He was prepared for Oxford, in a desultory way, by the Rev. John Wilkinson, perpetual curate of Cambo in Northumberland, which was his grandfather’s parish. This worthy man lamented that the lad was too clever by half, and would never study. By far the greater part of these years seems to have been spent out of doors, on the Northumbrian moor and sea-coast, in the forest at Ashburnham, or upon the southern shores of the Isle of Wight. Around Capheaton the boy rode indefatigably, often in the sympathetic company of a cousin, and “many a masterpiece of the Victorian poets was recited — during a spirited canter or a leisurely saunter on horseback through those beautiful Northumbrian roads or fields.” About the middle of Christmas 1854 (if we may trust the reference to Balaklava), it suddenly came upon him that it was all very well to fancy or dream of “deadly danger” and forlorn hopes and cavalry charges, when he had never run any greater risk than a football “rouge,” and so he determined to scale the Culver as “a chance of testing my nerve in face of death which could not be surpassed.” Culver Cliff is the eastern headland of the Isle of Wight, a great face of chalk picturesquely striated with bands of flint. It was a precipice impregnable from the sea-foot, or at least Swinburne believed that it had never been so climbed by a human being, He performed the feat, which he described in a letter published by Mrs. Disney Leith shortly after his death. The story is admirably told, and closes with a domestic touch which is delightful. The deed of daring could not be concealed from his mother:
Of course she wanted to know why I had done such a thing, and when I told her she laughed a short, sweet laugh most satisfactory to the young ear, and said, “Nobody ever thought you were a coward, my boy.” I said that was all very well, but how could I tell till I tried? “But you won’t do it again?” she said. I replied, of course not — where could be the fun? I knew now that it could be done, and I only wanted to do it because nobody thought it could.
A good deal of highly autobiographical colour may be gleaned from the drama of The Sisters (1892), where Redgie Clavering, to those who know him, is largely Algernon Swinburne’s recollection of himself as a youth of eighteen. Here we have the tendency “to ride forbidden horses, and break bounds on days forbidden”; the passion for “a swim against a charging sea,” until “a breaker got you down”; the “light, soft, shining, curly hair, too boyish for his years”; the study of “Dodsley’s great old plays”; the fretting at an enforced idleness. The scene is laid alternately in Northumberland, and in a southern garden by the sea, full of nightingales and roses. But above all, here is the hero, not long come from Eton, full of poetry and ambition, but yearning more than for all other things for the experience of a soldier or a sailor, and fuming because he is considered “not old enough to serve.” And there are other points, even more intimate, in the sum of which the figure of Reginald Clavering is revealed as a close and conscious portrait of the poet as he saw himself, looking back over thirty-seven years. In this we are not left to conjecture, for in writing to Mrs. Lynn Linton (Oct. 16, 1892) he said that he “never wrote anything so autobiographical as Redgie’s speech about Northumberland in the Eton midsummer holidays”:
The crowning county of England — yes, the best!...
Have you and I, then, raced across its moors
Till horse and boy were well-nigh mad with glee
So often, summer and winter, home from school,
And not found that out? Take the streams away,
The country would be sweeter than the south
Anywhere: give the south our streams, would it
Be fit to match our borders? Flower and crag,
Burnside and boulder, heather and whin, — you don’t
Dream you can match them south of this? And then
If all the unwater’d country were as flat
As the Eton playing-fields, give it back our burns,
And set them singing through a sad south world
And try to make them dismal as its fens, —
They won’t be.
And to Edward Burne-Jones he wrote (Oct. 15, 1802), “I think I have succeeded in making a nice young fellow out of my own recollections and aspirations.”
Swinburne had passed the age of eighteen when, in 1855, he went abroad for the first time, spending several weeks in Germany in the company of his uncle, General Thomas Ashburnham (d. 1872). He was not then nor in later life attracted by the German language or literature, and his works contain scarce a reference to that country. What did on this occasion impress him was the return voyage from Ostend (by a slip of memory called “Calais” in a poem of his old age). About midnight the packet was caught in midchannel by a thunderstorm strong enough to delay her some three good hours over the due time. This storm haunted the poet’s memory, and was described by him repeatedly, in prose and verse, almost until the end of his life. The version given in his review of L’Homme qui rit, written fourteen years after the experience, is perhaps the finest specimen extant of Swinburne’s descriptive prose, with its “race and riot of lights, beautiful and rapid as a course of shining Oeeanides along the tremulous floor of the sea.” He was fond of saying that the spectacle of this storm touched his nerves “with a more vivid pleasure than music or wine,” and that it raised his spirit “to the very summit of vision and delight.” The recurrent effect upon him of this particular scene is characteristic. Swinburne did not live, like Wordsworth, in a perpetual communion with nature, but exceptional and even rare moments of concentrated observation wakened in him an ecstasy which he was then careful to brood upon, to revive, and perhaps at last to exaggerate. As a rule he saw little of the world around him, but what he did see was presented to him in a blaze of lime-light.
