extravagance of his conduct but only half abashed, 
 we are told, was often delightfully apparent in his 
 lighter moods. With all his impetuosity and reck- 
 lessness of speech, he observed in some matters a 
 remarkable discretion. His regard for the privacies 
 that are shamelessly violated in an age of personal 
 tittle-tattle was unfailing. The intimate friend of 
 some of the most discussed personalities of his time, 
 in no instance did he give pubhcity to any fact 
 learned in intercourse with them that had better been 
 left unmentioned, and he bitterly resented certain 
 
i6o SWINBURNE 
 
 lapses from this standard on the part of forma- 
 acquaintances of his and of the editors of their 
 correspondence and reminiscences. 
 
 About 187 s or a little later Swinburne's mind 
 became curiously unreceptive to new impressions. 
 He followed political developments keenly to the end, 
 and to the very limited extent that he had general 
 interests there was no marked unwillingness to 
 consider novel ideas. But the year 1875 was a kind 
 of barrier which shut out from his appreciation all 
 subsequent literature that was not simply the 
 continuation of work achieved before that date or 
 did not stir him by appeal to his old enthusiasms by 
 praise of Hugo, or denunciation of Napoleon HI, or 
 some such irrelevant attraction. He greatly admired 
 Mallarme's rendering of Poe's verse, but was not 
 interested in the work of the Symbolists. The 
 French Realists he hated vehemently, and when 
 Zola's " L'Assommoir " began to appear in a French 
 periodical, Swinburne declined to continue con- 
 tributing to it, issuing at the same time an indignant 
 protest against the brutal dirtiness of that book. 
 Ibsen he disliked. Among the younger English 
 writers there was scarcely one in whom he was even 
 moderately interested for literary reasons, though 
 there was never on his part the least jealousy or 
 desire to use his influence against younger men. All 
 
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS i6i 
 
 this was the more extraordinary because in the 'sixties 
 he had been preeminently the champion of writers 
 who were new or new to English readers. But the 
 defender of Meredith and of Baudelaire came forward 
 only once in later years on behalf of a misunderstood 
 artist, when he joined in the protest against the 
 censor's ban on M. Maeterlinck's " Monna Vanna." 
 
 Although some outbursts may seem to contradict 
 the assertion, Swinburne was deeply reverent. If he 
 assailed with furious invective forms of a Christianity 
 that seemed to him Christ-less, and sometimes per- 
 mitted himself to write of great men in terms that 
 the greatest of men could hardly be justified in 
 applying to the meanest, it was only in defence of 
 what he reverenced. Satirical and contemptuous as 
 he could be, he had in him really nothing of the 
 mocker. There was never a man readier to honour 
 whole-heartedly excellence of any kind wherever he 
 recognised it, or more nobly humble in homage. 
 
 A wonderful charm and power radiated from this 
 brilliant, high-strung, and swiftly responsive man of 
 genius, something that enthralled and exalted every 
 one who came into contact with his immense vitality 
 and generous enthusiasm. He Wcis often extravagant 
 and unjust, and he could be splendidly absurd, but 
 of dullness, meanness, timidity, hypocrisy, selfishness 
 he was at all times equally incapable. The man, as 
 
 M 
 
i62 SWINBURNE 
 
 he is revealed to us in his work and in the memories 
 of his friends, is a great lover and a great fighter, 
 unflinching in devotion to his ideals and fiercely 
 combative in defence of them and of friends, an 
 artist proudly indifferent to anything but his own 
 severe artistic conscience and the admiration of a 
 few fellow poets, a force rejoicing in its own strength 
 and answering instantaneously to every human or 
 natural force it encounters in eager sympathy or 
 vehement opposition. " The most poetic personality 
 I have ever known," said Burne-Jones, and so very 
 different an observer as Guy de Maupassant has set 
 him down as " I'etre le plus extravagamment artiste 
 qui soit peut-etre aujourd'hui sur le mondc." 
 
( i63 ) 
 
 III 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 (I) 
 No work of art can be judged rightly except on 
 principles deduced from itself; but in the case of 
 Swinburne hostile criticism has almost always ignored 
 this axiom. We have been told that all but the best 
 of Swinburne's verse, and miich even of that, is 
 diffuse, insufficiently charged with thought, disfigured 
 by wanton excess in the use of such devices as 
 alliteration, and much more to the same effect, by 
 critics who have never paused to ask themselves if 
 they had understood his aim and if his methods did 
 not necessitate the things of which they complain. 
 It is perfectly easy to produce scores of single lines 
 from Swinburne's blank verse which are as closely 
 packed, as heavily weighted, and as free from ob- 
 trusive virtuosity as those of almost any other poet ; 
 but Swinburne's most characteristic metrical forms 
 are anapaestic, and a closely packed anapaestic line 
 
 M 2 
 
104 SWINBURNE 
 
 or one in which use is not made of alliteration or 
 liquidation being almost necessarily unmusical, a 
 succession of such lines would be intolerable. It is 
 not any incapacity or wilful misdoing of Swinburne's, 
 but the nature of anapaestic verse in English that 
 explains the peculiarities of the typical Swinburnian 
 line. He does but obey, only more consciously and 
 consistently, laws which have been honoured by every 
 writer of anapaestic verse from the author of 
 
 My trewest tresowre sa trayturly taken, 
 Sa bytterly bondyn wyth bytand bandes, 
 
 to Poe. Of course, the methods adopted in writing 
 anapaestic verse affected his iambic and trochaic 
 verse also, and it may be readily conceded that a 
 certain exuberance in expression and tenuity in 
 thought were always natural to him ; but to say 
 these things is very different from joining in thf 
 foolish and ignorant denunciation heard from the 
 mouths of those whose misfortune of dullness would 
 have been less notorious if they had not the further 
 misfortune of not being dumb. 
 
