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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  ‘The New Sirens,’ I had mainly by heart in a time of childhood just ignorant of teens,” that is to say, in 1849, the year of their publication. The effect of this boyish enthusiasm was partly weakened, when Swinburne began to attend Arnold’s lectures in 1857, by the prejudice of Nichol, who, full of ardour for Carlyle, deprecated the Hellenism of Arnold, and who is doubtless the “profane alien” who scandalised Swinburne by defining the author of Empedocles as “David the son of Goliath.” Swinburne’s mature regard for Matthew Arnold should be studied in the very elaborate and generous monograph he published ten years later. In this he touches the various qualities of Arnold’s style in prose and verse with extraordinary fulness.

  At the beginning of his third year at Oxford, under the stimulus of Jowett’s conversation, Swinburne paid a closer attention to his studies than he had hitherto vouchsafed, and he took a second in moderations. In the course of this year, too, he won the Taylorian scholarship for French and Italian. With Italy and France, indeed, his thoughts were now occupied, even to excess. In January the fanatical Carbonaro, Orsini, attempted to assassinate Napoleon III., of whose character and person Swinburne had formed a violent hatred. The crime supplied the poet with a new hero, and having procured a portrait of Orsini, he hung it up in his sitting-room, opposite that of Mazzini, and pirouetted in front of it in ecstasies of enthusiasm. In the midst of a republican fervour which was nourished upon Les Châtiments of Victor Hugo — with its invectives against “le singe,” “le vautour,” “l’assassin” — the young English poet was summoned to accompany his parents to Paris in the Easter vacation of 1858. It was his earliest experience of France. He gave them a solemn promise that he would do nothing while in Paris to undermine the authority of Napoleon III., and this grave undertaking so much amused Lady Trevelyan that she painted a water-colour drawing of Algernon, stripped to the waist, his red hair flying out like the tail of a comet, with a blunderbuss in either hand, striding across the top of a Parisian barricade.

  Swinburne once described to me an incident of this visit to Paris, too characteristic not to be preserved. He handsomely kept his word not to endanger the Empire by any overt act, but his republican spirit boiled within him. One afternoon, driving in an open carriage in the Champs Élysées, Algernon being on the box beside the driver, the party met “the Accurséd” in his imperial person. Admiral and Lady Jane Swinburne stood up and bowed to the Emperor, who, very politely, raised his hat in response. “And did you take off your hat to him?” I asked. “Not wishing,” the poet answered slowly in an ecstasy of ironic emphasis,— “Not wishing to be obliged to cut my hand off at the wrist the moment I returned to the hotel, I — did — not!” On his reappearance at Balliol, Swinburne’s rites of incantation before the portraits of Mazzini and Orsini became more extravagant than ever. In these performances he was humorously supported by the sympathy of T. H. Green, but other fellow-undergraduates regarded them as silly and almost blasphemous. Nichol, however, was interested in them, and drew Jowett’s attention to the unparalleled phenomenon of a young person at Oxford who followed with passionate excitement and close personal study the great events of the Italy of that day. Oddly enough Jowett was rather an admirer of Napoleon III.

  Swinburne was drawn aside from the obsession of republicanism by his interest in the new and wonderful world of art which his Pre-Raphaelite friends opened out before him. Early in 1858 he was profoundly moved by studying the old French Violier des Histoires Romaines, which he immediately began to imitate. The publication of William Morris’s Defence of Guenevere filled him with emulation and respect. “Reading it,” he wrote, “I would fain be worthy to sit down at his feet.” On the other hand, Morris, with great affability, had consented to read in manuscript, and to commend, a drama of Rosamond, which Swinburne had now completed. How far this play, which we know was burned and then rewritten, corresponded with the Rosamond afterwards published, it is impossible to say. “But I suspect I must be Eglamor, to Morris as Sordello,” Swinburne modestly admitted. A quotation from a letter of this time deals with the great poem of Browning, which Nichol, who was still almost the only Browningite in Oxford, had no doubt recommended to him. Swinburne from Oxford writes to Hatch, who had now become a curate in a parish in the East End of London:

  I long to be with you by firelight between the sunset and the sea to have talk of Sordello; it is one of my canonical scriptures. Does he sleep and forget? I think yes. Did the first time Palma’s mouth trembled to touch his in the golden rose-lands of Paradise, a sudden power of angelic action come over him? I suspect, not utterly companionless. Sometimes one knows — not now: but I suppose he slept years off before she kissed him. In Heaven she grew too tired and thin to sing well, and her face grew whiter than its aureole with pain and want of him. And if, like the other Saint, she wept, the tears fell upon his shut lids and fretted the eyes apart as they trickled. Who knows these matters? Only we keep the honey-stain of hair. I write more folly to you than I dare read over.

