To close this episode a little prematurely, Baudelaire presently forwarded to Swinburne his brochure on Wagner and Tannhâuser in Paris, and this appears to have been the only communication Swinburne ever received from him. In April 1867 Fantin-Latour mentioned the rumour that Baudelaire was dead, and Swinburne immediately composed his grandiose clogy, “Ave atque Vale,” to which we shall return in due course. Baudelaire, however, survived until August 31st of that year, never having seen Poems and Ballads, in which there was so much that would have appealed to his peculiar artistic temperament.
The anonymous essays contributed to the Spectator of 1862 present us with a valuable opportunity of judging Swinburne’s early prose style. We find it strong and pure, moving already with a certain formal magnificence; it is related to the prose of Landor, which is its obvious model, as closely as Landor’s is to the movement of Cicero. The moderation of the stateliness is agreeable; there is as yet no trace, or hardly a trace, of the faults which were to invade the prose of Swinburne, the bluster and the strut, the wild exaggeration of irony, the abuse of alliteration and antithesis. These characteristics are found, however, beginning to protrude themselves in the letter on Meredith’s Poems, where we read that “all Muses are to bow down before her who babbles, with lips yet warm from their pristine pap, after the dangling delights of a child’s coral, and jingles with flaccid fingers one knows not whether a jester’s or a baby’s bells.” This is the structure and the colour which we learn to dread, for with Swinburne as a prose-writer suspecta sunt semper ornamenta. For the time being, however, and under the editorial repression, it would have been difficult to find in England at that moment a critic more learned, more dignified, or more graceful than the unnamed and unknown reviewer of Victor Hugo and Baudelaire.
The defence of George Meredith has been mentioned. That writer, already valued within a very narrow circle as the author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington, had been drawn, by a vivid sympathy rather than by complete conviction, to join the Pre-Raphaelites in the course of 1861, and had impressed Swinburne with his power of character and depth of imagination. But Meredith was not the elder by nine years for nothing, and he was not so implicitly delighted by Swinburne. He wrote of him: “He is not subtle: and I don’t see any internal centre from which springs anything that he does. He will make a great name, but whether he is to distinguish himself solidly as an artist, I would not willingly prognosticate.” In this dubious attitude, Meredith remained during the rest of his life; in fact, why should it be concealed that the two men ultimately “got upon the nerves” of each other? Nevertheless, in 1862, they still had much in common, and Swinburne was a frequent visitor at Corsham, while Meredith had his own room in Tudor House.
The Spectator, in an article violently unjust, “slated” Meredith’s Modern Love, thus provoking from Swinburne the long, generous, and rather redundant “Letter to the Editor,” which really amounted to a second review of the book, cancelling the first. It is very interesting to note that in printing this defence of Meredith (June 7th, 1862), the editor (doubtless R. H. Hutton himself) described Swinburne, whose name, let it be recalled, had been appended to no previous prose production, as one “whose opinion on any poetical question should be worth more than most men’s.”
The principal adventures in Swinburne’s career were the electric shocks which he received by running up against masterpieces. Early in this year 1862, he discovered, through the instrumentality of Rossetti, and in circumstances which he himself and several others have described, the hidden beauties of FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat, published in 1859. The form of the Persian quatrain charmed him, and led almost immediately (as Meredith picturesquely described in the latest public letter of his life) to the composition of Laus Veneris. This was the most sustained lyrical poem which Swinburne had yet produced, and from a technical point of view by far the most accomplished; and it is interesting to observe that while it is in no sense an imitation of Omar Khayyam, but on the contrary entirely characteristic of Swinburne himself, it has the aura of the Rubaiyat thrown over it like a transparent tissue. About the same date, he met for the first time with Leaves of Grass, lent him, I believe, by George Howard (afterwards the ninth earl of Carlisle), to whom a copy of the folio of 1855 had been sent. Whitman had, up to that time, scarcely been heard of in England. Swinburne was filled with enthusiasm, and sent over to America for a copy of his own, which was obtained not without some difficulty. This he ultimately presented to his friend and physician, Dr. George Bird, when he had secured a later and fuller collection. When this came he wrote to Monckton Milnes (August 18th, 1862):
Have you seen the latest edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? for there is one new poem in it, “A Voice from the Sea,” about two birds on the sea-beach, which I really think is the most lovely and wonderful thing I have read for years and years. I could rhapsodise about it for ten more pages, for there is such beautiful skill and subtle power in every word of it, but I spare you!