 The metrical preferences of so great a master 
 of verse are bound to be highly significant, and 
 Swinburne's devotion to anapaestic measures ought 
 to give us a clear indication of his aim, for as surely 
 
 as the iamb is proper to verse when i$ comes nearest 
 
 I, 
 
CONCLUSION 165 
 
 to being statement, the anapaest is proper to verse 
 which is before everything suggestion. Now, sug- 
 gestion may be mainly through imagery, in which 
 case we have symbolism, as with Blake and Mr. 
 Yeats, or mainly through music, in which case we 
 have the poetry of Swinburne, who went further in 
 dependence on music than any other poet. But 
 music is at once above and below thought, and if 
 words, with their often so definite intellectual import, 
 are to be used with more than that heed to their 
 musical value which every lyrical poet pays, they 
 must be subdued in one way or another, lest the 
 individual notes live with too strong a separate life 
 in the melody. That may be done in the manner 
 of Verlaine, with whom technique annihilates itself, 
 but sudi a method is impossible for a poet like 
 Swinburne, who is the supreme virtuoso and delights 
 in the open display of technique. He solves the 
 problem triumphantly in his own way. His vo- 
 cabulary, as any one who examines his work carefully 
 will soon realise, is one of the vastest and one of the 
 narrowest possessed by any English poet. Perhaps 
 only Shakespeare would yield the material for a 
 larger lexicon, and yet the epithet "winged" does 
 not less .surprise the reader of Shelley than some 
 dozen epithets surprise the reader of Swinburne. 
 The explanation is that as a virtuoso Swinburne 
 
i66 SWINBURNE 
 
 needs an enormous vocabulary, but having found 
 the exact word for his purpose he will use it habit- 
 ually for that purpose in a way that no poet more 
 concerned for the direct intellectual appeal of his 
 verse possibly could. This peculiar form of that 
 monotony in variety which is one of the character- 
 istics of great style results in just such a dimming of 
 individual words as Swinburne's purpose demands. 
 The elaborate grammatical construction usual with 
 him, and resulting simply from the working of his 
 mind, as is evident from the fact that it is habitual 
 in his prose, but congenial to his metrical form and 
 often encouraged by it, helps in this subduing of 
 individual words and phrases by diminishing the 
 force of logical relation in the sentence. So also is 
 he helped by the peculiar undefined imagery most 
 characteristic of him. His imagery is often very 
 beautiful, sometimes magnificent, but it is extra- 
 ordinarily narrow in range, and it is almost wholly 
 made up of abstract natural symbols, winds and 
 waves, fire, light, stars. Plainly it was not de- 
 liberately chosen for the purpose we are considering, 
 but was natural to an imagination for which the 
 world seemed to be resolved into its elements ; but 
 it serves that purpose wonderfully, keeping the 
 distractions of particularity and definite detail out 
 of the verse. Thus it is, by the subordination of 
 
CONCLUSION 167 
 
 everything to music, by a very remarkably extensive 
 and yet monotonous vocabulary, and by the character 
 of his imagery, that Swinburne achieves those al- 
 together unique effects which make much of his 
 verse to the uncomprehending appear vague, ex- 
 cessively involved, diffuse, and even empty, because 
 they are looking for something in it which it was not 
 his object to put into it and are overlooking his 
 superb success in his own purpose. 
 
 But, it may be said, granting his success, does not 
 his aim preclude the highest kind of success ? We 
 come to what is for many readers of Swinburne the 
 crucial question of the intellectual value of his work, 
 and it needs more careful treatment than the very 
 natural impatience of a fervent admirer is ready to 
 give it. Thought in poetry is of two kinds, the 
 thought which deals explicitly with the problems of 
 life, and the thought which is implicit in every worthy 
 presentation of life. There is no reason why the one 
 kind should be exalted at the expense of the other. 
 A poem which is avowedly philosophical is not 
 necessarily more productive of thought than one 
 which renders, without commentary, a profound 
 emotional experience, or even than one which renders 
 mainly physical sensation of some intense kind. 
 Tliere can be no generalisations on the subject, except 
 this, that implicit thought is more proper to Ij'rical 
 
1 68 SWINBURNE 
 
 poetry than explicit thought, for the aim of lyrical 
 poetry is to be a continuously maintained rapture, 
 and explicit thought is always liable to decline into 
 mere ratiocination. Now, in Swinburne there is not 
 usually much explicit thought, though there is a great 
 deal more than is popularly supposed, but the 
 implicit intellectual power is often of the very highest 
 kind. 
 