Mrs. Disney Leith informs me that Algernon was finally prepared for college by James Russell Woodford (1820-85), afterwards Bishop of Ely, but then vicar of Kempsford, near Fairford in Gloucestershire. I remember Swinburne’s speaking of Woodford with great cordiality some twenty years later.
During the three years and a half which Swinburne spent at Oxford, Robert Scott was the Master of his college. But there is no evidence that he impressed his individuality on Swinburne in any degree whatever, and, as Lord Bryce reminds me, the head of an Oxford College in those days was very little in touch with undergraduates. In 1856 the peculiarly favorable conditions afterwards enjoyed by Balliol had hardly begun to develop. Jowett, who had failed to secure the Mastership in 1854, had been appointed Regius Professor of Greek in the following year, but at the moment when Swinburne appeared at the University, Jowett was still the centre of disagreeable contention, and exposed to attacks on the ground of heresy. He was becoming more and more valued by the younger dons in Balliol itself, but his schemes for reform were still much debated and his personal intervention opposed. It was later that Jowett began to take a place in Swinburne’s life, and it is to be observed that the latter always insisted upon a distinction which throws an important light upon his attitude to the college. He used to say, very firmly, that the Master of Balliol was officially a stranger to him, but Mr. Jowett an honoured and lifelong friend.
Of Swinburne’s conduct as a freshman little has as yet been revealed, and perhaps there was little to reveal.
The earliest impressions of him which I have been able to collect are those of Mr. Donald Crawford, who has been obliging enough to put down his recollections for me. Mr. Crawford came to Balliol in the October term of 1856, and made Swinburne’s acquaintance immediately. They belonged to different college groups, but they were in the habit of taking Sunday walks together. Swinburne took no part in the ordinary outdoor amusements, and never appeared at wine-parties or at breakfasts; he remained much in his rooms. It was presently announced that he was “writing poetry,” and even “engaged upon a tragedy.” (This was doubtless much later.) Fragments of his verse were occasionally repeated, but were “not much appreciated by the rank and file of the college,” and indeed were thought very ridiculous. Mr. Crawford’s recollection of Swinburne’s appearance during hi
s first year at college is valuable:
A slight girlish figure, below the middle height, with a great shock of red hair, which seemed almost to touch his narrow sloping shoulders. He had the pallor which often goes with red hair. There was a dainty grace about his appearance, but it was disappointing that, like some figure in a pre-Raphaelite canvas, where he would not have been out of place, there was a want of youthful freshness in his face. He walked delicately, like Agag, with a mounting gait, as if picking his steps. He had a pleasant musical voice, and his manner and address, slightly shy and reserved, had a particular charm of refinement and good breeding.
He seems, apart from his striking physical appearance, to have attracted no sort of attention at Oxford, either among undergraduates or dons. One contemporary tells me that he lost about this time the fairy delicacy of his features and complexion, and became “very ugly”; the same informant says that he “recovered his good looks later.” But this is categorically denied by Professor T. E. Holland, who writes to me, “I never thought him ugly, or that his appearance altered.” It is vaguely reported that he was, as a freshman, “very reserved” and “rather sullen”; and still more vaguely that he passed through a recrudescence of Anglican ritualism. Professor Holland remembers that he first heard of him as “a most promising young fellow,” who, it was feared, had developed an admiration of Charles I., and a tendency toward High Church practices, “a brand, as it were, to be plucked out of the fire by the Old Mortality.” This is possible, for many of his contemporaries went through it, but on the other hand Lord Bryce saw no trace of it in 1858 when he first knew him, and he now doubts it. Keats has reminded us that “the imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment.” This was doubtless the case with Swinburne at the age of nineteen, He would feel himself solitary and undecided, conscious of latent powers which nobody suspected, and of ambitions which nobody comprehended. For the ordinary pursuits of young men at college he had a silent disdain, and did not encourage tutorial hopes by any application to the round of studies. Meanwhile, he was following his own course, devouring the literature of five languages and revolving a vast system of dreams.
Before leaving home for Oxford, Swinburne burned “every scrap of MS. he had in the world,” and during his life as a freshman we do not hear of his attempting composition, for Mr. Crawford’s recollection probably refers to 1858.
It was much to be observed that in later life, though he spoke often and in affectionate terms of Eton, Swinburne was never betrayed into the smallest commendation of Oxford. He was, indeed, unwilling to mention the University, and if obliged to do so, it was with a gesture of impatience and a reference to “the foggy damp of Oxonian atmosphere.” Long afterwards, in late middle life, he railed against Matthew Arnold for his “effusive Oxonolatry,” and earlier he had contrived to analyse and commend “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis” without so much as naming the “sweet city with her dreaming spires” which is the very substance of those poems. He used to express the view that an Oxford resident never dies, having never lived, but ceases. Much misapprehension, much exasperation, must have gone to build up Swinburne’s dislike of Oxford, for he yielded as little as Dryden did to “the gross flattery of universities,” and the more he knew of Oxford the more he seemed to hate it. He disliked the ecclesiastical side thoroughly; and of course was out of sympathy with ordinary undergraduate life. Lord Bryce remembers seeing him once in a canoe, navigating it with considerable difficulty.
