The dramatic movement of Chastelard and its curious facility of style make it unique in the poetry of the nineteenth century. It has not the weight of Bothwell nor the ethical intensity of Erechtheus, but as a piece of literature for the study it has the extraordinary merits of speed and lightness. There are no heavy passages, or very few, and it proceeds on its flowery and fatal course without interruption. Of all Swinburne’s dramas it is the easiest to read, the most amusing, the most lucid. Nevertheless, it has never been favoured by the critics, nor much appreciated by the public. The reason is probably to be found in its attitude towards life and morals. It is well known that it was objected to from the first on the ground that it was “immoral” in tendency, and this charge was brought against it not in consequence of any coarseness in the language, but because the whole tone of it was out of sympathy with the sentimental conception of love that prevailed in the English literature of its time. The reading public was satisfied with the way in which Tennyson, particularly in the Idylls of the King, treated the emotions in the rude stories of a mythical antiquity which he rehearsed, and as it were adapted, for a strictly modern use. His Elaines and Enids were conventional women of the reign of Victoria, travestied against a romantic background of semi-barbarous romance, but preserving all their latter-day prejudices.
Swinburne, on the other hand, having selected for his background the strange mixture of refinement and brutality which characterised Franco-Scottish court-life in the sixteenth century, determined to present his characters as faithfully as he dared, without any concession to sentimentality. We have seen, and shall have occasion to see again, that his imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum, between the north and the south, between Paganism and Puritanism, between resignation to the instincts and an ascetic repudiation of their authority. With him, to an unceasing extent, the influences of childhood were ever present, and he saw existence in terms, now of the grim moors and stern summits of the Cheviot Hills, now of the rich gardens of the Isle of Wight, glimmering southward down to burnished seas of summer. In Chastelard a little group of delicate exotic women, rustling in their bright emptiness like so many dragonflies, are presented to us caged in a world of violent savages and scarcely less acrid ascetics. Swinburne was profoundly read in the pages of Brantôme and Knox, in the amorous novels of the French and the minatory sermons of the Scottish preachers. He was as much at home in the meadows of the Pays du Tendre as in the dark and perilous roads that led away from Holyrood, and was not less familiar with The Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women than with the divagations of Desportes in Les Amours d’Hippolyte.
Having it, therefore, upon his dramatic conscience to present lovers not as seen in Trollope and Patmore, or even in George Eliot and Browning, but in a condition of entire relaxation to the “precious” ideal of the French sixteenth century, Swinburne created a figure which shocked the British public of 1865, and has been unsympathetic to it since. In Chastelard, to use the well-known phrase of Corneille, love is not the “ornament,” as it is in most English plays, but the “body” of the tragedy. All relates to it, all else is molten in the breath of it; all sentiments, all responsibilities, all ties of religion and patriotism and duty wither where it blows.
Readers were offended with the hero in Swinburne’s third act, because his attitude to life was totally foreign to a generation which had pastured on The Angel in the House; but perhaps the most salient lines in the whole play are those in which the infatuated Chastelard says to the Queen, in the act of behaving to her in a manner which we justly regard as abominable and dishonourable:
No, by God’s body; You will not see? how shall I make you see?
Look, it may be love was a sort of curse
Made for my plague and mixed up with my days
Somewise in their beginning; or indeed
A bitter birth begotten of sad stars
At mine own body’s birth, that heaven might make
My lip taste sharp where other men drank sweet;
But whether in heavy body or broken soul,
I know it must go on to be my death.
There was the matter of my fate in me
When I was fashioned first, and given such life
As goes with a sad end; no fault but God’s.
Yea, and for all this I am not penitent.
This was the exact morality of those who dwelt in Tendre-sur-Inclination, and worshipped Love as an insatiable Moloch, “a sort of curse made for man’s plague.” And, as Brantôme says in his wonderful account of Chastelard’s execution, which Swinburne must have deeply studied, “c’est la fin de l’histoire.”