  He was now full of schemes of his own. He composed a dramatic lyric called “The Golden House,” which seems to have disappeared. He planned an epic poem on the Albigenses, but was conscious of insufficient knowledge: “I must read more, and then dash at it in wrath.” Again he had before him the subject of Tristram and Iseult, who were to be the life-long companions of his imagination: “I will send you specimens of a new poem on Tristram which I am about,” he writes. In a half-ironic, half-defiant mood he confesses to “an abortive covetousness of imitation in which an exaggeration of the faults of my models,” mainly Shelley, Browning, and Morris, “is happily neutralized by my own imbecility.” Under the pressure of Nichol, Swinburne presently passed through a period of looking to Carlyle as to an inspired teacher and guide, but Jowett, who was now seeing more and more of him, warned the young man against the influence of that writer. It is interesting to notice that for very many years the fascination and repulsion which Carlyle exercised over Swinburne continued to pulsate; he could never comfortably make up his mind whether to accept or to repudiate Carlyle, whom, however, in the main he decidedly repudiated. Jowett had now extended over Swinburne that ægis of interest and sympathy with which he overshadowed intelligent young men, not at Balliol only, but at other colleges. He is said to have been puzzled by something illogical and almost incoherent in Swinburne’s boutades, which yet amused him very much. The story goes that Jowett set an essay on the school of Eleatic Philosophers for his weekly class of undergraduates. Swinburne was asked to read his composition aloud, while Jowett sat before the fire, breaking the coal with a small poker.

  The essay was a torrent of words, read very rapidly and shrilly. When the poet had finished, Jowett said, after a long silence, “Mr. Swinburne, I do not see that you have been pursuing any particular line of thought.”

  Swinburne kept terms regularly through the years 1856, 1857, and 1858, but after that a change came over his temper. The restraining influence of his older friends was removed, for Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris had returned to London, Nichol had departed for Scotland at Christmas, while Hatch, Spencer Stanhope, and others had taken their degrees and left the University. Swinburne’s conduct became turbulent and unseemly; he was looked upon as “dangerous” by the college authorities, and Jowett expressed a fear that he might be sent down for some extravagance, “Balliol thereby making itself as ridiculous as University had made itself about Shelley.” It was now that Lord Sheffield heard Swinburne speak at the Union, “reading excitedly but ineffectively a long tirade against Napoleon, and in favour of Mazzini.” This “ingenuous confession of wrong-headed boyish perversity,” as it was universally regarded, “was received with a general kindly smile of amusement” by an assembly which contained, so at least it appeared to the orator, “grave and reverend seniors” as well as undergraduates not much older than himself. Swinburne followed with frantic interest the movements of Italy and Austria, and was hardly able to sustain the emotion produced in him by the declarati
on of war, and by the successive battles of Magenta and Solferino. He kept the first two terms of I — but he did not reside at all during the second half of the summer term, in consequence of Jowett’s growing anxiety about his behaviour, which became more and more unruly.

  Not much scandal seems to have been caused by Swinburne’s extravagances, except within Balliol College, where they were the cause of much annoyance to the authorities. But, so far as his friends in other colleges knew, his only offences consisted in a defiant neglect of morning chapel and in a determined disobedience of regulations. Lord Bryce writes to me:

  I remember how once — I think in 1859 — he had been gated by the Dean, old Mr. Woolcombe, for non-attendance, repeated after many admonitions, at chapel, and how consequently he could not accompany us on the annual excursion which the Old Mortality used to make to some place of interest or beauty within reach of Oxford. When we returned in the evening [from Edgehill], some one said, “Let us condole with poor Swinburne,” and so we went to his rooms to cheer him up. He launched into a wonderful display of vituperative eloquence. He was not really angry, but he enjoyed the opportunity, and the resources of his imagination in metaphor and the amazing richness of his vocabulary had never, I think, struck us so much before.

