Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

They say,

  Thine.

  ALEXANDER

  If the heaven stand still and smite thee not,

  There is no God indeed.

  CÆSAR

  Nor thou nor I

  Know.

  ALEXANDER

  I could pray to God that God might be,

  Were I but mad. Thou sayest I am mad: thou liest:

  I do not pray.

  CÆSAR

  Most holiest father, no.

  Thy brain is not so sick yet. Thou and God

  Friends? Man, how long would God have let thee live -

  Thee?

  ALEXANDER

  Long enough he hath kept me, to behold

  His face as fire - if his it be - and earth

  As hell - and thee, begotten of my loins,

  Satan.

  CÆSAR

  The firstfruits of thy fatherhood

  Were something less than Satan. Man of God,

  Vaunt not thyself.

  ALEXANDER

  I would I had died in the womb.

  CÆSAR

  Thou shalt do better, dying in Peter’s chair:

  Thou shalt die famous.

  ALEXANDER

  Ay: no screen from that,

  No shelter, no forgetfulness on earth.

  We shall be famed for ever. Hell and night,

  Cover me!

  CÆSAR

  Hast thou heard that prayers are heard?

  Or hast thou known earth, for a man’s cry’s sake,

  Cleave, and devour him?

  ALEXANDER

  I have done this thing.

  Thou hast not done it: thy deed is none of thine:

  Upon my hand, upon my head, the blood

  Rests.

  CÆSAR

  Wilt thou sleep the worse for this next year?

  ALEXANDER

  I will not live a seven days’ space beyond

  This.

  CÆSAR

  Thou hast lived thy seven days’ space in hell,

  Father: they say thou hast fasted even from sleep.

  ALEXANDER

  Ay.

  CÆSAR

  What they say and what thou sayest I hold

  False. Though thou hast wept as woman, howled as wolf,

  Above our dead, thou art hale and whole. And now

  Behoves thee rise again as Christ our God,

  Vicarious Christ, and cast as flesh away

  This grief from off thy godhead. I and thou,

  One, will set hand as never God hath set

  To the empire and the steerage of the world.

  Do thou forget but him who is dead, and was

  Nought, and bethink thee what a world to wield

  The eternal God hath given into thine hands

  Which daily mould him out of bread, and give

  His kneaded flesh to feed on. Thou and I

  Will make this rent and ruinous Italy

  One. Ours it shall be, body and soul, and great

  Above all power and glory given of God

  To them that died to set thee where thou art -

  Throned on the dust of Cæsar and of Christ,

  Imperial. Earth shall quail again, and rise

  Again the higher because she trembled. Rome

  So bade it be: it was, and shall be.

  ALEXANDER

  Son,

  Art thou my son?

  CÆSAR

  Whom should thy radiant Rose

  Have found so fit to ingraff with, and bring forth

  So strong a scion as I am?

  ALEXANDER

  By my faith -

  Wherein, I know not - by my soul, if that

  Be - I believe it. God forgot his doom

  When he thou hast slain drew breath before thee

  CÆSAR

  God

  Must needs forget - if God remember. Now

  This thing thou hast loved, and I that swept him hence

  Held never fit for hate of mine, is dead,

  Wilt thou be one with me - one God? No less,

  Lord Christ of Rome, thou wilt be.

  ALEXANDER

  Ay? The Dove?

  CÆSAR

  What dove, though lovelier than the swan that lured

  Leda to love of God on earth, might match

  Lucrezia?

  ALEXANDER

  None. Thou art subtle of soul and strong.

  I would thou hadst spared him - couldst have spared him.

  CÆSAR

  Sire,

  I would so too. Our sire, his sire and mine,

  I slew not him for lust of slaying, or hate,

  Or aught less like thy wiser spirit and mine.

  ALEXANDER

  Not for the dove’s sake?

  CÆSAR

  Not for hate or love.

  Death was the lot God bade him draw, if God

  Be more than what we make him.

  ALEXANDER

  Bread and wine

  Could hardly turn so bitter. Canst thou sleep?

  CÆSAR

  Dost thou not? Flesh must sleep to live. Am I

  No son of thine?

  ALEXANDER

  I would I saw thine end,

  And mine: and yet I would not.

  CÆSAR

  Sire, good night.