 Digressing a little, consider the range of his 
 imaginative and intellectual sympathies as a creative 
 artist. The poet who went back with unrivalled 
 success to the Greeks, and in going back discovered 
 there those really romantic qualities in the Greek 
 genius which a natural but rather excessive emphasis 
 on its classical qualities had obscured ; who in some 
 of his nature poems entered with perfect sympathy 
 into something much more primitive than the classical 
 or the modern feeling for nature ; who wrote in 
 " Tristram of Lyonesse " by far the greatest of 
 Arthurian poems, and in such a piece as " Laus Veneris " 
 recaptured more of the mediaeval spirit than any 
 contemporary except William Morris ; and who, as 
 Guy de Maupassant said of him, was also " un des 
 plus raffines et des plus subtils parmi les explorateurs 
 de manies et de sensations qui forment les ecoles 
 modernes," must have been a writer of very ex- 
 ceptional breadth and pliancy of intellect. Turn to 
 
CONCLUSION 169 
 
 his critical work and you will find the same, or even 
 more, width and suppleness. Two or three violent 
 prejudices admitted, it is not too much to say of 
 Swinburne that he is the most catholic-minded of 
 critics. Here we may well apply a severe and 
 instructive test. If, as we have been told, he was 
 intellectually the least of the great Victorian poets, 
 how is it that he understood Tennyson at least as well 
 as, probably rather better than, Tennyson understood 
 him, that he paid the most magnificent and illuminating 
 of compliments to Browning, who in all friendliness 
 could only describe Swinburne's poetry as "a fuzz of 
 words," and that he was the most generous and 
 discerning critic of Matthew Arnold, who summed up 
 Swinburne as " a pseudo-Shelley " ? Surely to have 
 Swinburne's enormous and secure grasp of the 
 classical and mediaeval spirits, and of the final 
 perversities of the modern spirit, to be, again in 
 Maupassant's words, an artist " en m^me temps k la 
 maniere ancienne et k la mani^re moderne," and to be 
 the acutest and most broad-minded critic among the 
 poets of his age, should be enough to safeguard a 
 writer from such charges as we have known levelled 
 against Swinburne. 
 
 But we need not rely on this indirect evidence, nor 
 even on the thought implicit in particular masterpieces 
 of his. There are a few poems, among his greatest, 
 
I70 SWINBURNE 
 
 which give us as exph'citly as is possible in lyrical 
 verse the philosophy implicit in his work as a whole, 
 and that philosophy is neither shallow nor incoherent. 
 In the early work there are two radical ideas, the 
 " happy days or else to die " natural with a young poet, 
 and a conviction, perhaps Oriental rather than Greek, 
 of the dominance of fate over life. The first " Poems 
 and Ballads " are full of that kind of weariness of life 
 which is the recoil of an ardent will to live fully 
 and intensely ; of genuine pessimism, that is of 
 pessimism which is not merely a reaction, there 
 is no trace in Swinburne, whose sympathies are 
 ever with what is vital and energetic. With such 
 a temperament as Swinburne's the idea of fatality 
 inspires not resignation but revolt, and revolt is 
 in his blood as well as in his thought. At first it 
 is little more than an instinctive rebellion, but at the 
 critical moment he whose work had been more ex- 
 clusively literary in inspiration than that of any other 
 great poet, came for the first time under an unliterary 
 influence, Mazzini's, and was powerfully stimulated 
 by events in the contemporary world. With the! 
 immediate widening of view from the individual to 
 humanity, the old conception of fate necessarily 
 weakened, for the lost battles of men are renewed with 
 a boundless hope by man. This philosophy, his own 
 and not Mazzini's or any one else's, now shaped itself. 
 
CONCLUSION 171 
 
 To the pantheism vaguely imph'cit in some of his 
 earlier work there was added the idea of man as the 
 master of things, of the divinity of humanity. The 
 mere revolt of an ardent and liberty-loving nature 
 altered into a reference from external sanctions to the 
 self-given law of humanity, and the idea of a malignant 
 fate changed to that of an indifferent nature, of which 
 man himself is part. Where in " Atalanta " and in 
 "Anactoria" the Gods were arraigned, in " Tristram 
 of Lyonesse " we have resignation to the whole world 
 of which man is part : — 
 
 How should the storms of heaven and kindled lights 
 And all the depths of things and topless heights 
 And air and earth and fire and water change 
 Their likeness, and the natural world grow strange, 
 And all the limits of their life undone 
 Lose count of time and conscience of the sun, 
 And that fall under which was fixed above 
 That man might have a larger hour for lov« ? 
 
 It is to be noted that though Swinburne's thought 
 makes man the centre of the universe, there is for 
 him no temptation in those weak imaginings which 
 substitute for a profound sympathy between man and 
 nature the pathetic fallacy — 
 
 Fancies and passions miscreate 
 By man in things dispassionate. 
 