CHAPTER V
POEMS AND BALLADS (1866)
The success of Chastelard, following upon the still more brilliant success of Atalanta, encouraged Algernon’s friends to press for the publication of his miscellaneous lyrics. Not a few among his associates had long believed that, interesting and eloquent as his dramas might be, it was his songs and ballads and odes that really placed him, as they contended, on the very topmost peak of Parnassus. There were remarkable scenes in the early ‘sixties; Swinburne in the studio of some painter-friend, quivering with passion as he recited “Itylus” or “Félise” or “Dolores” to a semicircle of worshippers, who were thrilled by the performance to the inmost fibre of their beings. It used to be told that at the close of one such recital the auditors were found to have slipped unconsciously to their knees. The Pre-Raphaelite ladies, in particular, were often excessively moved on these occasions, and once, at least, a crown of laurel, deftly flung by a fair hand, lighted harmoniously upon the effulgent curls of the poet. Rossetti looked askance at these private rites of deification, and was anxious that the poems should come forth to brave the battle and the breeze. But neither he nor any one else foresaw how fiercely the breeze would blow, and how long the battle would last.
As we read Poems and Ballads to-day, it is difficult to reconstruct the social order into which they intruded like a bomb-shell. So far as could be perceived at the time, the ‘sixties formed the most quiescent, the most sedate, perhaps, we might even without offence continue, the least effective and efficient period in our national poetry. That this was only apparent, and that to us, looking back over half a century, it is now seen to be prodigiously effective and active in the forces that were developing, does not militate against what has just been said. The Dedication of the Idylls of the King in 18G2, Enoch Arden and Aylmer’s Field in 18G4, were typical of a certain tendency, encouraged by social prejudice, which was deplorable in its effect upon public taste, however gracefully and even faultlessly exercised by Tennyson himself in certain instances. There is no doubt that the superficiality, the element of conventionality and timeserving which invaded that poet’s temperament at this moment — dust to be flung from his wings with admirable vigour at a later period — that this smooth blandness was terribly welcome to the mid-Victorian reading public, and that the favour which Philistia showed to it almost completely silenced every voice that uttered a whisper of revolt.
Tennyson, therefore, the starched and embroidered Tennyson of the Idylls, held the field of poetry all to himself, imperially resigning a corner here or there to a devoted disciple like Jean Ingelow. But over every other poetical voice depression and silence had fallen. Robert Browning, rebuffed and rejected, yet not discouraged, was concentrating himself on the long labour of writing The Ring and the Book. Matthew Arnold, though with Thyrsis in his portfolio, had long contented himself with prose in his addresses to the public. Philistia seined to have prevailed; it was the epoch of the crinoline and the pointed shawl, when not merely could a spade never be called a spade in the most restricted circles, but the existence of that or any other such domestic utensil was strenuously denied.
It is violent and unjust to sweep away, as some petulant youthful critics are nowadays apt to do, the value of Tennyson’s idyllic work. Take even the baldest portions of it, take the sentimental story of “Dora,”
and the skill of the verse, the lucidity and directness of the narrative command respect. But the influence of it all was deadening, and we see the unquestioned genius of Tennyson in 1862 acting as a upas tree in English poetry, a wide-spreading and highly popular growth beneath whose branches true imagination withered away. Propriety had prevailed; and, once more to change our image, British poetry had become a beautifully guarded park, in which, over smoothly shaven lawns, where gentle herds of fallow-deer were grazing, thrushes sang very discreetly from the boughs of ancestral trees, and where there was not a single object to be seen or heard which could offer the very smallest discomfort to the feelings of the most refined mid-Victorian gentlewoman. Into this quiet park, to the infinite alarm of the fallow-deer, a young Bacchus was now preparing to burst, in the company of a troop of Maenads, and to the accompaniment of cymbals and clattering kettle-drums.
