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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Swinburne, was head of the house, and this very remarkable man did more than any other person to awaken the proclivities and moral temperament of the poet. From his turbulent grandfather he inherited his republicanism, his impatience of restraint, his love of violent exercise, and from both families his elaborate and ceremonious courtesy. Sir John Swinburne, who had been born in 1762, was a link with the eighteenth century more than half-way down the nineteenth, for he lived to enter his ninety-ninth year, and to die in 1860. From his grandson’s recollections of him a quotation may be pertinent:

  Born and brought up in France, his father (I believe) a naturalized Frenchman (we were all Catholic and Jacobite rebels and exiles) and his mother a lady of the house of Polignac... my grandfather never left France till called away at twenty-five on the falling in of such English estates (about half the original quantity) as confiscation had left to a family which in every Catholic rebellion from the days of my own Queen Mary to those of Charles Edward had given their blood like water and their lands like dust for the Stuarts. I assume that his Catholicism sat lightly upon a young man who in the age of Voltaire had enjoyed the personal friendship of Mirabeau.... He was (of course on the ultra-Liberal side) one of the most extreme politicians as well as one of the hardest riders and the best art-patrons of his time.... It was said that the two maddest things in the north country were his horse and himself.... He was the friend of the great Turner, of Mulready, and of many lesser artists: I wish to God he had discovered Blake.... He was most kind and affectionate to me always as child, boy, and youth. To the last he was far liker in appearance and manners to an old French nobleman than to any type of the average English gentleman.

  On the other side, influences came from the Ashburnhams, whom Fuller described two centuries and a half ago as “a family of stupendous antiquity”; settled in Sussex before the Norman Conquest. The poet took pleasure in the fidelity of John Ashburnham who “was the closest follower of Charles I. to his death,” and who cleverly arranged the King’s safe-conduct from Oxford. A barony rewarded the son of this cavalier, and an earldom followed in 1730. In the course of the eighteenth century both the Ashburnhams and the Swinburnes married into the family of the Dukes of Northumberland. All this genealogy is to be lightly passed over, but not ignored. The poet, although so ardent a republican, was no democrat, and he did not affect, like “the gardener Adam and his wife,” to “smile at the claims of long descent.”

  ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE was born in Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, on the 5th of April 1837. He was the eldest of the six children of Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne (1797-1877), by his wife Lady Jane Henrietta (1809-1896), daughter of George, third Earl of Ashburnham. The admiral was the second son of the sixth baronet, the friend of Mirabeau; he is described to me by a survivor as devoted to mechanics, with some interest in music but none in literature. Towards the close of his life the poet wrote to Mr. Thomas Hardy that his “father served as a midshipman under Collingwood, and knew Lady Hester Stanhope in her later days when an Eastern princess and prophetess. She was very civil and pleasant to him, and I always as a boy thought what fun it must have been as an experience.” From his father the poet inherited, however, little except a certain identity of colour and expression; Algernon’s features and something of his mental character being his mother’s. From her father, the third Earl, she had received a careful education, and she possessed considerable literary taste. In particular, she cultivated with ardour the French and Italian languages. Much of her youth had been spent in Florence, at a time when the elegant accomplishment for Englishwomen was, par excellence, Italian, and Lady Jane taught the elements of that tongue to her eldest son at an extremely early age. Swinburne told me that he had read the Orlando Furioso long before he heard of The Faerie Queen.