  This richness of invective was the wonder and envy of his youthful friends. William Morris used to describe scenes of Homeric splendour. Swinburne was under the impression that there was only two fares for cabmen, a shilling for a short drive and eighteenpence for a long one. On one occasion, a cabman who considered himself underpaid began to abuse Morris and Swinburne, when the latter instantly replied with such a torrent of vituperation that the cabman drove off at full speed.

  Lord Bryce s observation, “he was not really angry,” throws a valuable light on many of his later escapades in controversy. He was not really angry with Furnivall and Emerson and the rest, but he enjoyed the opportunity to blaze in invective. At Oxford it is not to be doubted that his contemporaries of the Old Mortality alone, with the possible exception of Jowett, understood him. To the other dons and undergraduates he seemed half-mad and a little dangerous. His intimate friends recognised that he was an extraordinary being, referable to no category. With all his excitability and extravagance of language, and his general irresponsibility, he had admirable manners and plenty, not only of savoir faire, but of shrewdness in his judgments of others.

  But he was all out of tune with college discipline, and after consultation with the Admiral, Jowett determined that it would be best that Algernon should leave Oxford for a season, soon after entering his twenty-third year. He found an excuse for sending him to read modern history with William Stubbs, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, but then known as a learned young clergyman who had taken a country living that he might devote himself to the study of ecclesiastical registers. His parish was the strictly agricultural one of Navestock, near Romford in Essex, where he had quite recently married the mistress of the village school. To this amiable couple the republican was duly sent as a private pupil. Swinburne, a little in disgrace, but absolutely imperturbable, arrived at Navestock on a summer Saturday evening, and Mr and Mrs. Stubbs, on the supposition that he must be tired, kindly suggested that he should have his sleep out, and be excused from attending morning service in the parish church. The poet’s breakfast was served in his bedroom, but when the Vicar started for church Swinburne perceived that it was a glorious day, and reflected that it was a pity not to be out-of-doors. The vicarage of Navestock stands close to the churchyard, and to approach the church from the village every one must pass the gate of the vicarage garden. Swinburne, who had a preference for strong colours, slipped his feet into a pair of scarlet slippers, arrayed himself in a crimson dressing-gown, and sauntered out into the garden. The bell now summoned the parish to its devotions, and it occurred to Swinburne that it would be interesting to see what sort of people went to church in Essex on Sunday mornings.

  So, with the sun lighting up his great head of hair like a burning bush, with his robe all crimson to the ankles, and his vermilion shoes on his feet, he leaned pensively over the gate. The earliest worshippers began to come along the lane, but one and all stopped at a respectful distance, nor dared to pass the flaming apparition. Swinburne grew more and more interested in the silent, swelling crowd that now began to block the lane. Meanwhile there was an ecclesiastical deadlock; not a worshipper appeared in church, until Stubbs, at a loss to account for the absence of his parishioners, bade the clerk to ring again. Still no parishioners! But at last the boldest man in Navestock, fixing his eyes on the poet and hugging the further hedge, made a bolt past for the churchyard, and the entire congregation followed him in a rush. Swinburne reflected “how oddly the Essex yokel takes his Sunday service,” and then strolled back to the vicarage to dress for luncheon. This was his version of the incident, which Stubbs on his part was wont to tell in more or less similar terms.