At the close of 1865 the position of affairs was this. The Pre-Raphaelites, duly announced by Ruskin fifteen years earlier, had gradually forced themselves upon the acceptance of a limited circle of artists and lovers of art. In the person of Millais, who had something of the character of Tennyson, they had even captured the stronghold of the Royal Academy. But the very titles of the pictures with which Millais was winning the plaudits of the public — in 1865 they were “My Second Sermon” and “Charlie is my Darling” — were enough to show what concessions he was prepared to make. Those who made no concessions — D. G. Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Whistler, for example — arrived at no visible progress towards popularity, and were misunderstood, ridiculed, and eschewed by the critics. But in poetry it had until quite lately been even worse. Meredith’s first attempt in 1851, and his second in 1862, W. Morris’s in 1858, Swinburne’s own in 1860, D. G. Rossetti’s in 1861, had been absolute failures; the new poetry seemed to have achieved no progress in the eye of the public since the experiment of The Germ in 1850. Then at last came Christina Rossetti with her brilliant, fantastic, and profoundly original volume of Goblin Market in 1862, and achieved the earliest popular success for Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Swinburne never failed to recognise the priority of Christina; he used to call her the Jael who led their host to victory.
But neither in Goblin Market nor in Modern Love was anything to be found that could be charged with disturbing those proprieties which had now practically slumbered in English literature since the publication of Don Juan. Here might be a treatment of versification, of natural scenery, even of character which was unfamiliar and therefore blameworthy, but there was nothing or next to nothing which could mantle the cheek of innocence with a blush. The friends of Algernon Swinburne were amply aware that, so far from avoiding all possibilities of offence in this direction, he was prepared to turn the pudic snows of Mrs. Grundy’s countenance to scarlet, and they had observed a certain impish gusto in his anticipation of so doing. He was even impatient to invade the Respectabilities in their woodbine bower, and to make their flesh creep while he did so. In comparison with the crudities and the audacities which are nowadays poured out upon our indifference, the particular mutinies of Swinburne’s lyrics may appear to be mild and almost anodyne. But the age was not accustomed to expressions of sensuous or of heterodox opinion. It had never had presented to it, even “on grey paper with blunt type,” anything which bore the least resemblance to “Anactoria” or “The Leper.”
At the close of 1865, then, Lord Houghton, who took the most amiable and enthusiastic interest in the affairs of his young friend, laid himself out to prepare the way for a volume of lyrics. He suggested that the MSS. should be submitted to several people of importance, with reference to the possibility that the poems might create a dangerous scandal. Accordingly the opinions of Ruskin, and perhaps of F. T. Palgrave, to whom Houghton now introduced Swinburne, were invited.
On the 8th of December 1865 Ruskin called at 22 Dorset Street and spent a long evening alone with the poet, who read him “a great part of my forthcoming volume of poems, selected with a view to secure his advice as to publication and the verdict of the world.” Ruskin expressed an enthusiastic admiration and approval, and accepted Swinburne’s paganism “with frankness.” Lady Trevelyan also indicated approval. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Burton, and Whistler, none of whom could be considered, however, as whole-hearted supporters of Mrs. Grundy, were also gravely consulted.
Swinburne, as might well be supposed, was a little restive under all this examination, and he very properly insisted that censure should confine itself to the plain issue of whether the British public would or would not “stand” such a dish of strong meat. He invited no other criticism, and he wrote to Houghton with a proper dignity: “As to my quantities and metre and rule of rhythm and rhyme, I defy castigation. The head-master has sent me up for good on that score, — Mr. Tennyson tells me in a note that he envies me my gift that way.’ After this approval, I will not submit myself to the birch on that account.”
We have seen that he had been taken in 1858 to dine with Tennyson, who then wrote of him as “a very modest and intelligent young fellow”; and now the Laureate, having read Atalanta, remarked, “It is many a long day since I have read anything so fine.” In December 1865, when the manuscript of Poems and Ballads was being put together, Tennyson came up to London on one of his rare visits, and Palgrave asked Houghton to bring Swinburne to see his illustrious guest. But the visit was not wholly a success; after a few words of civility had passed between the poets, they found nothing more to say to one another. Swinburne withdrew, with G. H. Lewes, to another room, and monologuized in rather falsetto tones about Blake and Flaxman. He was unduly excited, and, in short, he behaved in a way which greatly incensed Houghton, who, while taking him back to his lodgings, administered to him “an avalanche of advice” as to how to behave in presence of his elders and betters, advice which was very angrily resented and led to a temporary cooling of friendship.
