Swinburne stayed some weeks in Florence, where he visited pictures in the delightful company of Mrs. Gaskell. Long afterwards he told me that she was the only person who sympathised with his raptures over the “Medusa” of Leonardo da Vinci: unfortunately the cruel art-crities now will have it that this panel was never touched by Leonardo. Of the drawings in the Uffizi he made a close study, and his notes were long valuable in the absence of any other catalogue or manual. He made the acquaintance of Mr. Seymour Kirkup (1788-1880), “the saviour of Giotto, the redeemer of Dante,” with whom Swinburne enjoyed long conversations about Blake, whom Kirkup had known intimately, and about Keats, at whose funeral he had taken part. He paid a visit to Fiesole, where, deafened by noonday nightingales in a high-walled garden, he recorded that he wrote Itylus. He passed on to Siena, which made upon him a deeper impression than any other Italian city, “lady loveliest of my loves,” a city to be the subject of one of the noblest of all his poems. Whether he saw much more of Landor is not remembered, but before finally leaving Florence he dedicated to the aged poet a sonnet which is here for the first time published:
The stateliest singing mouth that speaks our tongue,
The lordliest, and the brow of loftiest leaf
Worn after the great fashion close and brief,
Sounds and shines yet; to whom all braids belong
Of plaited laurel that no weathers wrong,
All increase of the spring and of the sheaf,
All high delight and godliness of grief,
All bloom and fume of summer and of song.
The years are of his household; Fate and Fame
Observe him; and the things of pestilence
Die out of fear, that could not die of shame,
Before his heel be set on their offence:
Time’s hand shall hoard the gold of such a name
When Death has blown the dust of base men thence.
Returning in the autumn of 1864 to London, Swinburne joined his friends at Tudor House for a while. But the importance of this arrangement has been exaggerated in legend. His tenancy lasted but two years, during which time his absence much exceeded his residence. The Pre-Raphaelites had not been well advised in sharing their domestic bliss; there were too many plums in their pudding. Swinburne and George Meredith developed, in particular, a remarkable incompatibility of temper. They parted, rarely to meet again until 1898, when, on occasion of Meredith’s seventieth birthday, there was a reconciliation by letter, and Swinburne accepted an invitation to Box Hill. Rossetti himself, though no misunderstanding obscured his almost parental affection for “my little Northumbrian friend,” found Swinburne a tempestuous inmate. I heard him say long afterwards, in reference to this time, “Algernon used to drive me crazy by dancing all over the studio like a wild cat.” The whole situation has been described to me as “pandemonium.” Swinburne was often a prey to fits of ungovernable fury. More than once the decorative artist, John Hungerford Pollen (1820-1902), was called in from his house in Pembridge Crescent “by his self-contained gentleness to allay the storm.” Swinburne found lodgings at 124 Mount Street, over a court milliner’s, moving later to 22a Dorset Street, which was his London home for four or five years. He spent another autumn in Cornwall, staying with Jowett at Kynance Cove and at St. Michael’s Mount. Here he finished, doubtless with the help of Jowett’s revision, the long dedication in Greek of Atalanta in Calydon to Walter Savage Landor: “Never any more shall I sit beside thee, touching thy pure hands with awe,” he says in it, and he delivers the body of his sacred friend, fallen by the Etruscan wave, to the tender care of the Pierides, and of the dancing Muses, and of Aphrodite, who delighted in the austere beauty of his songs.
CHAPTER IV
ATALANTA IN CALYDON. CHASTELARD
At the beginning of 1865 the printing of Atalanta in Calydon was completed, but there followed a long delay in connection with the binding, which I — G. Rossetti had designed. Bertram Payne, who was now responsible for the firm of Moxon, believed that the only hope of success which the poem offered lay in the beauty of its appearance, and accordingly no pains were spared to adorn the ivory-white sides of the buckram cover with mystic golden spheres. A limited number of copies, it is said one hundred, were manufactured, and the drama was at length issued towards the end of April, with no anticipations on the publisher’s part. But much had changed since the fiasco of 1860. Algernon Swinburne was no longer perfectly unknown; he was the object of curiosity in a small but very active circle, and already the legend of his superhuman cleverness and superdiabolic audacity had spread beyond the limit of his acquaintances. Moreover, Algernon had now a powerful friend, who was determined that the catastrophe of The Queen Mother should not be repeated. Lord
Houghton, in the common phrase, “knew everybody,” and was an indefatigable wire-puller. He set his heart on making Atalanta the principal literary sensation of 1865, and it was.