  [Exeunt

  FINIS

  The Novel

  Cheyne Walk, South-West London, where Swinburne lived with the artist Dante Gabirel Rossetti, who kept a menagerie in the back garden, much to the annoyance of their neighbours. It included a bull, a white peacock, a kangaroo, a raccoon and a wombat that reportedly had a liking for ladies’ hats. Consequently local house leases still forbid the keeping of such creatures.

  LOVE’S CROSS-CURRENTS

  A YEAR’S LETTERS

  This is Swinburne’s only complete novel, which was published serially in 1901 under a pseudonym. Love’s Cross-Currents attracted little notice from reviewers, except for some speculation as to who the author might be.

  Swinburne, 1894

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  I Lady Midhurst to Mrs. Radworth

  II Mrs. Radworth to Francis Cheyne

  III Lady Midhurst to Lady Cheyne

  IV Francis Cheyne to Mrs. Radworth

  V Lady Cheyne to Francis Cheyne

  VI Lady Midhurst to Reginald Harewood

  VII Reginald Harewood to Edward Audley

  VIII Francis Cheyne to Mrs. Radworth

  IX Lady Midhurst to Lady Cheyne

  X Lady Midhurst to Lady Cheyne

  XI Reginald Harewood to Mrs. Radworth

  XII Mrs. Radworth to Reginald Harewood

  XIII Francis Cheyne to Lady Cheyne

  XIV Lady Midhurst to Reginald Harewood

  XV Lady Cheyne to Francis

  XVI Mrs. Radworth to Lady Midhurst

  XVII Lady Midhurst to Lady Cheyne

  XVIII Lady Midhurst to Francis Cheyne

  XIX Francis Cheyne to Mrs. Radworth

  XX Reginald Harewood to Lady Cheyne

  XXI Lady Midhurst to Mrs. Radworth

  XXII Captain Harewood to Reginald

  XXIII Francis Cheyne to Mrs. Radworth

  XXIV Lady Cheyne to Mrs. Radworth

  XXV Reginald Harewood to Edward Audley

  XXVI Lady Cheyne to Reginald Harewood

  XXVII Reginald Harewood to Mrs. Radworth

  XXVIII Lady Midhurst to Mrs. Radworth

  XXIX Francis Cheyne to Lady Midhurst

  XXX Lady Midhurst to Lady Cheyne

  DEDICATION

  TO THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

  As it has pleased you to disinter this buried bantling of your friend’s literary youth, and to find it worth resurrection, I must inscribe it to you as the person responsible for its revival. Were it not that a friend’s judgment may always seem liable to be coloured by the unconscious influence of friendship, I should be reassured as to its deserts by the approval of
a master from whose verdict on a stranger’s attempt in the creative art of fiction there could be no reasonable appeal — and who, I fed bound to acknowledge with gratitude and satisfaction, has honoured it by the sponsorial suggestion of a nom and a happier ‘name. As it is, I can only hope that you may not be for once mistaken in your favourable opinion of a study thrown into the old epistolary form which even the pant genius of Balzac could not restore to the favour it enjoyed in the days if Richardson and of Laclos. However that may be, I am content to know that you agree with me in thinking that in the world of literary creation there is a legitimate place for that apparent compromise between a story and a play by which the alternate agents and patients of the taie are made to express what befalls them by word of mouth or of pen. I do not forget that the king of men to whose hand we owe the glorious history of Redgauntlet began it in epistolary form, and changed the fashion of his tale to direct and forthright narrative when the story became too strong for him, and would no longer be confined within the limits of conceivable correspondence: but his was in its ultimate upshot a historic and heroic story. And I have always regretted that we have but one specimen of the uncompleted series of letters out of which an earlier novel, the admirable Fortunes of Nigel, had grown up into immortality. The single sample which Lockhart saw fit to vouchsafe us is so great a masterpiece of dramatic humour and living imagination that the remainder of a fragment which might well suffice for the fame of any lesser man ought surely to have been long since made public. We could not dispense with the doubtless more generally amusing and interesting narrative which superseded it: but the true and thankful and understanding lover of Scott must and will readily allow or affirm that there are signs of even rarer and finer genius in the cancelled fragment of the rejected study. But these are perhaps too high and serious matters to be touched upon in a note of acknowledgment prefixed to so early an attempt in the great art of fiction or creation that it would never have revisited the light or rather the twilight of publicity under honest and legitimate auspices, if it had not found in you a sponsor and a friend.