  Another story of the Navestock episode used to be recounted by Stubbs. Finding Swinburne to be passionately devoted to the poets and remarkably learned in their works, his host and hostess inquired whether he did not write poetry himself. It appeared that he did, and being pressed to produce a specimen of it, he dragged out of his box a large historical tragedy in blank verse. What this was does not seem to be remembered, but we may conjecture that it was the original draft of Rosamond. Early in the evening Swinburne began to read, and he read the play right through. Stubbs was very much impressed with the merits of the piece, but also with its faults, and he felt obliged to say that he thought the tone of the amatory passages somewhat objectionable. He had anticipated a little scene of modest confusion, which he would have removed by praise, but what he was not prepared for was a long silent stare, followed by a scream which rent the vicarage, and by the bolt upstairs of the outraged poet, hugging his MS. to his bosom. Presently gentle Mrs. Stubbs stole upstairs, and tapping at Swinburne’s door, entreated him to come down to supper. There was no reply, but an extraordinary noise within of tearing and a strange glare through the key-hole. All night, at intervals, there were noises in the poet’s room, and the Stubbses were distracted. In the morning Swinburne appeared extremely late, and deathly pale. Stubbs, by this time very wretched, hastened to say how sorry he was that he had so hastily condemned the drama, and how much he hoped that Swinburne had not been discouraged by his criticism. The poet replied, “I lighted a fire in the empty grate, and I burned every page of my manuscript.” Stubbs was horrified. “But it does not matter; I sat up all night and wrote it right through again from memory.”

  The stay at Navestock was a very pleasant episode, and Swinburne never ceased to refer to it with pleasure. Stubbs, who was not only a very kindly but a really witty man, always spoke in a friendly way of Swinburne, and enjoyed being chaffed about his pupil. But the visit came to an end, and when, on the 14th of October, Swinburne had to reappear in Oxford, he proved to be as unfitted for university life as ever. Instead of attending to his work, he occupied himself, in his lodgings in Broad Street, with writing a three-act comedy in the manner of Fletcher, called Laugh and Lie Down; this, perhaps happily, is lost. His landlady, whose previous tenant had been Nichol, made complaints to the authorities about Swinburne’s late hours and general irregularities, and afterwards laid it down as a rule that she would never take another lodger from Balliol College. “I’ve had me fill of them tiresome Balliol gentlemen,” she severely said. Jowett gave the matter up in despair, and on the “21st of November 1859, Swinburne left Oxford for good, never taking a degree. Nothing can be added to his own frank statement, made nearly forty years later, “My Oxonian career culminated in total and scandalous failure.”

  CHAPTER III

  EARLY LIFE IN LONDON (1859-1865)

  When he left Oxford, Algernon went up to Northumberland, where his grandfather had now entered the ninety-eighth year of his life. From Capheaton he made negotiations with his father, who, deeply incensed by his son’s failure at the University, continue
d to inquire what Algernon meant to do. The young man declined to live any longer at home, but preferred his liberty in London, with the power to devote himself to literature. Lady Jane was on his side, and Admiral Swinburne ultimately withdrew his opposition. After a long delay, in the course of 1860, — an allowance, small at first, but ultimately

  (I believe) of £400 a year from his parents having been offered and accepted, Algernon arrived in London, where his only acquaintances seem to have been the painters whom he had met at the Oxford Union three years before. Of these the one he found first was Edward Burne-Jones, but presently William Morris came back from France, the Madox Browns were settled in Fortes Terrace, and Rossetti, fresh from Paris, returned to Chatham Place. These last three men had lately married, and their modest households were open to the young poet. In June 1860 Burne-Jones also married, and from the very first Algernon was made at home in his house. The charming recollections of Lady Burne-Jones form almost the only London record of Swinburne’s life at this time. After the summer of this year, he was a frequent and always a welcome visitor to the William Morrises at the Red House, in Essex, where Miss May Morris tells me that she just remembers him, lying on the grass in the orchard, with his red hair spread abroad, while her baby sister and she scattered rose-leaves over his laughing face.

  He took rooms at 1G Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square, to be near the British Museum. The Burne-Joneses lived close by, in Russell Place. Swinburne would come in two or three times in a day, “bringing his poems hot from his heart,” as Lady Burne-Jones puts it. He was restless beyond words, hopping about the room unceasingly, “seeming to keep time, by a swift movement of the hands at the wrists, and sometimes of the feet also, with some inner rhythm of excitement.” At that date, being twenty-three years of age, but looking much younger, he was a miracle of strange freshness and fascination. “When repeating poetry he had a perfectly natural way of lifting his indescribably fine eyes in a rapt unconscious gaze, and their clear green colour softened by thick brown eyelashes was unforgettable.” Already the profusion and magnificence of his talk were the wonder of those who listened to him. He saw, however, but very few people, studying and writing, generally alone, with feverish assiduity.