This incident was highly characteristic, and may be taken as a type of much which has been repeated and may be repeated again. Swinburne was now becoming unfitted for general society, because the presence of many persons, and particularly of strangers, fretted him, and because he was unable to resist the tide of excitement which considerations of literature and art loosened in his being, and which flooded his brain, distracted his voice, and disarticulated his limbs.
It is thought to have been in 1866 that Swinburne became acquainted at the Arts Club with Dr. George Bird, already the intimate friend of the Burtons and the Spartalis. This excellent physician, whose tastes were markedly intellectual and artistic, and who had enjoyed the intimacy of Leigh Hunt in his last years, was an unqualified admirer of Atalanta in Calydon. He had a nature, sympathetic and serene, which instantly commended itself to Swinburne, who soon became a constant visitor to him and to his sister, Miss Alice Bird, at their house in Welbeek Street. Algernon’s meetings here with Richard Burton have already been mentioned. Dr. Bird became Swinburne’s guardian-angel, as well as his doctor, and in the double capacity saved him from many results of his wild impulsiveness. Once, some years later than the point which we have now reached, the poet completely vanished, to the extreme alarm of his family. Admiral Swinburne came up from Holmwood in great agitation, and, helpless to discover the truant, applied to Dr. George Bird and his sister. Alone with Miss Bird for a few moments, the Admiral said, with pathetic solicitude, “Miss Bird, God has endowed my son with genius, but He has not vouchsafed to grant him self-control.” On this occasion, and on others of a more or less distressing kind, the prodigal was found and restored to his lodgings by the devotion and cleverness of Dr. Bird, to whom, it is not too much to say, he owed his life not once nor twice.
The little breeze with Houghton, who displayed on these occasions a most amiable patience, soon blew itself out, and the preparations for collecting the lyrics went forward undisturbed. In January 1866 it was decided to make a beginning by issuing, as a test, a small privately printed edition of what was, oddly enough, looked upon by the friends as the most dange
rous of the pieces, namely, Laus Veneris. Accordingly, Moxon issued a very few copies of this poem as a little book by itself. Of the genesis of this interesting pamphlet, Swinburne gave an account in later years. “It was,” he wrote, “more an experiment to ascertain the public taste — and forbearance! — than anything else. Moxon, I well remember, was terribly nervous in those days.” The reference is to the firm, since Moxon himself was dead, but his business was continued by a certain J. Bertram Payne, who, no doubt, represented “Moxon” to the poet’s consciousness.
In spite, however, of the imprint on Laus Veneris, there certainly had been a proposal that the ancient firm of Murray should publish the complete collection, and Lord Houghton, rather prematurely, submitted the manuscript to Albemarle Street. Swinburne was not quite pleased; “I do not,” he wrote to Joseph Knight, “overmuch like my poems sent as it were for approval like those of a novice.” This anxiety was well grounded, for Mr. Murray at once refused them (March 4), and in terms which stung the poet to fury. He said that he would permit no more interference, and “Moxon” finally deciding to take it, the thick volume now entitled Poems and Ballads was in the hands of the printers by March 1860. On the 19th of April Swinburne was correcting proofs of this and of a prose book on Blake of which he had sent part to press before the close of 1865. If the timidity of publishers should seem to us to-day excessive, let it be recalled that as lately as 1841 Edward Moxon himself had been prosecuted, and heavily fined, for issuing a reprint of Shelley’s Queen Mab. In the light of subsequent action, we may well believe that the shadow of this conviction still troubled the dreams of his successor.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 361