 But the relation of man to the universe in Swinburne's 
 thought had been set forth so clearly, completely and 
 
172 SWINBURNE 
 
 nobly in "Hertha" that a commentary is almost 
 superfluous. In that poem and some few others we 
 have genuine poetical thought, not thought put into 
 poetry, as so much of the work of his two great 
 contemporaries was, but thought which is one with 
 the poetry. It remains only to be said that the stress 
 laid by Swinburne, notably in "The Altar of 
 Righteousness," on the strong obligation upon man to 
 advance righteousness is in no way contradictory to 
 his revolutionary theories, but simply the logical 
 outcome of his firm conviction that " save his own 
 soul man has no star." The immense revolt against 
 the external sanctions is only preliminary to, a greater 
 insistence on the sanctions which are within, and the 
 vehemently sought liberty is only, in his thought, 
 liberty to be used to the uttermost in furthering the 
 cause of man, which is the cause of the universe. In 
 all this there is a deep optimism, not the glib assurance 
 that all is well with the world, but a boundless faith 
 in man, a firm belief that the free play of human 
 thought and passion will be productive of good 
 because at heart humanity has the eternal law of 
 righteousness. In this view, indeed, righteousness is 
 only the resolution of man to be truly himself. But 
 we must never forget that we are dealing with one 
 who was first and last and always a poet, and that his 
 system of thought exists not as something which he 
 
CONCLUSION 173 
 
 has clothed with verse but as something of one 
 substance with his poetry. 
 
 As we have his thought in the mass of his poetry, 
 it is curiously diffused, and comes to us rather as 
 innuendo than as aphorism. Probably no other poet 
 of his rank has added so few lines to the treasury of 
 great commonplaces. It must be added that probably 
 no other poet has written so few lines which would 
 not instantly be recognised as his. The technical 
 characteristics of a line of Swinburne are unmistakable, 
 but we have known many mistakes made as to the 
 real nature of his technical ..achievement. That he 
 was the very greatest master of metrical form that 
 English lyrical verse has had is universally admitted, 
 but it is a popular error that he was before everything 
 an innovator. He invented much certainly, but he 
 came to fulfil and not to destroy, and on the whole it 
 is as an inspired adaptor more than as an inventor that 
 he must be regarded. I have traced, in dealing with 
 that poem, the earlier history of the marvellous 
 measure of " Dolores," and there are few of his most 
 beautiful and original forms which could not be 
 similarly traced back to an imperfect ancestor. The 
 student who enters on that fascinating task will need, 
 however, to have a very wide and minute knowledge 
 of English verse, for many of Swinburne's finest 
 technical achievements are in the adaptation, say, 
 
174 SWINBURNE 
 
 rather, transformation, of forms that undistinguished 
 predecessors used without metrical skill or without 
 sense of their special capacities. Thus the enchanting 
 music of " The Palace of Pan " is to be referred 
 back to the slithering melody of a set of verses 
 by so preposterous a writer as " Monk " Lewis. 
 But there are also many splendid instances of his 
 power to better the work of masters as he turns their 
 forms to his own purposes. A little time spent over 
 some of Dryden's songs * will reveal the origin of two 
 of the most beautiful song forms in the first " Poems 
 and Ballads," though here the difference in degree is 
 so great that it almost amounts to one of kind. A 
 score of other instances suggest themselves ; none 
 more worthy of notice, I think, than the development 
 of the " Laus Veneris " form out of FitzGerald's 
 quatrains, a miraculously appropriate adaptation of a 
 great form to a great and alien purpose. Note how 
 the effect of detachment proper to FitzGerald and 
 Omar is avoided by the linking of the stanzas, while 
 the special fitness of the form for weary meditation 
 is preserved. But perhaps Swinburne's genius for 
 adaptation may be best seen in his slight modifica- 
 tions of traditional forms. For one example out of a 
 hundred, take the "Ilicet" stanza, a very familiar 
 
 * See particularly in The Spanish Friar the song beginning 
 " Farewell, ungrateful traitor ! " 
 
CONCLUSION 175 
 
 form, with double rhymes and additional feet in 
 the third and sixth lines making it the new and 
 wonderful thing it is, slow and heavy, and with 
 hopelessness in every emphatic cadence. Yet, because 
 it is slow-moving, that is not typical, for it is one of 
 the innumerable technical distinctions of Swinburne 
 that he brought into English verse a speed unknown 
 and undreamed of before him. It was naturally 
 anapaestic verse that gave him most of it, and his 
 development, one is tempted to say invention, of 
 anapaestic verse in his chief work as a master of 
 metrical form ; but he can get speed out of measures 
 that might be supposed to be incapable of it, as a 
 score of examples could be adduced to prove if it 
 needed proving. There is no established form out of 
 which he did not draw his own music. What less 
 probable at his date than anything new from the 
 heroic couplet ? But turn to " Tristram of Lyonesse," 
 and note how a form that it had almost always been 
 fatal to use without respect for its tendency to the 
 " stopped " effect has been made to yield the effect 
 of onward and uninterrupted rush for scores of lines 
 at a time. Yet when he chooses he can use the 
 " stopped " form magnificently, for a few moments, as 
 may be seen in certain couplets in " Anactoria," which, 
 however, as a whole exhibits the same characteristics 
 as " Tristram." 
 