Conditions of taste had altered in the five years since Swinburne made his first vain appeal to the public. The intentions of the Pre-Raphaelites, both in painting and poetry, were no longer entirely unintelligible or held worthy of mere angry ridicule. Where Morris, Swinburne, and Meredith had failed to penetrate the Philistine fortress, Christina Rossetti in her Goblin Market (1862) had succeeded. Ruskin had grown to be a recognised authority, and he brought the Pre-Raphaelites in his wake; he was known to have an almost extravagant admiration of the new poet. Matthew Arnold’s lectures at Oxford had caused a wide awakening; people who had thought it crafty to extinguish each glimmering taper that made itself apparent were now anxious to look out for new poets and to court unparalleled sensations. There was a widespread revolt against the tyranny of Tennyson, whose Enoch Arden (1864) had seemed to many hitherto dutiful worshippers an intolerable concession to commonplace ideals. Robert Browning, after a long period of silence, had spoken again in a volume which showed him to be in full sympathy with revolutionary methods of style. Atalanta, “the pure among women,” arrived in Paternoster Row at a moment as auspicious as that in which her prototype walked over lowland and lawn from Arcadia to Calydon northward. The reviewers were practically unanimous, and Swinburne shot like a rocket into celebrity.
Of all Swinburne’s works, Atalanta in Calydon has remained the best known and most enjoyed by the ordinary reader. The lyrical passages are abundant, and they are well adapted to display the startling originalities of the poet’s metre in their most pleasing shape. The legend is clear and romantic, of a great simplicity, and yet full of the elements of passion. The recitative is composed in blank verse, which is astonishing in its lucidity and dignity and music. The morality was objected to as defective by some reviewers, but merely in connection with the attitude of the poet towards the gods and divine influences in general, to a consideration of which we shall presently return. But the refinement of the sentiments and the dignity of the language attributed to the characters were of the most admirable kind, and the poet evidently aimed in this respect at a rivalry with the sacred enthusiasm of Aeschylus and the serene elevation of Sophocles.
There had not been written since the Prometheus Unbound of Shelley a drama on the model of Greek antiquity which could be compared with the new play. We must go to more recent experiments in French drama, as, for example, to the remarkable tragedies of Moréas, to find anything comparable with Atalanta in Calydon. The choral plays of Milton, even, have little in common with the achievements of the early Greeks, and their sublime imagery and their moral splendour arc remote, in form at least, from the aims and outlines of Hellenic tragedy which Swinburne, with extreme adroitness, contrived to capture. His knowledge of the text of Aeschylus was extraordinarily close and sympathetic. His marvellous memory enabled him to carry practically the whole of the Oresteia in his mind, and there are those still living who recollect, as an astonishing feat, his ability to “spout” the plays of Aeschylus in Greek as long as any auditor had the patience to listen to him.
His scholarship, as we are to
ld by those best qualified to judge — and Jowett is said to have been of this number — was not exact in the grammatical sense; he was no Scaliger or Bentley. But it sufficed to enable him, with intense gusto, to enjoy and to retain the beauties of the poets, to understand their work from the inner point of view. He was able to speak of Shelley, whose feeling for Greek verse he admitted to have been delicate in the extreme, as one whose “scholarship was yet that of a clever but idle boy in the upper forms of a public school.” Critics have sometimes spoken of Swinburne as though his own knowledge of Greek was of the same kind, but this is certainly a mistake. Thirlwall, as we shall see, did his Landorian elegiacs justice, and there can be little doubt that Swinburne’s mind and memory were more deeply immersed in the poetry of the ancients than that of any other English poet, more than that of Milton, or even of Landor. Moreover, we must not forget to observe the excellent economy which Swinburne reintroduced into this order of writing by the carefully balanced form of Atalanta. It was a protest against the shapelessness of the “spasmodical” types of lyrical but essentially untheatrical drama, such as were much admired at that time, though forgotten now. We speak not of Arnold’s admirable Empedocles; but some of us still recall Swinburne’s attitude towards Alexander Smith’s Life Drama, Sydney Dobell’s Balder, and the whole set of rhapsodical works of which they were the type. We know how resolutely and designedly he set his face against their excesses.
