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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  With all our loves, I remain

  Your affectionate sister,

  A.C.

  XXVII Reginald Harewood to Mrs. Radworth

  London, Jan. 19th.

  I WILL wait for you till your own time; only, my dearest, I will not have you wait out of pity or fear. All that is done with: my time is here, with me; I have the day by the hand, and hold it by the hair. We have counted all and found nothing better than love. I do just hope there may be something for me to give up or go without: I see nothing yet. You are so far much better to me than all I ever knew of. I sit and make your face out between the words, and stop writing to look. You ought to have given me that broken little turquoise thing you used to have hung to your watch. I wonder all men who ever saw you do not come to get you away from me-fight me for you at least; for I shall never let you out of my hands when I have you well in them. If one had seen you and let you slip! I knew I should get you some day or die.

  Because I was never the least worth it. Because you need not have been so good, when you were so beautiful that nothing you did could set you off. But you know I loved you ages first. When I was a boy, and got sight of you, I knew stupidly somehow you were the best thing there was. You were very perfect as a child; I know the clear look of your temples under the hair; and the fresh delicious tender girl’s hair drawn off and made a crown with. I want to know what one was to have done without that? I don’t think you cared about me a year ago-not the least, my love that is now. I had to play Palomydes to your Iseult a good bit; but are you ever going to be afraid of the old king in Cornwall after this? as if we were not any one’s match, and anything we please. Je serai grand, et toi riche, Puisque nous nous aimerons. You shall scent me out the music to that some day; the song made of the sound of flowers and colour of music: you ought to know the notes that go to the other version of it. We shall have such a love in our life that all the ends of it will be sweet. You will not care too much about the people that could be of no use to you. Could a brother save you when you wanted saving? Besides, I have hold of you. The whole world has no claim or right in it any longer to set against mine. Let those come that want you, and see if I let go of you for any man. There will not be an inch of time, not a corner of our life, without some delicious thing in it. Let them tell us what we are to have instead if we give each other up. I shall get to be worth something to you in time. You say now you never found anything yet that had the likeness of your mate. I have much more of you than all the earth could deserve; I should like to see myself jealous of old fancies in a dead dream. That poor child at A. H. writes me piteous little letters, in the silliest helpless way, about the wrong of this and the right of that; she has been set upon and stung by some poisonous tale-bearing or other; she wants one to forbear “loving for others’ sake, and absolutely cites her own poor terrified little repentance after her husband’s death, on remembering some unborn baby-ghost of a flirtation which she never told some innocuous preference which sticks to the childish little recollection like a sort of remorse. It is pitiable enough, but too laughable as well; for on the strength of it she falls at once to quoting vicious phrases and transcribing mere bat-like infamies and stupidities of the owl-eyed prurient sort, the base bitter talk of women without even such a soul as serves for salt to the carrion of their mind. We know where such promptings start from. What is it to me, if I am to be the man fit to match with you by the right of my delight in you, that you have tried to find help or love before we came together, and failed of it? Let them show me letters to disprove that I love you, and I will read them. Till they do that I mean to hold to you, and make you hold to me. I thought there had been more in her than one sees; but she has a pliable, soft sort of mind, not unlike her over-tender, cased-up, exotic sort of beauty. I don’t want women to carry the sign mark of them all over, even to the hair. Hers always looks sensitive hair, and has changes of colour in it. A woman should keep to the deep sweet dark, with such a noble silence of colour in the depth of it-rich reserved hair, with a shadow and a sense of its own, that wants no gilt setting of sunbeams to throw out the secret beauty in it. I should like to see yours painted; that would beat the best of them. Promise I shall have sight of it again soon. I want you as a beggar wants bread to eat; I have the sort of desire after your face that wounded men must have after water. I wish there were some mark of you carved on me that I might look at. Now this is come to me, I wonder all day long at all the world. Nobody else has this; but they live in a sort of way. I do think, at times, that last year my poor little plaything of a sister and your brother were almost ready to believe they knew what it was-as you hear children say. They had the look and behaviour of a girl and boy playing themselves into belief in their play. And all the while we have drawn the lot and can turn the prize over, toss and catch it in our hands. All little loves are such poor food to keep alive on: our great desire and delight-infinite faith and truth and pleasure-will last our lives out without running short. You know who says there are only three things any lover has to say: Je t’aime; aime-moi; merci. I say the last over for ever when I fall to writing. I thank you always with all my heart and might, my darling, for being so perfect to me. We will go to France. There will be money. Write me word when you will. And I love you. We will have a good fight with the world if it comes in our way. Let us have the courage of our love, knowing it for the best thing there is. There is so little, after all has been thought of, either to brave or to resign.