  His father’s family also had a curious connection with Italy. Algernon’s grand-uncle, Robert Swinburne, became an Austrian subject, and rose to be a general and a baron of the Holy Roman Empire. He was at the time of his death Austrian Governor of Milan. His son, Baron E. R. F. F. Swinburne, who died as lately as 1907, was Chamberlain to the Emperor Franz Josef. These were strange kinsmen for the poet who was never tired of denouncing “the plume-plucked Austrian vulture-head, twin-crested.” Though born, almost by accident, in London, the whole of Swinburne’s childhood was spent in the country, with his parents in the southern part of the Isle of Wight, and with his grandfather in Northumberland. Swinburne stated in a letter to Stedman that he was born “all but dead, and certainly was not expected to live an hour.” But he grew up a healthy boy, and passed through his childhood without anything more serious than mild attacks of the usual infantile disorders. He was, from the first, nervous and fragile in appearance, but underneath his sprite-like slenderness there lurked a wiry persistency of constitution. Admiral Swinburne rented East Dene, a large house in Bonchurch, at the eastern extremity of the village, and immediately under the high cornice of St. Boniface Down. The rambling gardens and laws of East Dene descend southward to the sea-shore, divided from it only by the masked path that leads to Luccombe, and so they practically shelve from the great trees in the shadow of the Undercliff down to the shingle and the seaweed. The view from the house south-east is over limitless ocean. Close by, to the east, is the wonderful chaos of the Landslip with its tangled lianas and romantic chasms, and to the west, the shores of Monk’s Bay and Horse Shoe Bay with their groynes and their fishermen’s boats, so that on each side there lay an enchanted Tom Tiddler’s

  Ground for emancipated children through the blissful and interminable seasons of seventy years ago.

  But although East Dene was such a paradise for an active and healthy child, it did not stand alone in Algernon’s fortunate experience. Five miles east of Bonchurch, on the romantic high-road between the Undercliff and the sea, stood the Orchard, the home of Sir Willoughby Gordon. Algernon’s uncle and aunt, Sir Henry and Lady Mary Gordon, lived at Northcourt, at Shorwell, which was about an equal distance from Bonchurch. They with their children, of whom Mrs. Disney Leith was one, made frequent visits to the grandparents’ seaside home, The Orchard, where might be constantly seen “Algernon, riding on a very small pony, led by a servant,” come to spend an enchanting day with his cousins by the sea at St. Catherine’s Point or in Puckaster Cove, or, straying farther afield, in the sinuous and leafy lanes of Niton or over the hills to Chale.

  From some stanzas addressed to his aunt, Lady Mary Gordon, in which Swinburne attempted late in life to sum up his memories of the garden at The Orchard, one may here be quoted, in which, looking far backward, he declares that —

  The sun to sport in and the cliffs to scale,

  The sea to clasp and wrestle with, till breath

  For rapture more than weariness would fail,

  All-golden gifts of dawn, whose record saith

  That time nor change may turn their life to death,

  Live not in loving thought alone, though there

  The life they live be lovelier than they were

  When clothed in present light and actual air.

  A year or two later, Algernon and his eldest sister Alice would be seen “walking on ahead of the rest over the rough grass of the Bonchurch down — he with that springy dancing step which he never entirely lost.” The surviving cousin, now Mrs. Disney Leith, has preserved a charming picture of the walks and games “up the hill,” in which the future poet took the lead of a happy band of playmates. In all his pleasures, however, although they included riding, roaming, and climbing, the sea took the foremost place. His own words are significant:

  As for the sea (he wrote to Stedman), its salt must have been in my blood before I was born. I can remember no earlier enjoyment than being held up naked in my father’s arms and brandished between his hands, then shot like a stone from a sling through the air, shouting and laughing with delight, head foremost into the coming wave.... I remember being afraid of other things, but never of the sea.

  For his aunt,
Lady Mary Gordon, who died in 1899 in her eighty-fourth year, the poet retained through life an almost passionate devotion. In some hitherto unpublished lines, written shortly before her death, he tells her that —

  Child and boy and man, one equal light

  Of loving kindness made me in your sight

  Glad always as the sea makes all shores bright.

  In the happy household at The Orchard he was always known by the romantic name of Cousin Hadji.