176 SWINBURNE 
 
 Of the technical characteristics of Swinburne's 
 verse, its buoyancy, speed, security in the most 
 audacious feats, its enormous variety of effect in 
 the use of the same forms, as shown, for example, in 
 the various poems in the " Dolores " measure, its 
 dazzling brilliance and intoxicating music, much more 
 might be said. I will content myself, however, with 
 two more remarks. The many-footed measures are 
 wonderful pieces of virtuosity, unprecedented and 
 likely to remain unparalleled ; but I am not sure that 
 they are wholly satisfactory technically, for in spite 
 of great skill in the shifting of pauses, they do 
 occasionally exhibit the inevitable tendency to break 
 up, and apart from that, they certainly encourage 
 diffuseness. The finest of them, to my mind at least, 
 are the measures of " Hesperia " and of " Evening 
 on the Broads," where, as Professor Saintsbury 
 has pointed out, Swinburne has made perhaps the 
 greatest of his metrical discoveries, the discovery that 
 a certain disposition of anapaests will produce dactyllic 
 effects, otherwise, in Swinburne's own words, abhor- 
 rent to English verse, and has solved triumphantly 
 the otherwise insoluble problems of the hexameter 
 and of elegiacs in English. 
 
 Having perhaps said enough to indicate the 
 general character and something of the special 
 distinction of his superb metrical achievement, we 
 
CONCLUSION 177 
 
 must go on to admit frankly that his mastery over 
 other than metrical form is less complete, or rather, 
 less secure. In much of his verse there is an evident 
 disproportion of expression to substance. 
 
 (2) 
 
 It is easy to be overmuch concerned about literary 
 influences, but there is less than the usual danger in 
 the cjise of Swinburne, where not only method but 
 inspiration is so often to be referred to literary 
 suggestion. Yet even here it will be well to issue a 
 warning at the outset against the folly of supposing 
 that any enumeration of influences can diminish hi^ 
 glory as a creative artist of profound originality, 
 though such a warning is the less needful because the 
 immense extent and extreme complication of his 
 literary debt afford paradoxical proof of his original 
 power, since his individuality is strong and persistent 
 in spite of the changes of influence under which he 
 worked. At the beginning of the work reviewed in 
 the preceding pages the influences were almost 
 beyond computation. Greek and Elizabethan 
 dramatists, Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire, Rossetti and 
 the early Italians translated by Rossetti,* and Morris 
 
 * But, of course, known to Swinburne independently of 
 Rossetti's versions. 
 
 N 
 
178 SWINBURNE 
 
 were the most evident sources of suggestion. The " Pre- 
 Raphaelite " influences did not last long ; there was 
 no deliberate search after medisevalism subsequent 
 to the masque of " Queen Bersabe " in the first 
 " Poems and Ballads," and no quest of pictorial 
 symbolism after the opening pieces in that volume, 
 though, of course, his kinship on one side of his genius 
 to Rossetti and Morris was clear to the end, and the 
 dedication of his last volume of verse to the memory 
 of Morris and Burne-Jones was as appropriate 
 aesthetically as it was touching humanly. Gautier 
 and Baudelaire exercised no compelling charm over 
 his verse after certain of the pieces in the second 
 " Poems and Ballads." Direct and strong classical 
 influences are not often evident in the work of later 
 years, in which, it may be added, exotic influences 
 generally are much fainter. The Elizabethans 
 naturally dominated only his unlyrical dramatic verse, 
 and that not too obviously after the first wonderful 
 boyish play of "The Queen Mother," the most 
 remarkable and faithful study after Shakespeare in 
 the whole of the English drama. The one influence 
 which was more powerful in his middle than in his 
 first period, and that continued powerful to the end, 
 was Hugo's ; not very fortunately, I think, for Hugo 
 seemed to sanction Swinburne's natural excesses and 
 to suggest others. It was inevitable, however, that he 
 
CONCLUSION 179 
 
 should prevail, and Gautier and Baudelaire, who of all 
 artists cared least for humanity, should be forgotten 
 in that hour when a spark from Mazzini set burning 
 the splendid light that preceded a sun which never rose. 
 Swinburne himself, it has not been sufficiently realised, 
 saw that it was a false dawn, and with a proud 
 resignation, but with no abandonment of hope, turned 
 to other things. The work of the next twenty years 
 in verse exhibited an increasing elaboration of 
 technique with a curious and almost continuous 
 restriction of range in subject-matter, until at last 
 literature, the sea and children became almost the only 
 themes of his verse. 
 
 To the popular contention that there was a 
 great decline, or as it has been said, a collapse, 
 the present writer is vehemently hostile. If any one 
 chooses to say that after the second " Poems and 
 Ballads," issued in his forty-first year, there were very 
 few triumphs in those kinds of poetry to which the 
 greatest things in the first and second " Poems and 
 Ballads " and the " Songs Before Sunrise " belonged, 
 I shall not quarrel with him ; nor yet if he should add 
 that a good deal of the later lyrical verse is of the 
 nature of self-echoes and that much of it is deficient 
 in sting. But if the second period, after the sensuous 
 and the political revolts had spent themselves, opens 
 rather vaguely, it soon gains lustre from the magnificent 
 
