During the holidays of that year, 1849, Swinburne’s parents travelled in the Lakes, and took Algernon with them. In September they all visited Rydal Mount, where the aged Wordsworth received them with great civility. Miss Elizabeth Sewell (1815-1906) was present on this very interesting occasion, and made the following entry in her journal:
He [Mr. Wordsworth] was so very nice to Algernon, especially at last, that I could have cried, as Algernon did when we went away.... Lady Jane said what a pleasure it had been to bring Algernon, and how he had looked forward to it, as he was already acquainted with his writings. Wordsworth’s answer was, “Yes, he supposed Algernon might have read ‘We are Seven’ and some other little things. There was nothing in his writings that would do the boy harm, and there were some things that might do him good.” Some observation was made about Algernon’s not forgetting his visit, and Wordsworth’s words were, “He did not think Algernon would forget him.”
Wordsworth died six months later, and Swinburne told me that when the news reached Eton it “darkened the April sunshine” for him.
There is a general agreement that an almost immediate development of Swinburne’s intellect followed his arrival at Eton. His bringing up at home had been scrupulously strict, but his mother demanded from him no further protestations or promises, except that he would not look at Byron’s poems; she felt that a brain so precocious could be fed no longer upon food for babes. Lord Redesdale becomes again our guide:
His school work was prepared, as in the case of other boys, in his room; his reading for pleasure was done in the boys’ library in Weston’s yard. I can see him now sitting perched up Turk-or-tailor-wise in one of the windows looking out on the yard, with some huge old-world tome, almost as big as himself, upon his lap, the afternoon sun setting on fire the great mop of red hair.
This is confirmed by Mr. Luxmoore, who remembers seeing him at the top of a ladder in the College Library, with his bright head against the dark book-shelves. “Few boys had access to the College Library then, but Swinburne found out the way, and was constantly seen there.”
Another contemporary describes him pointed out to visitors by “Grub” Brown, the librarian, as one of the sights of Eton, where he sat, day after day, in a gallery-window of the library with a folio across his knees. He read the English poets with such assiduity, and over so wide a range, that it could seem to Sir George Young difficult to say what, as a little schoolboy, Swinburne “did not know and did not appreciate of English literature.” His copy of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets bears on it, in his handwriting, the date April 18, 1850.
Earlier than this his mother had given him a copy of Beattie’s Minstrel, a poem then still much admired by readers of mature years. His extraordinary and lifelong devotion to the minor dramatists of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages dates from his early Eton days.
Thirty years later, when Swinburne was looking over my book-shelves, he took down a copy of Lamb’s Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets, and, turning to me, said, “That book taught me more than any other in the world, — that and the Bible.” He wrote (in 1885) that the plays of Marston had dwelt in his memory since “I first read them at the advanced age of twelve,” and (in 1887) that those of so obscure a writer as Nabbes had been familiar to him “ever since my thirteenth year.” He induced his mother to buy for him Dyce’s edition of the Works of Marlowe when it was quite a new book, and this was issued in 1850. In the same year he was in possession of Massinger and Ford. Swinburne constantly attributed to himself a love and some budding knowledge of most of the rarer Elizabethans at the extremely precocious age of thirteen. Again we must lay Lord Redesdale under contribution; the description refers to a slightly later date, perhaps to 1851 or 1852.
Algernon was now devouring the great classics of France and Italy. His memory was wonderful, his power of quotation almost unlimited. We used to take long walks together in Windsor Forest and in the Home Park, where the famous oak of Herne the Hunter was still standing, a white, lightning-blasted skeleton of a tree, a fitting haunt for “fairies, black, grey, green and white,” and a very favourite goal of our expeditions. As he walked along with that peculiar dancing step of his, his eyes gleaming with enthusiasm, and his hair, like the Zazzera of the old Florentines, tossed about by the wind, he would pour out in his unforgettable voice the treasures which he had gathered at his last sitting. Other boys would watch him with amazement, looking upon him as a sort of inspired elfin-something belonging to another sphere.... He carried with him one magic charm — he was absolutely courageous. He did not know what fear meant.