  PROLOGUE

  I

  In the spring of 1849, old Lord Cheyne, the noted philanthropist, was, it will be remembered by all those interested in social reform, still alive and energetic. Indeed, he had some nine years of active life before him — public baths, institutes, reading-rooms, schools, lecture-halls, all manner of improvements, were yet to bear witness to his ardour in the cause of humanity. The equable eye of philosophy has long since observed that the appetite of doing good, unlike those baser appetites which time effaces and enjoyment allays, gains in depth and vigour with advancing years — a cheering truth, attested alike by the life and death of this excellent man. Reciprocal amelioration, he was wont to say, was the aim of every acquaintance he made-of every act of benevolence he allowed himself. Religion alone was wanting to complete a character almost painfully perfect. The mutual moral friction of benefits bestowed and blessings received had, as it were, rubbed off the edge of those qualities which go to make up the religious sentiment. The spiritual cuticle of this truly good man was so hardened by the incessant titillations of charity, and of that complacency with which virtuous people look back on days well spent, that the contemplative emotions of faith and piety had no effect on it; no stimulants of doctrine or provocatives of devotion could excite his fancy or his faith — at least, no clearer reason than this has yet been assigned in explanation of a fact so lamentable.

  His son Edmund, the late lord, was nineteen at the above date. Educated in the lap of philanthropy, suckled at the breasts of all the virtues in turn, he was even then the worthy associate of his father in all schemes of improvement; only, in the younger man, this inherited appetite for goodness took a somewhat singular turn. Mr. Cheyne was a Socialist — a Democrat of the most advanced kind. The father was quite happy in the construction of a model cottage; the son was busied with plans for the equalization of society. The wrongs of women gave him many a sleepless night; their cause excited in him an interest all the more commendable when we consider that he never enjoyed their company in the least, and was, in fact, rather obnoxious to them than otherwise. The fact of this mutual repulsion had nothing to do with philanthropy. It was undeniable; but, on the other hand, the moral-sublime of this young man’s character was something incredible. Unlike his father, he was much worried by religious speculations — certain phases of belief and disbelief he saw fit to embody in a series of sonnets, which were privately printed under the title of “Aspirations, by a Wayfarer.” Very flabby sonnets they were, leaving in the mouth a taste of chaff and dust; but the genuine stamp of a sincere and single mind was visible throughout; which was no small comfort.

  The wife of Lord Cheyne, not unnaturally, had died in giving birth to such a meritorious portent. Malignant persons, incapable of appreciating the moral-sublime, said that she died of a plethora of conjugal virtue on the part of her husband. It is certain that less sublime samples of humanity did find the society of Lord Cheyne a grievous infliction. Reform, emancipation, manure, the right of voting, the national burden, the adulteration of food, mechanics, farming, sewerage, beetroot sugar, and the loftiest morality formed each in turn the staple of that excellent man’s discourse. If an exhausted visitor sought refuge in the son’s society, Mr. Cheyne would hold forth by the hour on divorce, Church questions, pantheism, socialism (Christian or simple), the equilibrium of society, the duties of each class, the mission of man, the balance of ranks, education, development, the stages of faith, the meaning of the age, the relation of parties, the regeneration of the priesthood, the reformation of criminals, and the destiny of woman. Had fate or date allowed it, — but stern chronology forbade, — he would assuredly have figured as president, as member, or at least as correspondent of the Society for the Suppression of Anatomy, the Society for the Suppression of Sex, or the Ladies’ Society for the Propagation of Contagious Disease (Unlimited). But these remarkable associations, with all their potential benefits to be conferred on purblind and perverse humanity, were as yet unprofitably dormant in the sluggish womb of time. Nevertheless, the house decidedly might have been livelier than it was. Not that virtue wanted its reward. Lord Cheyne was in daily correspondence with some dozen of societies for the propagation and suppression of Heaven knows what; Professor Swallow, Dr. Chubbins, and Mr. Jonathan Bloman were among his friends. His son enjoyed the intimacy of M. Adrien Laboissière, secretary of the committee of a minor democratic society; and Mdlle Clémence de Massigny, the too-celebrated authoress of “Rosine et Rosette,” “Confidences d’un Fauteuil,” and other dangerous books, had, when in the full glow of her brief political career, written to the young son of pale and brumous Albion, “pays des libertés tronquées et des passions châtrées,” an epistle of some twenty pages, in which she desired him, not once or twice, to kiss the paper where she had left a kiss for him— “baiser chaste et frémissant,” she averred, “étreinte altière et douce de l’esprit dégagé des pièges hideux de la matière, témoin et sceau d’un amour ideal.” “O poëte!” she exclaimed elsewhere, “versons sur cette triste humanité la rosée rafraichissante de nos pleurs; melons sur nos lèvres le soupir qui console au sourire qui rayonne. Chaque larme qui tombe peut rouler dans une plaie qu’elle soulagera. Les voluptés acres et sévères de l’attendrissement valent bien le plaisir orageux des sens allumés.” All this was astonishing but satisfactory to the recipient, and worth at least any two of his father’s letters. Chubbins, Bloman, and the rest, practical men enough in their way, held in some contempt the infinite and the ideal, and were incapable of appreciating the absolute republic and the forces of the future.