  I shall make you wear your hair the way we like. Your sort of walk and motion and way of sitting has just made me think of the doves at Venice settling in the square, as we shall see them before summer. There is a head like you in San Zanipolo; a portrait head in the right corner of a picture of the Virgin crowned: we shall see that. Only it has thick curled gold hair, like my sister’s. You had that hair when you sat to Carpaccio; you have had time to grow perfecter in since. I can smell the sweetness of the sea when I think of our journey. I like signing my name, now it has to do with you. My name is a chattel of yours, and yours a treasure of mine. Let it be before spring; and love me as well as you can.

  REGINALD EDW. HAREWOOD

  XXVIII Lady Midhurst to Mrs. Radworth

  Ashton Hildred, Jan. 30th.

  MY DEAR CLARA:

  I HAVE not yet made up my mind whether or no you will be taken at unawares by the news I have to send you. You must make up yours to accept it with fortitude. Amy has just enriched the nation, and impoverished your brother, by the production of a child-male. In spite of her long depression and illness, it is a very sufficient infant, admirable in all their eyes here. Frank, I am sure, expected to hear of this in time. While there was any doubt as to the child’s (I mean Amy’s, and should say the mother’s) state of health, we could not resolve on publishing the prospect of her confinement. I may all but say it was a game of counter-chances. That it has come to no bad end you will, I am sure, be as glad as we are. Eight months of mourning were enough to make one thoroughly anxious. The boy does us as much credit as anything so fat and foolish, so red and ridiculous, as a new baby in good health can do. I suppose we shall be inundated with troubles because of this totally idiotic fragment of flesh and fluff, which my daughter has the front and face to assert resembles its father’s family-such is the instant fruit of sudden promotion to grandmotherhood. And I am a great-grandmother; and not sixty-two till the month after next. Armande will never allow me my rank as junior again; yet I recollect her grown-up patronage of your father and me when we were barely past school age, and she barely out-la dame aux belles cousines I called her, and him le petit Jean de-what is it?- Saintré? I suppose my son-in-law will be guardian. I do hope nobody will feel upset at this-our dear Frank is too good a knight to grudge the baby its birth. Poor little soft animal, one could wish for all our sakes some of its belongings off the small shoulder of it; but as it has chosen to come, they must stick to it. Amy is in a noticeable flutter of impatience to get the christening of it well over; she has high vi
ews of the matter, picked up of late in some religious quarter. Edmund Reginald we mean to have it made into, and I must have Redgie Harewood to come and vow things for it-he will make an admirable surety for another boy’s behaviour; and the name will do very well to be washed under-unless, indeed, Frank would be chivalrous enough to halve the charge; then we might bracket his name with the poor father’s. Don’t ask him if you think he would rather keep off; we don’t want felicitation, only forgiveness; that we must have. If I had not been tricked and caught in the springe of a sudden promise to take the weighty spiritual office on myself, I should implore you to be godmother. As it is, I suppose the sins and the sermons must all come under my care. Break the news as softly as you can; there must always be something abrupt, questionable, vexatious, in a business of the sort. It is hard to have to oust one’s friends and shift one’s point of view at a week’s notice. However, here the child is, and we must set about the management of it. I shall make Frederick undertake the main work at once as guardian and grandfather. He writes to Lidcombe by this post. Amy is already better than she has been for months, and very little pulled down, in spite of a complete surprise. She makes a delicious double to her baby, lying in a tumbled tortuous nest or net of hair with golden linings, with tired relieved eyes and a face that flashes and subsides every five minutes with a weary pleasure-she glitters and undulates at every sight of the child as if it were the sun and she water in the light of it. You see how lyrical one may become at an age when one’s grandchildren have babies. I should have thought her the kind of woman to cry a fair amount of tears at such a time, but happily she refrains from that ceremonial diversion. She is the image of that quivering rest which follows on long impassive trouble, and the labour of days without deeds-quiet, full of life, eager and at ease. I imagine she has no memory or feeling left her from the days that were before yesterday. She and the baby were born at one birth, and know each as much