This may be set against the ungracious recantation of later years, to which reference will have to be made.
In the summer of 1862 a distinguished party assembled at Fryston; it included Venables, James Spedding, the newly-appointed Archbishop of York (William Thomson), and Thackeray, the latter having brought his two young daughters, afterwards Lady Ritchie and Mrs. Leslie Stephen. Lady Ritchie recalls for me that the Houghtons stimulated the curiosity of their guests by describing the young poet, who was to arrive later. She was in the garden on the afternoon of his arrival, and she saw him advance up the sloping lawn, swinging his hat in his hand, and letting the sunshine flood the bush of his red-gold hair. He looked like Apollo or a fairy prince; and immediately attracted the approval of Mr. Thackeray by the wit and wisdom of his conversation, as much as that of the two young ladies by his playfulness. On Sunday evening, after dinner, he was asked to read some of his poems. His choice was injudicious; he is believed to have recited “The Leper”; it is certain that he read “Les Noyades.” At this the Archbishop of York made so shocked a face that Thackeray smiled and whispered to Lord Houghton, while the two young ladies, who had never heard such sentiments expressed before, giggled aloud in their excitement. Their laughter offended the poet, who, however, was soothed by Lady Houghton’s tactfully saying, “‘Well, Mr. Swinburne, if you will read such extraordinary things, you must expect us to laugh.”
“Les Noyades” was then proceeding on its amazing course, and the Archbishop was looking more and more horrified, when suddenly the butler— “like an avenging angel,” as Lady Ritchie says — threw open the door and announced, “Prayers! my Lord!”
Lady Ritchie dwells on Swinburne’s “kind and cordial ways” during this amusing visit to Fryston. She had never seen anybody so disconcerting or so charming, and when Thackeray and his daughters had to take their leave, while Swinburne remained at Fryston, the future author of The Story of Elizabeth burst into tears. The friendship so begun continued until the day of the poet’s death, though they met rarely. It appears from Lady Ritchie’s recollection that Thackeray must have been shown some of Swinburne’s MS. poems by Lord Houghton, for he expressed his admiration of them. He died, as we know, a few months later, too soon to see any of them in print, except those which were printed in the Spectator in the course of this year, 1862.
With the end of the year there unfortunately came a misunderstanding with the Spectator. The editor was beginning to take alarm at the sans-culottism of his brilliant contributor. A burlesque review of an imaginary volume of French poetry was refused, as indeed was inevitable. Swinburne replied that “sanity and decency are the two props of my critical faculty” and that the principles of the Spectator offended his moral sense. The outraged editor involved himself in his toga, and Master Algernon was invited no more to that tea-party. He had, however, tasted printer’s ink, and enunciated the very reasonable wish that “I could find some paper or review were I could write at my own times and in my own way occasional
studies on matters of art and literature of which I could speak confidently.” But in a country teeming with penny-a-liners there was apparently no room for a real writer, and eight years more were to pass before an editor was inspired to invite prose contributions from Swinburne’s pen.