 N 2 
 
i8o SWINBURNE 
 
 achievement of" Tristram of Lyonesse," a poem which, 
 whatever its defects as narrative may be, is simply 
 nnrivalled for long-sustained passion, for rapture 
 maintained at a pitch one would suppose possible only 
 in brief lyrics. To this period, too, belong those 
 ballads to the best of which something less than 
 justice has yet been done, almost all the unparalleled 
 sea poems, almost all the beautiful and charming 
 poems on children, the many fine elegies, the many 
 poems in honour of beloved writers, including the 
 great series of sonnets on the Elizabethan dramatists, 
 and apart from all these " The Commonweal," one of 
 the noblest and stateliest expressions of exalted 
 patriotism that any occasion has drawn from any 
 English poet. Such a body of poetry amply suffices 
 to leaven a mass of work which, though liable to the 
 criticisms directed against it above, is still never less 
 than poetry. It is true, however, that for twenty 
 years before something like a renewal of youth in 
 "The Tale of Balen," Swinburne's chief work was 
 not in lyrical verse but in the drama and in prose 
 criticism. 
 
 The plays, putting aside the two great master- 
 pieces on the Greek model, have been very variously 
 estimated, as Swinburne himself recorded with good- 
 humoured tolerance. They were, of course, written 
 for the Elizabethan stage, except "Bothwell," which 
 
CONCLUSION i8i 
 
 could not possibly have been produced on any stage, 
 and they are all open to attack as work in a rather 
 illegitimate form. I do not know that it is necessary 
 to say anything more on the point, for if they are 
 not actable, "King Lear" loses in acting, as its 
 cloudy grandeur is forced into too definite and 
 earthly a shape. Fitness for the stage apart, the 
 question is whether they are satisfactory as drama in 
 every other way. Frankly, they are not. They 
 contain many remarkable dramatic studies, and in 
 Mary Queen of Scots one very great creation ; they 
 have very many magnificent speeches and some fine 
 scenes ; they exhibit, what has not often been 
 acknowledged, a rare power of creating the atmo- 
 sphere of the period to which they belong ; but 
 though the structure is generally firm, they are 
 without exception deficient in the power of awakening 
 curiosity as to the progress of the action, deepening 
 it into suspense, and satisfying it by the inevitable 
 conclusion. Just as in " Tristram of Lyonesse " we 
 care nothing for the course of the narrative and 
 everything for the passion of Tristram and Iseult, so 
 in the plays, with some reservation in favour of the 
 trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots, it is the ebb and 
 flow of passion in the superb verse, and not the 
 consequences of passion in action, that hold us. 
 Swinburne's fatalism does not help him here, for 
 
i8z SWINBURNE 
 
 fate dominates rather than directs the action. It 
 does dominate it, for the charge of arbitrariness is ill- 
 founded ; but the action seems almost unimportant. 
 Having said so much, we may the more readily 
 acknowledge that only Shakespeare has put more 
 poetry into the English drama. "Bothwell," in 
 particular, is full and over-full of poetic riches, and 
 whatever may be said of its inevitable lack of unity, 
 it can fairly be described as sharing with Mr. Hardy's 
 " Dynasts " the distinction of being of all English 
 dramatic work since Shakespeare the widest in scope 
 and the most admirable for long-sustained power. 
 All objections to it are silenced by its stupendous 
 ambition and unflagging ardour. An " epic drama " 
 indeed, and it is Victor Hugo who said the final 
 thing about it, in a letter to Swinburne, " Occuper 
 ces deux cimes, cela n'est donn^ qu'a vous." It is 
 by far the greatest of his tragedies, as " Mary 
 Stuart," his own choice, is probably the most 
 satisfactory, and as " Chastelard," for one reader at 
 least, seems the one fullest of such delights as 
 may seduce the critical intelligence into blindness 
 to all defects. 
 
 The general characteristics of Swinburne's criti- 
 cism should have been made fairly clear earlier in this 
 volume, and little need be said of them here. By 
 temperament he was debarred from patient analysis 
 
CONCLUSION 183 
 
 and continuously judicial valuation, but his extrava- 
 gances have often been exaggerated. The extrava- 
 gances for the most part are on the surface ; the bare 
 judgment, conveyed often enough in some hyper- 
 bolical phrase and almost always with great emphasis, 
 is practically unerring. The unhabituated reader 
 may question Swinburne's sense of values, but as he 
 grows accustomed to the emotional exaltation of 
 Swinburne he will realise that the whole of his 
 criticism is high-pitched, and that there is very much 
 less confusion of the relative merit of writers and 
 books than at first sight appears. How wide in 
 sympathy, how brilliantly intuitive, how stimulating 
 and eloquent the best of it is must have been made 
 clear even by the few brief excerpts which have been 
 given in this book ; but of the medium of this 
 criticism it is necessary to say something more. 
 