Swinburne spent four years and a half at school, and his attitude to Eton has been variously appraised. But the late Vice-Provost (Francis Warre Cornish) and many others have attested to the warmth of his feeling for the school, and the kindliness of his reminiscences. As has been excellently pointed out, he was not made of the stuff which moulds the enthusiastic schoolboy, and yet the old traditions and chivalrous memories of Eton sank into the depths of his soul. His Commemoration Ode of 1891 records with glowing hyperbole the unfading devotion of a lifetime, and he never lost his tender and wistful affection for the Forest, the Brocas, Cuckoo Weir, and the school library.
Still the reaches of the river, still the light on field and hill, Still the memories held aloft as lamps for hope’s young fire to fill, Shine, and while the light of England lives shall shine for England still.
These lines were inscribed on the great wreath of ilex and laurel, sent to his burial in 1909, “with grateful homage from Eton,” and nothing would have pleased him better than this tribute from the school to which he looked back with unfailing happiness. Every word he said in gratitude to Eton may be contrasted with his bitter references to Oxford.
In those days the discipline of athletics was not rigidly enforced, and Swinburne played no games. His references to football are perfunctory. We are told that he never possessed a cricket bat. On the other hand, he could swim and walk for ever. As the sea at Bonchurch, so at Eton the river took up a great deal of his attention. He “passed” early in 1851, and “passing” means, as all Etonians know, much to the schoolboy swimmer. In later years Algernon used to dwell fondly on the various stages of his apprenticeship — Cuckoo Weir, and Athens, and Upper Hope, and finally that glorious lasher and test of the finished athlete, Boveney Weir. In the summer holidays of 1851, Sir George Young stayed with the Swinburnes at Bonchurch. Algernon was consumed by a passion for the sea, and, in their daily bathes in the cove at East Dene, used to make the gardener push the jumping-stage further into the surf than his friend and schoolfellow, though a skilful swimmer, quite enjoyed.
Swinburne’s third year at Eton was marked by a considerable development of his mental powers, and by the awakening of a certain ambition. In this year, 1852, after reading much French with Henry Tarver, he won the second Prince Consort’s prize for French and Italian, and got “sent up for good” for his Greek elegiacs. On this last feat he constantly dwelt with a fond complacency, and for many years he kept this copy of Greek verse carefully. He lent this and an earlier exercise in elegiacs to Lord Houghton in 1864, but they are no longer forthcoming.
In after years, Swinburne plainly stated that he destroyed “root and branch” every specimen of his English verses written before he went to Oxford. It is certain that he thought he had “burnt every scrap,” yet one poem of over two hundred lines escaped him and still exists in MS. This is “The Triumph of Gloriana,” which was probably written in 1851. It is an exercise in couplets, describing a visit of Queen Victoria to Eton, “the Temple of Loyalty.” No touch of realism enables us to guess what particular visit is intended. “Forth from the moated castle” of Windsor “troops pass out,” escorting “the fairy dame” to Eton’s “secret sanctuary,” and back again. The diction of the piece is purely eighteenth century, and seems to be founded, like the versification, on a reverent study of Pope’s Homer, with a touch of The Pleasures of Memory thrown in. There is n
ot the slightest indication that the author was acquainted with any of the poets of the seventeenth or the nineteenth centuries. The verse is smooth, monotonous, and diversified by frequent alexandrines. A boyish sneer at Harrow, “Wrapt in a mist the Theban mountain lies,” — Eton being “bright Athens,” — is the only sparkle in a dull mass of imitative correctness. Not a foot, not a syllable, reveals the coming genius. The only quality of the coming Swinburne which “The Triumph of Gloriana” exemplifies is his marvellous power of sustained imitation at will.