as the other of the people and things that went on before that. Get your husband to take a human view of the matter-I suppose his ideas of a baby which is neither zoophyte nor fossil are rather of the vaporous and twilight order of thought-and bring him down for the christianizing part of the show, if he will condescend so far. He could take a note or two on the process of animal development by stages, and the decidedly misty origin of that comic species to which our fat present sample of fleshly goods may belong. About Reginald: I may as well now say, once for all, that I think I can promise to relieve you for good of any annoyance in that quarter. We must both of us by this time be really glad of any excuse to knock his folly about you on the head. Here is my plan of action, to be played out if necessary; if you have a better, please let me know of it in time, before I shuffle and deal; you see I show you my hand in the most perfectly frank way. That dear good Armande, who really has an exquisite comprehension of us all and our small difficulties, has got (Heaven I hope knows how, but I need hardly say I don’t) a set of old letters out of the hands of the sémillant and seductive M. de Saverny fils, and put them into mine, where you cannot doubt they are in much better keeping. Octave is not exactly the typical braggart, but there is a dash in him of that fearful man in Madame Bovary-the first lover, I mean; varnished of course, and well kept down, but the little grain of that base nature does leaven and flavour the whole man. He will never have, never so much as understand, the splendid courtesy and noble reticence of a past age. His father had twice his pretensions and less than half his pretension; and so it will be with all the race. Knowing as you do now that the papers exist, you must feel reasonably glad to be well out of his hands. Not, of course, my dear niece, that I could for one second conceive you have what people would call any reason to be glad of such a thing, or that I would, in the remotest way, insinuate that there was even so much as seeming indiscretion on one side. But when you permitted Octave to open up on that tack, you were not old or stupid enough to see, what duller eyes could hardly have missed of, the use your innocence might be put to-a thing, to me, touching and terrible to think of. Cleverness, like goodness, makes the young less quick to apprehend wrong or anticipate misconstruction than stupid old people are. In this case my heavy-headed experience might have been a match for your rapid bright sense. I have hardly looked at your correspondence; had not other eyes been there before mine, nothing, of course, could induce me to look now; but I know Madame de Rochelaurier well enough to be sure she has not skipped a word. I must look over my hand, you see, as it is. It was hard enough to get them from her at all, as you may imagine; I hardly know myself how I did get it done; mais on a ses moyens. What I have seen, in the meantime, is quite enough to show me that one of these letters would fall like a flake of thawed ice on the most feverish of a boy’s rhapsodies. With the least of these small ink-and-paper pills, I will undertake to clear your suitor’s head at once, and bring him to a sane and sound view of actual things. I know what boys want. They will bear with any imaginable antecedent except one which makes their own grand passion look like a pale late proof taken off at a second or third impression. All the proofs before letters you left in Octave’s hands long ago-your sentiment (excuse, but this is the way he will take it) has come down now to the common print. Show him what the old friend really was to you, and he will congeal at once. I don’t imagine you ever meant actually to let him thaw and distil into a tender dew of fine feeling at your feet; you would no doubt always have checked him in time-if he would always have let you. But then, upon the whole, it is as well to have a weapon at hand. I believe he has grown all but frantic of late, and has wild notions of the future-amusing to you no doubt while they last, but not good to allow of. Now, I should not like to lay the Saverny letters before him, and refrigerate his ideas by that process; one had rather dispense with it while one can; but sooner than let his derangement grow to confirmed mania and become the practical ruin of him, I must use my medicines. I know, after he had taken them, he would be sensible again, and give up his dream of laws broken and lives united. Still, I had rather suppress and swamp altogether the Saverny Rochelaurier episode, and all that hangs on to it-rather escape being mixed up in the matter at all, if I can. There is a better way, supposing you like to take it. Something you will see must be done; suppose you do this. Write a quiet word to Reginald, in a way to put an end to all