Swinburne adopted for his great choral drama one of the most romantic stories of late Homeric Greece, and one which seems to have stimulated with peculiar freshness and purity the imagination of the ancients. When Pausanias was in Arcadia he visited the city of Tegea, and found there a temple which far excelled all its fellows in the Peloponnesus, whether for size or beauty. This was the fane of Athena Alea, built in the highest style of late magnificence by Scopas the Parian, who introduced into it all the orders of architecture, and produced a gorgeous structure in which Doric, Corinthian, and Ionic were combined in harmony. On the front gable, in the centre of the whole composition, he presented the Hunt of the Boar of Calydon, and there were to be seen in effigy the “snowy-souled” Atalanta; Meleager, type of the robust hunter of the woods; and the evil brethren of Queen Althaea. Pausanias does not describe the arrangement of the group, but we cannot doubt that the moment chosen by the sculptor was that when, after the death of the boar, Meleager pushed the brothers aside and
With great hands grasping all that weight of hair
Cast down the dead heap clanging and collapsed
At female feet, saying, This thy spoil, not mine,
Maiden, thine own hand for thyself hath reaped,
And all this praise God gives thee, since the incident was the one which the sanctuary most mysteriously venerated, while the very tusks of the boar itself, held to be the sacred treasure of Athena Alea, were preserved within until Augustus impiously carried them away to Rome. It is almost certain that Ovid — of whom Swinburne never speaks, so far as I remember, with approval — has no right to be considered responsible for Atalanta in Calydon. The courtly sweetness and scented grace of Ovid were particularly what the young English poet did not wish to reproduce in his study of austere and archaic ritual. But it can but be interesting to compare the elaborate version of the story, as we get it in the eighth book of the Metamorphoses, with Swinburne’s plot. We must not overlook the fact that Ovid adds very much which Homer, in the ninth Iliad, omits or gives more vaguely, nor that the English poet accepts the general Ovidian outline of the story. The paramount influence of Althaea, as the tool of the gods in their sinister revenge, is as much emphasised in one poem as in the other, although Swinburne, with superior art, introduces Althaea to us on the very threshold of his drama, while Ovid forgets to mention her existence until after the death of Plexippus and Toxeus. But when she does appear in the Metamorphoses, the rôle she fills is just as effective as that of the Swinburnian Althaea. It may be remarked that Ovid dedicates one of his finest passages of purely descriptive verse to the lair of the Calydonian monster. The English poet’s picture of the scene of the flaying of the Boar seems to have been written in direct competition with this, and fine as is Ovid’s description of the ozier-beds and the hollows of the rain-sodden brushwood, still finer is the English poet’s picture of the place where
... much sweet grass grew higher than grew the reed,
And good for slumber, and every holier herb,
Narcissus, and the low-lying melilote,
And all of goodliest blade and bloom that springs
Where, hid by heavier hyacinth, violet buds
Blossom and burn; and fire of yellower flowers
And light of crescent lilies, and such leaves
As fear the Faun’s and know the Dryad’s foot; Olive and ivy and poplar dedicate,
And many a well-spring over-watched of these.
One great and obvious improvement Swinburne makes, while otherwise keeping very close to the outlines of the old tale. In the Greek versions Meleager has a wife, named Cleopatra, who attends his last moments as his spirit is passing out of the smouldering brand. The presence of this lady, who was ultimately transformed into a kingfisher, would have been a most incongruous element in that last magnificent chorus round the dying hero. Swinburne ejected Cleopatra from his scheme, and Meleager is the wild hunter of the woods, who has never stooped to the lure of woman till he is smitten by the eyes and hair of Atalanta.