It is particularly important to notice that almost all Swinburne’s literary convictions were formed while he was at school. We have already seen that this was the case with the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. In like manner the passion for Victor Hugo began in 1852, being started by the reading of Notre-Dame de Paris with Tarver. Long afterwards, speaking of Hugo in a private letter, Swinburne remarked, “A Eton je m’enivrais de ses drames.” Some months earlier than this he had fallen under the spell of Landor, and in particular of the Hellenics. He told Landor, when he saw him at Florence in 1864, that “his poems had first given him inexplicable pleasure and a sort of blind relief when he was a small fellow of twelve.” He added that his “first recollection of them” was of “The Song of the Hours” in the Iphigenia. This is the chorus beginning, “To each an urn we bring,” and it is difficult to think of a lyric less likely to appeal to the ear of a child. Nothing could show more remarkably the precocious ripeness of judgment of this boy of less than thirteen than that, without contemporary opinion to guide him or a friend to indicate his course, he should unwaveringly discover in “The Hamadryad” and “Acon and Rhodope” beauty of a higher class than in any of the idyllic poems of Tennyson which were then so extravagantly in fashion. Walter Savage Landor became spontaneously the
... name set for love apart,
Held lifelong in my heart, for whom for more than half a century no eulogy was to be too ardent, no moral and intellectual gratitude too tender. It was under the auspices of Marlowe, and Landor, and Hugo, strange idols for a little boy at an English public school, that Swinburne used to take long walks in Windsor Forest, always with a single friend, “dancing as he went, and reciting from his inexhaustible memory the works which he had been studying in his favourite sunlighted window.”
To such a nature, holidays afforded the same stimulus as school, and perhaps in a purer form. Through these years, Algernon appeared to those who saw him at home to be more, and not less, of a child than his age proclaimed him. He led a life like that of the stainless occupants of Paradise, in a perpetual frolie on the downs, in the gardens, by the sea of the Isle of Wight or of Northumberland. This felicity was diversified by visits to Northcourt, and to Ashburnham Place, where Algernon adopted airs of chivalrous protection to his little cousin and playfellow, Lady Katherine, with whom, each mounted on a robust pony, he took endless rides in the forest. Another cousin, Mrs. Disney Leith, has recorded that he was now, as always, a reckless although a fearless rider, and he was not infrequently thrown from having lapsed into a dreamy half-unconsciousness, but never with serious results.
Charles Dickens, staying at Bonchurch, noted with approval “the golden-haired lad of the Swinburnes,” who played so gracefully and gaily with his own boys. All the evidence points to the fairy-like sprightliness and unearthly charm of this wonderful child over whose bliss no shadow of a cloud had yet passed, or seemed likely to pass.
The great simplicity of the boy, and his absence of affectation, rendered still more singular the contrast between this puerile, or almost infantile, gaiety and insouciance and the intense seriousness of his attitude towards the intellectual and imaginative domains. This fay tripping in the sunshine was already, in several directions, erudite far beyond his years, and in particular he had accepted, with perfect consciousness and for the rest of his life, ambitions, aims, adorations, which were diametrically opposed to the experience and hopes of all who surrounded him. It was no part of the scheme of happiness which his family planned for him that he should be a republican and a poet of the Hugo and Landor type.
Meanwhile, it is not certain in what year, but probably in 1852, Lady Jane Swinburne solemnly presented him to one from whom no dangerous influences could be anticipated, and whose example might be advantageous. This was Samuel Rogers, who had refused the Laureateship at the death of Wordsworth on account of his own advanced age. Lady Jane said that she had ventured to bring her son to visit Mr. Rogers, “because he thinks more of poets than of any other people in the world.” The sagacious old author of The Pleasures of Memory was greatly touched, and at the close of the interview he solemnly laid his hand on Algernon’s head, and said, “I prophesy that you will be a poet too!” This visit did not lead Swinburne to reject Odes et Ballades in favour of Italy, but it stimulated his sense of the hieratic dignity of poets. Mr. Rogers was perhaps hardly a primate of song, but he was accredited in the service of Apollo, and he was extremely venerable. The interview, by Swinburne’s own later declaration, confirmed the boy in his poetic calling.