this folly for good. Say he must leave off writing; we know (thanks to your own excellent feeling and sense) that he does write. Lay it on your husband, if you like-but make it credible. Leave no room for appeal. Put it in this way, suppose, as you could do far better than I can for you. That an intimacy cannot last which cannot exist without exciting unpleasant, unfriendly remark. That you have no right, no reason, and no wish to be offered up in the Iphigenia manner for the sake of arousing the adverse winds of rumour and scandal to the amusement of a matronly public. That you are sorry to désillusionner even “ a fool of his folly,” and regret any vexation you may give, but do not admit (I would just intimate this much, as I am sure you can so well afford to do) that he ever had reason for his unreason. That, in a word, for your sake and his and other people’s, you must pass for the present from intimates into strangers, and may hope, if both please, to lapse again in course of time from strangers into friends. I think this will do for the ground-plan-add any intimation or decoration you like, I for one will never find or indicate a fault. Only be unanswerable, leave no chance of room for resistance or reply, shut him up, as you say, at once on any plea, and I will accept your point of action and act after it-he need never, and never shall, be made wiser on the subject than you please. The old letters shall never have another chance of air or light. If you don’t like writing to silence him, I can but use them faute de mieux-for, of course, the boy must be brought up short; but I think my way is the better and more graceful. Do not you? It is a pity that in putting a stop to folly we must make an end of pleasant intercourse and the friendly daily habits of intimate acquaintance. I can quite imagine and appreciate the sort of regret with which one resigns oneself to any such rupture.
For my part it is simply the canon of our Church about men’s grandmothers which keeps me safe on Platonic terms with our friend. Some day I shall console and revenge myself by writing a novel fit to beat M. Feydeau out of the field on that tender topic. Figure to yourself the exquisite effects that might so well be made. The grandmother might at last see my hero’s ardour cooling after a bright brief interval of birdlike pleasure and butterfly love-volupté supreme et touchante où les rides se fondent sous les baisers et les lois s’effacent sous les larmesall that style; and when compelled to unclasp her too tender arms from the neck of her jeune premier, the venerable lady might sadly and resignedly pass him on, shall we suppose to his aunt? A pathetic intrigue might be worked out, by which she would (without loving him) seduce her son-in-law so as to leave the coast clear for the grandson who had forsaken her, and with a heart wrung to the core by self-devoted love prepare her daughter’s mind to accept a nephew’s homage: finally see the young people made happy in each other and an assenting uncle, and take arsenic, or, at sight of her work completed, die of a cerebral congestion (one could make more surgery out of that), invoking on the heads of child and grandchild a supreme benediction, baptized in the sacred tears which drop on the grave of her own love. Upon my word I think it an idea which might bear splendid fruit in the hands of a great realistic novelist. I see my natural profession now, but I fear too late. In good earnest I am sorry this must be the end. A year ago I was too glad to enlist your kindness on Reginald’s behalf; and I can see how that kindness led you in time to put up with his folly. I am sure I can but feel the more tenderly and thankfully towards you if indeed you have ever come to regret for a moment that things were as they are. I have no right to reproach, and no heart: no one has the right; no one should have the heart. You know my lifelong abhorrence of the rampant Briton, female or male; and my perfect disbelief in the peculiar virtue of the English hearth and home. There is no safeguard against the natural sense of liking. But the time to count up and pay down comes for us all; we have no pleasures of our own; we hold no comforts but on sufferance. Things are constant only to division and decline. The quiet end of a friendship I have at times thought sadder than the stormiest end of a love match. Chi sa? But I do know which I had rather keep by me while I can. It is a pity you two poor children are not to be given more play, or to see much more of each other. He will miss his friend, her sense and grace and wit, the exquisite companionship of her, when he has done with the fooleries of sentiment. You, I must rather hope for his sake, may miss the sight of him for a time, the ardent ways and eager faiths and fancies, all the freshness and colour and fervour of his time and temperament; perhaps