  The Swinburnes were a devout Anglican family, looked upon as rather “high” in those early days of ecclesiastical revival. In the midst of the poet’s early childhood, the household was thrilled by the Oxford Movement and by the formidable, yet exhilarating, charges of heresy brought against its leaders. Without going very deeply into theology, they threw in their lot with Newman and Keble, and their Anglicanism took a warmer and vivider colouring. In this the household at East Dene was fully supported by the families at Niton and at Northcourt, and Algernon Swinburne was trained in a strictly High Church atmosphere. As child and boy he was, as he afterwards put it, “brought up quasi-Catholic.” Into the religious exercises of Sunday he entered even “passionately,” and when it was his turn to read the Bible aloud or make a reply from the Catechism, those who listened early remarked how beautifully he did it. In particular, his mother insisted, and there was no need for her to urge on so ardent a pupil, that her eldest son should acquire an extended knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. This acquaintance with the text of the Bible he retained to the end of his life, and he was accustomed to be emphatic about the advantage he had received from the beauty of its language. At a very early age he was perceived to have a marked fondness for reading, and Mrs. Disney Leith retains her recollection that “Algernon was always privileged to have a book at meals.” Less has been recorded about his childish visits to Capheaton, but his own poems contain innumerable references to the effect of the bracing Northumberland landscape upon his nerves. It was the habit of the Swinburnes to spend the late summer and early autumn in the north, so as to escape the sultry heats of Bonchurch and Niton, exposed in August to the full glare of the sea. A large cousinhood gathered at Capheaton “in those bright autumn days, where everything seemed to combine for the delight of youth — a lake to row and sail on, lovely gardens and woods to roam or play in, and, above all, abundance of ponies to ride.” The rough and manly aspect of Northumberland, where —

  Through fell and moorland,

  And salt-sea foreland,

  Our noisy norland

  Resounds and rings, gave an element of strength to Swinburne’s genius, just as the rich southward boskage of the Isle of Wight gave it sweetness and melody. All through his life, his idea of a southern scene was of looking from the ferny dells of Bonchurch out over gardens to the Channel; a northern one, of looking eastward over the great lion-coloured sands of Bamborough towards a grey and storm-shaken Northumbrian ocean.

  This rapidly-developing intelligence taxed and yet stimulated the powers of his mother, who instructed a “soul-hydroptic” pupil in the elements of history, of religion, and of the languages of Italy and France. His amiable docility was extreme; he responded with astonishing eagerness to all the advances of knowledge, and his demands soon became greater than Lady Jane could afford to respond to. It was determined, as he was destined for Eton, to entrust him to the care of Collingwood Foster Fenwick, the rector of Brook, a parish at the other end of the island. Northcourt, the home of Algernon’s uncle and aunt Gordon, was about half-way between Bonchurch and Brook, and an easy pony-ride from the latter. The link between the families, therefore, was not broken. Mr. Fenwick expressed himself astonished at finding the child already so deeply taught in certain directions. He was not, however, either at home or at Brook, allowed to read any fiction, Lady Jane Swinburne having firm views on this subject. There seems to be some little doubt as to the date when this embargo was raised. Lord Redesdale thinks it coincided with Algernon’s arrival at Eton. The poet himself told me that the earliest novel he was ever allowed to see was Dombey and Son, and that he read it in the serial numbers; these were brought to a conclusion in 1848, but we are not obliged to believe that they circulated immediately in the Swinburne households.

  Swinburne entered Eton at the beginning of the summer half of 1849, being then twelve years of age. His father and mother brought him to school and at once sent for his first cousin, Algernon Bertram Mitford, that they might put him under the care of a kinsman five weeks his senior. I had the singular good fortune to be able to obtain from this cousin, afterwards the first Lord Redesdale (1837-1916), a very full and picturesque account of the poet’s arrival and behaviour at school. He was to “look after him,” and although there was little difference in the boys’ ages, the elder had been sent to school when he was nine years old and was well versed in all the ways of Eton, “mysteries bewildering to the uninitiated.” Lord Redesdale writes:

  What a fragile little creature he seemed as he stood there between his father and mother, with his wondering eyes fixed upon me! Under his arm he hugged his Bowdler’s Shakespeare, a very precious treasure bound in brown leather with, for a marker, a narrow slip of ribbon, blue I think, with a button of that most heathenish marqueterie called Tunbridge ware dangling from the end of it. He was strangely tiny. His limbs were small and delicate, and his sloping shoulders looked far too weak to carry his great head, the size of which was exaggerated by the tousled mass of red hair standing almost at right angles to it. Hero-worshippers talk of his hair as having been a “golden aureole.” At that time there was nothing golden about it. Red, violent, aggressive red it was, unmistakable red, like burnished copper. His features were small and beautiful, chiselled as daintily as those of some Greek sculptor’s masterpiece. His skin was very white — not unhealthy, but a transparent tinted white, such as one secs in the petals of some roses. His face was the very replica of that of his dear mother, and she was one of the most refined and lovely of women. His red hair must have come from the Admiral’s side, for I never heard of a red-haired Ashburnham.