Towards the beginning of his second year, he began to make friends, who were all, so far as we can perceive, older than himself. Apparently the earliest of these was Edwin Hatch, who, a nonconformist undergraduate of Pembroke College, had recently entered the Church of England, and was attracting a good deal of notice in Oxford. Hatch was already writing much for periodicals and dictionaries, and must have been the earliest practising man of letters known to Swinburne. He was a great organiser, and he had instituted in his college a sort of Brotherhood of Letters, in which Swinburne shyly took some part. Hatch introduced him to a future poet and a future painter, to Richard Watson Dixon and to Spencer Stanhope; but each of these men was Swinburne’s senior by four years. John Nichol of Glasgow, since 1855 at Balliol College, was also of their age, but he formed a closer tie with Swinburne, founded on deeper community of interest than Hatch showed. Another very early friend was Thomas Hill Green, the future philosopher, who was a year older than Swinburne, and had entered Balliol College in October 1855. Green, who was inactive and shy, gave as yet to the dons little promise of a brilliant future, but he and Swinburne had a good deal to say to one another, and much fun to communicate, during the long country walks in which they both delighted. Swinburne had some few still older friends in Oxford. One, for whom he expressed a warm admiration, was Manuel John Johnson, the astronomer (1805-59), then keeper of the Radcliffe Observatory. It was Nichol who drew the attention of Jowett to Swinburne’s remarkable qualities; and by its own maturity and fulness the mind of Nichol exercised a strong influence over that of Swinburne, not altogether in a useful direction, since, while the ardour and intellectual independence of the young Scotchman were sympathetic, he was ready to encourage and so exaggerate some of Swinburne’s weaknesses.
On the other hand, Swinburne attributed to Nichol’s teaching a steadying influence on his own intellect, and in 1859 declared that he had received “valuable help in the study of Logic” from him, naively adding that this was “in a space of time necessarily short.” Nichol did not make many friends, and he was afflicted by a sort of Carlylese moroseness; but later on this passed away, and Nichol became prominent in the counsels of the Old Mortality Society, which was founded by him in November 1850, and which at first circled round himself. It was founded for the purpose of affording to its members “such intellectual pastime and recreation as should seem most suitable and agreeable.” To belong to the Old Mortality became a considerable distinction, for the six original members were — besides Nichol and Swinburne — Dicey, George Rankine Luke (“our chief of men in our college days,” whose career of high promise was cut short by drowning in the Isis in 1862), George Birkbeck Hill, and Algernon Grenfell; while T. H. Green, Pater, J. A. Symonds, Bywater, Caird, and those eminent survivors, Professor Holland and Lord Bryce, were afterwards included. The society met in one another’s rooms once a week in term-time, and read either essays or passages chosen by the host. The meetings, Professor Holland tells me, invariably took place after dinner, over cups of coffee. Although Nichol avoided general companionship, he was very assiduous in cultivating his particular friends. Who these were have just been mentioned, and there exists a large photographic group of them, where Swinburne is discovered near the centre of the front, a prominence which he owes, no doubt, to his diminutive size. Of his contributions to debate none are preserved, but we learn that on the 13th of February 1857, during the absence of Nichol, who was ill, Swinburne praised the satiric genius of Dryden to the detriment of that of Pope and Byron.
Lord Bryce remembers a meeting in Swinburne’s rooms in 1858, at which the host read Browning’s essay prefixed to the forged Letters of Shelley; and afterwards repeated, or rather chanted, to his friends a few of Browning’s poems, in particular, “The Statue and the Bust,”
“The Heretic’s Tragedy,” and “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” Of those present only Swinburne himself and Nichol had, so far as Lord Bryce can recall, ever read any of Browning’s poems. Two or three years later everybody was reading them. Swinburne had in those days an immense admiration for Ruskin. Lord Bryce recollects that one Sunday afternoon, when he dropped in upon him, Swinburne took down a volume and read aloud, with admirable expression, a long description of an old boat lying on the shore, and of all it had been and had seen.
Already Swinburne knew far more of English poetical literature than either Nichol or any other of the group, and stood alone among them as wide
ly read in French and Italian. Nichol once remarked to Lord Bryce, “He is the one among us who certainly has genius.” No one of his friends of the Old Mortality doubted that; the only question was whether his strange erratic mind would ever concentrate itself upon the production of a large piece of work. Already Swinburne was curiously detached from most of the common interests of humanity. T. H. Green was accustomed to chuckle as he described a meeting of the Old Mortality, where he read an essay on the development of Christian Dogma. He happened to look up once from his paper, and nearly burst out laughing at the sight of Swinburne, whose face wore an expression compounded of unutterable ennui and naïf astonishment that men whom he respected could take interest in such a subject.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 353