It has been said that at Eton he had an extraordinarily wide knowledge of the Greek poets, and that he read them with ease in the original. His closest school-friend insists that this is incorrect, or should be reserved for the record of his advanced Oxford life. We are told that he left Eton knowing no more Greek than any intelligent schoolboy should, and the unquestioned success of his elegiacs was due more to his extraordinary gift of imitation than to any precocious familiarity with the Greek language. The mediocrity of his record, on arriving at Oxford, bears out this view. It is certain, however, that he was devoted to that charming anthology, the old Eton Poetac Graeci, to which he owed his earliest introduction to Theocritus and Alcaeus, and on which was founded his lifelong passion for Sappho. Long afterwards, as Mr. A. G. C. Liddell has reported, he was accustomed to say that the Poetae Graeci “had played a large part in fostering the love of poetry in his mind.” He is said by another schoolfellow to have complained that he found Theocritus “the hardest Greek lesson of the week,” the lyric poets already attracting him far more vividly than the bucolic. His appreciation of Latin poetry was less cordial than his love of Greek, and remained so all his life. Catullus alone gave him pleasure of an ecstatic kind. Horace he disliked, and Lucretius bored him. In after years, when Raper expressed wonder that Swinburne did not enjoy the poetry of Virgil, greatest of all masters of alliteration and assonation, he replied that it was due to his having been made to learn that poet by heart at Eton. He said he liked to wait till a poet learned him by heart, and took possession of his soul as Sappho had done. He attributed his want of sympathy with most of the Latin classics to his having been forced to repeat them under compulsion.
The accounts of Algernon’s behaviour in childhood and as a schoolboy have reached us through the memories of those who regarded him with love and admiration, but they are unanimous in representing him as unaggressive and self-contained, gentle, courteous, and gay. Lord Redesdale tells me that at school he was what is picturesquely called “a bag of nerves,” and that the smallest obstacle ruffled him. But, although so irritable, he was not overbearing. It is highly probable that the arrogance which marred certain phases of his middle life, was absent in his childhood as it vanished from his serene old age. These superficial faults, excrescences upon his native character, were without question the result of a disturbance of his nervous system, which had not begun at Eton. From earliest childhood he had the trick, whenever he grew the least excited, of stiffly drawing down his arms from his shoulders and giving quick vibrating jerks with his hands. His family always insisted that he spoilt his shoulders and made them sloping by this trick which dragged them down. If he happened to be seated at a moment of excitement, he would jerk his legs and twist his feet also, though with less violence. At such times his face would grow radiant with a rapt expression, very striking to witness. All this developed itself in early childhood, and alarmed his mother, who applied to a specialist
for advice. After a close examination the physician’s report was that these motions resulted from “an excess of electric vitality,” and that any attempt to stop them would be harmful. Accordingly, to the very end of his life, whenever Swinburne was happy, or interested, or amused, he jerked his arms and fluttered his little delicate hands.
A certain change took place in Swinburne’s character at the opening of his last year at school. He became less amenable to discipline and idler at his work. Francis Warre Cornish, when he was a new boy early in 1853, had the poet pointed out to him as “Mad Swinburne,” and he tells me that he has never forgotten the impression he received of the strange figure. Through the summer of 1853 Swinburne had increasing trouble with Joynes of a rebellious kind, and in consequence of some representations he did not return to Eton, although nothing had been said during the previous half about his leaving, and although at the last he seemed to be doing particularly well. When he left school he was within a few places of the headmaster’s division. He had now entered his seventeenth year.
CHAPTER II
OXFORD (1853-1859)
Algernon Swinburne left school in the summer of 1853, and he matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, on the 24th of January 1850. How he spent these two years and a half is not at present very clear. He was sixteen when he left Eton and he was nearly nineteen when he went to the University. These are important years in the life of most active and original minds, but we have no evidence that they left much trace upon his. There is reason to believe that at the back of his head, when he made further stay at Eton impossible for him, was the passionate wish to be trained for the army. He would have turned out to be a singular field-officer, it must be presumed, yet cavalry was what he was after. He saw himself galloping to the destruction of kings on a charger as black as night. He said himself that the Balaklava Charge (Oct. 25, 1854) “eclipsed all other visions,” and the date of this proves that the desire to be a beau sabreur was no passing one. “To be prepared for such a chance as that was the one dream of my life.” And, so late as 1891, he told Edward Burne-Jones that “the cavalry service” had been the ideal of his early hopes. His mother was not altogether against the plan, and on one occasion, probably late in 1854, the question was finally pressed by Algernon to a family decision. The parents took three days to think the matter over, and then told the boy it could not be. “My father resolutely stamped out my ambition for a soldier’s work,” on account, mainly, of the slightness and shortness of his son’s figure. But Swinburne continued to regret the military profession, until some twenty years afterwards, when, in commenting to me on his growing deafness, he added with a sigh, “So that, after all, I suppose I should not have done well to be a soldier!”
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 352