 The prose of Swinburne, which seems to have been 
 intelligently estimated by hardly any critic except 
 Professor Saintsbury, will one day have a very 
 important and distinct place in the history of the 
 development of English prose. It is astonishingly 
 close to his verse, yet it is by no means that illegiti- 
 mate hybrid honoured and condemned by description 
 as prose-poetry. Only Landor, of all English prose 
 writers who have also been poets, has kept the two 
 forms as close together, and Landor is not altogether 
 
1 84 SWINBURNE 
 
 a rival, for even if we ignore the fact that he was 
 primarily a writer of prose, we must take into account 
 the careful subdual of his verse, which makes it 
 easier, though very far from easy, for his prose to 
 approach it. In Swinburne's verse there is of course 
 no such restraint, and the gulf to be bridged is 
 wider. His prose being so near to his verse, and 
 Swinburne being before everything a poet, it would 
 be idle to search curiously for its origins in earlier 
 masters of prose ; its origins are mainly in his verse 
 and in the poets who influenced his verse. Landor 
 he did indeed set up before him as a great exemplar, 
 asking himself, we are told, whether this or that page 
 would have been passed by the Old Roman ; and 
 yet, though Landor's influence is plain here and 
 there, it is one that asserts itself at intervals, in details 
 rather than continuously or in main features. In 
 the more elaborate of his descriptions there is some 
 trace of obligation to Ruskin in method, and I have 
 sometimes seemed to feel a suggestion from Pater, 
 though the marked emphasis of Swinburne's prose 
 is not like Ruskin's, and is as far removed as possible 
 from the winding and gentle insinuation of Pater's. 
 There is a fourth name, and one for our purpose 
 more important, to be mentioned. It may surprise 
 some, but Mr. Gosse has given it in some records of 
 Swinburne's conversation and Professor Saintsbury 
 
CONCLUSION 185 
 
 in too brief an examination of Swinburne's prose, 
 and for my part, if I may add my testimony super- 
 fluously to that of my betters, the name of Johnson 
 came to my lips almost the first time I came on an 
 antithetical passage in Swinburne. As might be 
 inferred from work referred to such names, for 
 whatever in it does not derive directly from its 
 author's verse, Swinburne's prose is composite in 
 character and is the most remarkable example of 
 the very unusual blending of the eighteenth century 
 and the nineteenth century rhythm that we have. 
 The average of it is not absolutely satisfactory, for 
 there is rather too much of certain devices, especially 
 of alliteration and of double or treble antithesis, to 
 say nothing of an occasional verbal prodigality, but 
 it has wonderful rhythmical qualities as a rule, and 
 in scores of passages it rises, more legitimately than 
 Ruskin's, I think, and much more legitimately than 
 De Quincey's, I am sure, though generally with Jess 
 opulence and exquisiteness of colour than the 
 former's and less strangeness of imagination than the 
 latter's, to the level of noble and glowing poetry or 
 at least of a vehement and really poetical kind of 
 rhetoric. Examples enough have perhaps been given, 
 but I will add one more, a prose commentary on his 
 own poems : — " Not to you or any other poet, or 
 indeed to the very humblest and simplest lover of 
 
1 86 SWINBURNE 
 
 poetry, will it seem incongruous or strange, suggestive 
 of imperfect sympathy with life or deficient inspira- 
 tion from nature that the very words of Sappho 
 should be heard and recognised in the notes of the 
 nightingales, the glory of the presence of dead poets 
 imagined in the presence of the glory of the sky, the 
 lustre of their advent and their passage felt visible as 
 in vision on the live and limpid floor-work of the 
 cloudless and sunset-coloured sea." 
 
 That is from his admirable review of his own 
 work in the first collected edition of his poems. No 
 summary could hope to compete with that dedicatory 
 preface, and none shall here be attempted. But the 
 choice made there from among his poems is not 
 likely to be quite that of any of his readers. The 
 ode he exalts above all other poetic forms, and it is 
 by his odes, he says, that he is to be judged as a 
 lyrical poet in the higher sense. Without entering 
 into any discussion of the claim made for the form, 
 we may acknowledge the excellence of his work in it 
 and note his scrupulous respect for its too often 
 neglected or defied laws. It should be a wide 
 definition that would cover all the great things in 
 English verse that their writers have called odes. 
 Swinburne, however, has always been heedful of the 
 principle which limits the ode to some actual or 
 imagined occasion of public celebration, and in 
 
CONCLUSION 187 
 
 structure he has followed the classical division into 
 strophe, antistrophe and epode. A special ambition 
 of aim and a special elaboration of means are evident 
 in all his exercises in the form, and the best of his 
 odes may rank with Shelley's and Coleridge's. But 
 I am not sure that even technically these things can 
 be regarded as his greatest work. The quest of the 
 ode is, of course, elaborate harmony, and though 
 Swinburne was a master of harmony it was only in 
 melody that he transcended all who have made music 
 out of English words. However that may be, it is 
 certain that in the highest poetical qualities his odes 
 are not to be preferred to the many great things in 
 the less ambitious kind of lyric. The final judgment 
 on his lyrical work must be based rather on "The 
 Garden of Proserpine," " The Triumph of Time " and 
 four or five other pieces from the first " Poems and 
 Ballads," on "Ave Atque Vale," "At a Month's 
 End" and "A Forsaken Garden" from the second 
 " Poems and Ballads," on " Hertha," " The Pilgrims " 
 and the prelude of the " Songs Before Sunrise," on a 
 few sea-poems scattered through later volumes and 
 on " A Nympholept," and perhaps especially on the 
 choruses in " Atalanta " and " Erectheus." These 
 make up a body of lyrical verse unsurpassed by any 
 poet And Swinburne has done far more for English 
 lyrical verse than anyone else, leaving it enriched and 
 