In the spring of 1862 Algernon had joined his family in the Pyrenees, and stayed some weeks at Cauterets. During this time he visited the mysterious lake of Gaube, and indulged in “the flight of his limbs through the still strong chill of the darkness from shore to shore,” to the horror of the natives, who had a tradition that to bathe in Gaube was to court certain death. It would be difficult, and is not needful here, to follow the young poet through all his peregrinations in the year 1863. Not much of it was spent in London. He was paying his usual Christmas visit to Northumberland, when the alarming illness of Edith, his second sister, called him, with the rest of the family, to Bournemouth. She rallied, and in February her brother returned to London; in March we find him in Paris, writing his sonnet called “Hermaphroditus” in the Louvre. It was on this occasion that he made the acquaintance of Fantin-Latour and began a cordial friendship with Whistler. This was presently confirmed by Whistler’s return to England and his settlement in Chelsea, where Swinburne immediately brought him into relation with Rossetti. Whistler’s mother, a lady of noble presence and admirable sweetness of character, welcomed Algernon at her house, and was at this time of great practical service to him. Among his associates was now the painter and draughtsman, Frederick Sandys, who was familiar with both Rossetti and Whistler. Swinburne wrote some verses called Cleopatra to a drawing by Frederick Sandys which appeared as a wood-cut in the Cornhill Magazine in September 1866, and as late as 1868 he defended in fiery accents Sandys’ famous picture “Medea,” which had been rejected from the Royal Academy exhibition. The acquaintanceship soon afterwards lapsed.
Considerable anxiety had now begun to be felt about Algernon’s health, which was less and less satisfactory. He began to suffer occasionally from a malady which seemed to be exclusively brought on by the excitements of London life. There was always, I believe, a difference of opinion among the doctors as to the actual nature of this disease, which was, however, epileptiform.
It took the shape of a convulsive fit, in which, generally after a period of very great cerebral excitement, he would suddenly fall unconscious. These fits were excessively distressing to witness, and produced a shock of alarm, all the more acute because of the deathlike appearance of the patient. Oddly enough, however, the person who seemed to suffer from them least was Swinburne himself. The only real danger appeared to be that he would hit himself in his fall, which indeed he repeatedly and severely did. But his general recovery after these fits was magical, and it positively struck one — if it is not absurd to say so — that he was better after them, as after a storm of the nerves.
One such attack came on in Whistler’s studio, and Mrs. Whistler nursed the patient back to health with tender solicitude. But the doctors represented both to her and to Rossetti, who had long been growing anxious, that it was important for Algernon to be away from London and its agitations as much as possible. He had now started a magnum opus, and that could be as successfully conducted in the country as in Tudor House. He therefore left London, practically for the remainder of 1863, staying first through long summer weeks at Tintagel with the landscape-painter J. W. Inchbold, a man of serene and gentle temper peculiarly suited to calm the troubled soul of the over-agitated poet. Here, while Inchbold was quietly painting, Swinburne swam in the Cornish sea or galloped on horseback along the cliffs, murmuring verses which were beginning to take choral and dramatic shape and to foreshadow Atalanta in Calydon.
His health was once more all that could be desired. Inchbold and he lodged and boarded austerely in the village schoolhouse, twenty-two miles from a railway and six from the nearest post-town, Camelford. From Cornwall in October Swinburne proceeded, with the beginning of Atalanta in his pocket, to his cousins at Niton in the Isle of Wight, and in their house he stayed until February 18G4, when his great drama was completed to his satisfaction.
On the 25th of September 1863, Miss Edith Swinburne had died, and the rest of the family left East Dene for a long tour on the Continent, leaving Algernon with his cousins. During this visit to the Isle of Wight, he was engaged, not merely on Atalanta in Calydon, but on the joint production, with his cousin, Miss Mary Gordon (afterwards Mrs. Disney Leith), of an anonymous story called The Children of the Chapel. Miss Gordon was the main author, but Algernon made suggestions and gave endless references and information. He wrote, moreover, the whole of the verses, which include a morality play, called The Pilgrimage of Pleasure. This is an astonishingly brilliant piece of pastiche, reproducing the versification, language, and tone of the nondescript Elizabethan interludes of about 1575, with an art which probably no other person in England could have equalled. Nothing could be odder than to find a work of such learning and elegance unobtrusively buried in an anonymous story for children. The little volume, which has now become extremely scarce, was issued by an obscure bookseller in the City in 1864.