  The arid virtue of the two chiefs was not common to the whole of the family. Mr. John Cheyne, younger brother to the noted philanthropist, had lived at a great rate for years; born in the regency period, he had grasped the with his time, and sucked his orange to some purpose before he came to the rind. He married well, not before it was high time; his fin
ances, inherited from his mother, and originally not bad for a younger son, were shaken to the last screw that kept both ends together; he was turned of forty, and his wife had a decent fortune: she was a Miss Banks, rather handsome, sharp and quick in a good-natured way. She brought him a daughter in 1836, and a son in 1840; then, feeling, no doubt, that she had done all that could be looked for from a model wife, completed her good work by dying in 1841. John Cheyne consoled himself with the reflection that she might have done worse; his own niece, the wife of a neighbour and friend, had eloped the year before, leaving a boy of two on her husband’s hands. For the reasons of this we must go some way back and bring up a fresh set of characters, so as to get things clear at starting.

  A reference to the Peerage will give us, third on the Cheyne family list of a past generation, the name of Helena, born 1800, married in 1819 Sir Thomas Midhurst, Bart., by whom (deceased) she had one daughter, Amicia, born 1820, married in May, 1837, to Captain Philip Harewood, by whom she had issue Reginald-Edward, born April 7, 1838. This marriage was dissolved in 1840 by Act of Parliament.” And, we may add, Mrs. Harewood was married in the same year to Frederick Stanford, Esq., of Ashton Hildred, co. Bucks, to whom, in 1841, she presented a daughter, named after herself at the father’s desire, who in 1859 married the late Lord Cheyne, just ten months after his father’s lamented decease. Lady Midhurst, then already widowed, took up her daughter’s cause energetically at the time of the divorce. Her first son-in-law was her favourite abhorrence; with her second she had always been on the best of terms, residing, indeed, now for many years past with him and his wife, an honoured inmate for the term of her natural life, and in a quiet though effectual way mistress of the whole household. It was appalling to hear her hold forth on the topic of the unhappy Captain Harewood. She had known him intimately before he married her daughter; at that time he thought fit to be delightful. After the marriage he unmasked at once, and became detestable. (Fan and foot, clapping down together, used to keep time to this keen-voiced declaration.) He had used his wife dreadfully; at this day his treatment of the poor boy left in his hands was horrible, disgraceful for its stupidity and cruelty — such a nice little fellow the child was, too, not the least like him, but the image of his mother and of her (Lady Midhurst), which of course was reason enough for that ruffian to ill-use his own son. There was one comfort, she had leave to write to the boy, and go now and then to see him; and she took care to encourage him in his revolt against his father’s style of training. In effect, as far as she could, Lady Midhurst tried to instil into her grandson her own views of his father’s character; it was not difficult, seeing that father and son were utterly unlike and discordant. Old Lord Cheyne (who took decidedly the Harewood side, and used sometimes to have the boy over to Lidcombe, where he revelled about the stables all day long) once remonstrated with his sister on this course of tactics. “My dear Cheyne,” she replied, in quite a surprised voice, “you forget Captain Harewood’s estate is entailed.” He was an ex-captain; his elder brother had died before he paid court to Miss Midhurst, and, when he married, the captain had land to settle on. As a younger brother, Lady Midhurst had liked him extremely; as a man of marriageable income, she gave him her daughter, and fell at once to hating him.