1 88 SWINBURNE 
 
 suppled at every point, so that for all who come after 
 him it is alike hopeless to write it without obligation 
 to him or as he wrote it 
 
 (3) 
 
 In an interesting lecture delivered not long ago, 
 Mr. Gosse laid stress on the fact that Swinburne 
 was a specialist in emotion, and an able and sym- 
 pathetic anonymous writer in the Times, taking up 
 Mr. Gosse's words, developed the argument in- 
 geniously. Dealing with Swinburne as a great 
 virtuoso, this writer drew a distinction between such 
 an artist as Swinburne, whose emotional experiences 
 are incessant and for whom the expression of them 
 becomes the business of his life, and certain other 
 artists, " a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven," 
 who " are not so easily moved," or rather, " exercise 
 more judgment in the choice of emotional experience." 
 The very greatest artists, the argument proceeds, 
 " seem to be on their guard against artistic special- 
 isation, not so much in craft as in life." 
 
 The distinction is real, and it is presented 
 suggestively, but is it a distinction between the 
 very greatest and the less great ? I think not. 
 Whether a man of genius is an artist every hour of 
 his life, like Swinburne, or an artist, we might say. 
 
CONCLUSION 189 
 
 incidentally, like Shakespeare, does not depend on 
 the greatness of a man. As Mr. Arthur Symons 
 has suggested in his subtle book on " The Symbolist 
 Movement in Literature," there are certain natures — 
 " Shakespeare or Rimbaud, great or small " — to 
 whom their art is only a function of life, an outlet for 
 an energy that may have many other outlets. Yes, 
 there is the very pertinent case of such a small, vivid, 
 astonishingly original, soon diverted genius as that 
 of the French boy who created a new poetry and 
 then totally abandoned literature for the delights of 
 traffic in ivory in African cities. It may be to the 
 greater glory of the man to be something besides 
 being an artist ; I am unable to understand how 
 it can be to the greater glory of the artist, and I 
 know that it has often been to his damage, At 
 any rate, we cannot accept the proposed test as one 
 which will separate the very greatest artists from the 
 less great. In dealing with an artist as such, we are 
 concerned only with the quality of that part of 
 himself, often only a very small part, which he puts 
 into his art, and in the case of Swinburne we have a 
 poet who put into his poetry almost all of himself. 
 Other poets have expressed themselves as fully and 
 have made the production of verse quite as much 
 the business of their lives, but, as is well seen in 
 Wordsworth, at the cost of putting into poetry much 
 
190 SWINBURNE 
 
 that is unpoetical : everything that Swinburne wrote 
 in verse, whatever its relative value, is poetry. 
 
 The truth about Swinburne, I think, is that no 
 poet in our language, not even Shelley, has been so 
 completely and exclusively fitted by nature for the 
 production of lyrical poetry. Other poets, his equals, 
 have had to subdue much, and to ignore much, of 
 themselves as artists ; but Swinburne was poetry, 
 and his work was not so much his achievement as 
 bis existence. This was at once his glory and his 
 peril. There is not a blemish in his work that is not 
 due to his exceptional aptitude for his art. Song 
 comes so readily to him that he will sometimes sing 
 without a subject, and even when the subject is 
 adequate, it is sometimes passed too rapidly through 
 the alchemical process which fits it for poetry, so 
 that in the absence of the discipline of difficulty 
 some of his verse is rather in the nature of 
 magnificent performance than of creation. However, 
 to demand of such a poet that he should be less 
 easily moved, that he should choose more wisely 
 from among his emotional experiences, is to demand 
 that he shall deny his genius. We must recognise 
 that with Swinburne the response to stimulus is at 
 times excessive ; but we must also acknowledge that 
 without this extreme responsiveness, this instant 
 vibration into music under the lightest touch, we 
 
CONCLUSION 191 
 
 could never have had the unparalleled abandonment, 
 so complete that it masters that to which it yields 
 in rejoicing surrender, and the incomparable music 
 of the work of his most fortunate hours. 
 
 Criticism has not yet taken the measure of his 
 genius. It will not be able to do so, I think, until 
 the belief that he was the first poet of a new, instead 
 of the last of an old, dispensation is wholly dead, 
 until his aims have been more clearly understood, 
 and until some of the emphasis put on his very early 
 work has been shifted to the work of his maturity. 
 We need not be anxious to predict his exact place in 
 literature ; it is enough for us to know that, except 
 among those deaf to music and dead to the electrical 
 invigoration of contact with an immense vital energy, 
 there can never be any question of his right to rank 
 somewhere among the very greatest masters who 
 have turned into song that language in which of all 
 still spoken the lyric muse is most intimately at 
 home. 
 
 If, in the superb phrase of Balzac, " La gloire est 
 le soleil des morts," for him the sun has not yet 
 reached the zenith, and for him there can never be 
 the decline of day. In that certitude, at the close 
 of this so imperfect examination of his many and 
 splendid works, I give him the last salute of all my 
 love and reverence. 
 
lokdok: 
 
 PRINTED nV WtLlIAM CLOWES AND SOHS, LtMITBD, 
 DUKE STKEUT, STAMFORD STKEBT, S.E., AMD CRBAT WINDMILL STKBGT, Vt. 
 

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