  Sir George Young, who was six months Swinburne’s junior, was introduced to him by Joynes in September 1849, and saw a good deal of him that half and the next; and then again a year later. He gives a slightly more elaborate account of Swinburne’s appearance. “His hair was of three different colours and textures, red, dark red, and bright, pure gold.” Both combine to describe him as at that time “a fascinating, most lovable little child,” and both speak of a certain isolation which marked him off from others; “he was not at home among Eton boys,” says Sir George Young; his cousin tells us he was “shy and reserved.” But let Lord Redesdale continue his clear and invaluable recollections:

  We rapidly became friends. Of course, being in separate houses, we could not be so constantly together as if we had both been in the same house. I was at Evans’s and Durnford was my tutor. Swinburne was at Joynes’s and of course Joynes was his tutor. Still we often met, and pretty frequently breakfasted together, he with me, or I with him. Chocolate in his room, tea in mine. The guest brought his own “order” of rolls and butter, and the feast was made rich by the addition of sixpennyworth of scraped beef or ham from Joe Groves’s, a small sock-shop which was almost immediately under Joynes’s house. Little gifts such as our humble purses could afford cemented our friendship: I still possess and treasure an abbreviated edition of Froissart’s Chronicles which Algernon gave me (in 1850) now, alas! sixty-five years ago.

  He boarded at the house in Keate’s Lane now known as Keate House. It was “Joynes’” then. Mrs. Warre-Cornish, who has collected some of the legends of the houses in those days, tells the following story of a visit paid by Lady Jane Swinburne to her son when he had the measles — she read Shakespeare to him through the day:

  ... and when she left him at tea-time to take tea with Mrs. Joynes, the maid brought from home was requested by the boy to continue reading whilst he took his. A pot of jam suddenly emptied on the reader’s head wa
s a sign that this interpretation of Shakespeare did not soothe the patient. The other story is connected with the night-dose for wintry colds. This one was brought in to a boy, who stood up on his bed instead of lying on it, and whose wild, rolling eye accompanied a passionate outpouring of verse. The ministering incomer feared delirium, but was told that it was “only little Swinburne reciting as usual.”

  He was, like everybody else, now and then indisposed, and Sir George Young remembers, on another occasion, seeing him in bed when “his little white face, great aureole of hair, and green eyes, looked at me from the pillow.” Swinburne’s physical strangeness was the object of wonder at Eton, but he was preserved from bullying by a certain dignity and by his unquestionable courage. He was not interfered with since he interfered with no one else, and Sir George Young admits that, even as quite a small boy, there was “something a little formidable about him.”

  There would naturally be a section of his schoolfellows to whom there was nothing attractive in his temperament, and when I applied to the late Lord St. Aldwyn, who was his contemporary at Eton, he could recall nothing except that Swinburne was “a horrid little boy, with a big red head and a pasty complexion, who looked as though a course of physical exercise would have done him good.” The disproportionate size of his head — which was noticeable all through his life, although ridiculously denied after his death — was an object of amazement at Eton. His hat was the largest in the school, when he was only twelve years of age. The present Provost recounts how one day, in a schoolroom only approached by a sort of ladder, Swinburne’s wild and glowing head appeared one dark morning very late for school as if out of the floor, and how the Master in charge, who was W. G. Cookesley (1802-1880), paused to exclaim, “Ha! here’s the rising sun at last!” Cookesley, who was a scholar and an intelligent man, ought to have made out that Swinburne was something extraordinary.