even a little the face and eyes and hair; ce sont là des choses qui ne gâtent jamais rien; we never know when we begin or cease to care for such things. I too have had everything handsome about me, and I have had losses. You see, my dear, the flowers (and weeds) will grow over all this in good time. One thing and one time we may be quite sure of seeing-the day when we shall have well forgotten everything. It is not uncomfortable, as one gets old, to recollect that we shall not always remember. The years will do without us; and we are not fit to keep the counsel of the Fates. In good time we shall be out of the way of things, and have nothing in all the world to desire or deplore. When recollection makes us sorry, we can remember that we shall forget. I never did much harm, or good perhaps, in my life; so at least I think and hope; but I should be sorry to suppose I had to live for ever in sight of the memory of it. Few could rationally like to face that likelihood if they once realized it. There is no fear; for a time is sure to come which will have to take no care of the best of us, as our time has to take none of plenty who were better. I showed you, now some eighteen months since, when it first appeared, I think, that most charming song of “ Love and Age,” the one bit of verse that I have liked well enough for years to dream even of crying over; the sweetest, noblest piece of simple sense and manly music, to my poor thinking, that this age of turbulent metrical machinery has ever turned out; and it, by the by, hardly belongs to you. Your people have not the secret of such clear pure language, such plain pellucid words and justice of feeling. Since my first reading of it, the cadences that open and close it come back perpetually into my ears like the wash of water on shingle up and down, when I think of times gone or coming. I never coveted a verse till I read that in “ Gryll Grange “; there is in it such an exquisite absence of the wrong thing and presence of the right thing throughout just enough words for the thought and just enough thought for the matter; a wise, sweet, strong piece of work. We shall leave the years to come nothing much better than that. What is said there about love and time and all the rest of it is the essence, incomparably well distilled, of all that we can reasonably want or mean to say. We must let things pass; when their time is come for going, or when if they stay they can but turn to poison, we must help them to be gone. And then we had best forget. It is a dull, empty end; a blank upshot; but you know what good authority we have for saying there are no such things as catastrophes. I admit it is rather a case of girl’s head and fish’s tail; but you must see how deep and acute that eye of Balzac’s was for such things. His broad maxims are the firmest-footed and least likely to slip of any great thinker’s I know; they have such tough root and tight hold on facts. As to our year’s work and wages, we may all say truly enough, Le dénoûment c’est qu’il n’y a pas de dénoûment. I prophesied that last year, when there first seemed to be a likelihood of some domestic romance getting under way. The point of such things, as I told Amy, is just that they come to nothing. There were very pretty scandalous materials; the making of an excellent roman de mœurs-intime et tant soit peu scabreux. Amy and your brother, you doubtless remember, gave symptoms of being touched, as flirting warmed to feeling; they had begun playing the game of cousins with an over-liberal allowance of sentiment. Redgie again was mad to upset conventions and vindicate his right of worshipping you; had no idea, for his part, of keeping on the sunny side of elopement. Joli ménage! one might have said at first sight knowing this much, and not knowing what Englishwomen are here well known to be. And here we are at the last chapter with no harm done as yet. You end as model wife, she as model mother; you wind up your part with a suitor to dismiss, she hers with a baby to bring up. All is just as it was, as far as we all go; the one difference, lamentable enough as it is, between this and last year is the simple doing of chance, and quite outside of any doing of ours. But for poor Edmund’s accidental death, which I am fatalist enough to presume must have happened anyhow, we should all be just where we were. Not an event in the whole course of things; not, I think, so much as an incident; very meagre stuff for a French workman to be satisfied with. We must be content never to make a story, and may instead reflect with pride what a far better thing it is to live in the light of English feeling and under the rule of English habit. You will give Frank my best love and excuses in the name of us all. He must write to me before too long. For yourself, accept this as I mean it; act as you like or think wise, and believe me at all times