To this drama were prefixed the two pieces of elegiac Greek verse addressed to Landor. Over these Swinburne had taken very great pains. When Lord Houghton was preparing to review the poem for the Edinburgh Review, Swinburne was afraid that these Greek compositions might escape attention, as Houghton made no pretence to being an expert. At the poet’s suggestion, Houghton applied to Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David’s, for an opinion. The Bishop read Atalanta, and came to dinner with Lord Houghton to talk it over, expressing himself in the meantime as follows. No more interesting proof of the effect Swinburne produced on the learned world of letters in 1865 could be adduced than is contained in this private letter from the famous author of the History of Greece:
The Greek verses are... of a very high order of merit, and both in their strength and weakness worthy of the poem itself, as here and there they seem to reflect some of the peculiarities of its diction, though there are also a few lines which I believe for other reasons a Greek would not have written. I should like to know a little about the author. He must be a young man, but it would be psychically interesting to ascertain until what time of life such a man can continue to regard Landor as by far the greatest of all poets.... I am still more curious to know to what kind of reactionary school the author belongs. Somehow I cannot fancy him to be a stiff Churchman or an obscurantist Romanist; still less as an intolerant Puritan; and yet he takes the side of the old, now pretty nearly antiquated, orthodoxy which thought itself in peril if it admitted that there was anything good and holy, or in fact, not diabolical, in the Pagan religion.
This was a charge calculated to surprise the poet, but Thirlwall supported it on the ground that the austere sentiment is not
... put in the mouth of one of the characters in the drama, where it might simply have heightened the tragic effect; but is enunciated by the chorus, and therefore must be the poet’s last word and his way of expressing the national sentiment. Both as a Philhellene and as a liberal theologian I repudiate this imputation. Even from the purely poetical point of view it seems to me a mistake. The tragic action, as it seems to me, is not brought out in stronger relief, but rather effaced by the intense unbroken murkiness of the background.
Our answer to the Bishop’s acute criticism must be that to Swinburne the real tragic action lay not around the slaying of the Boar and the evaporation of Meleager, but precisely in the struggle with theological tyranny which drives his chorus to lift its voices in despair and revolt. No doubt this was an idea which would, as Thirlwall said, have made Aeschylus stare and Sophocles sh
udder, but Euripides might surely have entertained it. After much consideration Thirlwall wrote on the Greek elegiacs two paragraphs, which Houghton incorporated in his review. It must have given Swinburne intense gratification to be told, by so eminent a Grecian, that his thoughts moved “with scarcely less ease and freedom in the language and measures of Callinus and Mimnermus than in his native speech.” It was a salve to the sore wound which stung the persistent undergraduate of Balliol whenever he thought of his inglorious exit from Oxford.
The attitude towards theology, which Thirlwall so strangely misunderstood, and which F. D. Maurice and others strenuously deprecated, was part of that revolt against the traditions of official religion which had immediately followed Swinburne’s abrupt rejection of Anglicanism when he was at Oxford. It is not to be overlooked that he had a mind which had passed through the discipline of a training that was rigorously devout. He differed from those pagans of indifferent heart, who have never known, and do not care to comprehend, the faith of the fervent Catholic or Puritan. Swinburne was deeply instructed in the text and teaching of the Bible, and it is noticeable that there is a distinct strain of the religious controversialist running through his poems. It is true that it expresses itself in antagonism, but it is violently there; the poet is not a lotus-eater who has never known the Gospel, but an evangelist turned inside out. In the great choruses and tirades of Atalanta the absolute negation of free will is progressively insisted upon. We have the lugubrious and melodious expression of a fatalism that far surpasses that of Aeschylus, and is completely Oriental. Blind chance, an impersonal moira against which the gods themselves contend in vain, tosses the faint human creature, as a wave tosses a breaking bubble. There is no equity, no foresight, no method in the fate of mortals, for
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 359