Algernon Swinburne joined his family in Italy immediately after leaving the Isle of Wight in the February of that year. After a short stay at Genoa, he arrived at Florence early in March, and one of his earliest acts was to call on the aged Walter Savage Landor, armed with a letter of introduction from Milnes (who had now become Lord Houghton). With some difficulty he discovered “the most ancient of the demi-gods” in his lodging at 93 Via della Chiesa, but the visit was not a success. Landor was now in his ninetieth year, and, like other very old men, easily bewildered. The unknown little poet, with his great aureole of fluffed red hair, burst into his presence with protestations of worship, and, flinging himself on both knees before the old man, implored his blessing. Landor was so feeble and deprecating, so perplexed and uncomfortable, that Swinburne withdrew “in a grievous state of disappointment and depression,” fearing that he “was really too late.” But, taking heart of grace, he wrote next day a letter of apology and explanation, “expressing (as far as was expressible) my immense admiration and reverence in the plainest and sincerest way I could manage.” The result was a note of invitation which Swinburne answered by setting out then and there for Landor’s lodging.
This second excursion was crowned with complete success. The old man had had time to recover from his agitation and to realise the meaning of the incident. Swinburne “found him at last, brilliant and altogether delicious as I suppose others may have found him twenty years since.” As he was to write when, six months later, Landor died:
I came as one whose thoughts half linger,
Half run before; The youngest to the oldest singer
That England bore.
I found him whom I shall not find
Till all grief end,
In holiest age our mightiest mind,
Father and friend.
In a letter written the same day as his second visit (March 4th, 1864) Swinburne tells Lord Houghton:
If both or either should die tomorrow, at least today he has told me that my presence has made him happy; he said more than that — things for which of course I take no credit to myself but which are not the less pleasant to hear from such a man. There is no other man living from whom I should so much have prized any expression of acceptance or goodwill in return for my homage, for all other men as great are so much younger that in his case one sort of reverence serves as the lining for another. My grandfather was upon the whole mieux conservé, but he had written no “Hellenics.” In answer to something that Mr. Landor said today of his own age, I reminded him of his equals and predecessors, Sophocles and Titian; he said he should not live up to the age of Sophocles, not see ninety. I don’t see why he shouldn’t, if he has people about him to care for him as he should be cared for. I should like to throw up all other things on earth and devote myself to playing valet to him for the rest of his days. I would black his boots if he were chez moi.
He has given me the shock of adoration which one feels at thirteen towards great men.
Landor talked to his young visitor with great freedom, and, in relation to the approach of death at his own advanced age, remarked that he had no belief in the immortality of the soul nor opinion about it, but “was sure of one thing, that whatever was to come was best — the right thing, or the thing that ought to come.” He was delighted with Swinburne’s enthusiasm for the cause of Italian freedom, and gave him several copies of his unpublished dialogue in Italian, Savonarola e Il Priore de San Marco (1860), which the Tuscan Government had suppressed, “through priestly influence,” as the author told Swinburne. He referred with patient scorn to the obloquy and insult, “asses’ kicks aimed at his head,” which reached him from England, and acknowledged that “the sincere tribute of genuine and studious admiration” was still gratifying to his head and to his heart. Before long, the aged poet addressed Swinburne as his “dear friend”; “let me now and ever call you so,” he said with pathetic emphasis.
When the interview had lasted a very long time, while the aged poet yielded more and more completely to the fascination of his youthful visitor, Landor said, impressively, “Sir, this meeting must be commemorated. I hereby present to you that Correggio hanging on the wall. It is a masterpiece that was intercepted on its way back to its Florentine home from the Louvre, whither it had been taken by Napoleon Bonaparte.” Swinburne protested that he needed no such form of memorial. The interview, without any such aid, would be indelibly fixed upon his memory. But this did not suit his imperious host. After Landor had insisted time after time, and time after time Swinburne had refused to deprive him of the treasure, Landor rose, and turning purple with anger, shouted, “By God, sir, you shall!” So Swinburne said no more, and the picture was sent to his hotel. He brought it back to England, but it was a worthless daub, one of the strange artistic delusions of Landor’s extreme old age. What became of it seems to be unknown; Correggio or no Correggio, it would have an amusing association with two eminent and wilful persons.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 358