Meanwhile, still early in 1866, Swinburne published with Moxon a judicious selection from the lyrical work of Byron, and prefixed to it a long critical study. In later years, when his attitude to Byron had become one of pronounced hostility, he disliked any reference to this early essay, which is now little known. It is, however, not merely a sound, clear, and weighty piece of criticism, but is written in a style of unusual purity and restraint. No more faultless passage of prose was ever composed by Swinburne than that with which the Byron of 1866 concludes:
His work was done at Missolonghi; all of his work for which the fates could spare him time. A little space was allowed him to show at least a heroic purpose, and attest a high design; then, with all things unfinished before him and behind; he fell asleep after many troubles and triumphs. Few can ever have gone wearier to the grave; none with less fear. He had done enough to earn his rest. Forgetful now and set free for ever from all faults and foes, he passed through the doorway of no ignoble death out of reach of time, out of sight of love, out of hearing of hatred, beyond the blame of England and the praise of Greece. In the full strength of spirit and of body his destiny overtook him, and made an end of all his labours. He had seen and borne and achieved more than most men on record. “He was a great man, good at many things, and now he had attained his rest.”
Here the cadences are exquisite, and they are proper to the instrument of prose. The Byron of 1866 begins with a handsome compliment to Matthew Arnold, but it is probable that to Arnold himself was due Swinburne’s later prejudice against Byron, since he bitterly resented Arnold’s depreciation of Shelley as a mere satellite of Byron, and so was drawn to meditate upon Byron’s shortcomings as a poet and as a man. It was arranged that Moxon should follow the Selections from Byron by a similar Keats arranged, with a critical preface, by Swinburne; but in the confusion which presently ensued this project was dropped. So also was the scheme of a literary magazine he was to edit.
In the case of a collection of lyrical verse so important as Poems and Ballads, it would be interesting to possess some indication of the dates at which the successive pieces were composed. But, so far as our present knowledge goes, this is impossible. We are not able even to conjecture what actuated the poet in the existing arrangement, or rather lack of arrangement, of the poems. He seems to have shuffled them together, like cards in a hat, with an intentional confusion of subject, date, and style. That they illustrate ten or eleven years of Swinburne’s life, years in which he was rapidly developing in intellectual experience and in breadth of expression, this is all that we know, and it is tantalising enough to the biographical critic.
The only light thrown on this darkness is itself obscure, since the lines in the Dedication to Edward Burne-Jones, in which the poet says of his Poems and Ballads that
Some sang to me dreaming in class-time And truant in hand as in tongue; For the youngest were born of boy’s pastime, The eldest are young, are refuted by his own explicit statement, at a later date, that he “burned every scrap of MS. he had in the world” when he was eighteen. But in April 1855 — if we may take that as the approximate date of this destruction — he had left school for two years, and the impression that still-existing verses had been written “in classtime” at Eton is almost certainly an error of memory. It may be connected with the strange fact that about 1865 Swinburne contrived to persuade himself, and to convince some of his friends, that he was three years younger than he really was. He cultivated this odd fiction for some time, thereby laying many traps for posterity. On the double supposition, then, that he was born in 1840, and that Poems and Ballads covered eleven years, he would be obliged to attribute the earliest of them to his fifteenth year, when he was still at Eton, and when we know that he “got full sense” for his Greek elegiacs. But this was an innocent mystification, and there is no evidence that a single piece in Poems and Ballads was “blown with boy’s mouth in a reed,” especially as we have seen the boy Algernon to have been far from precocious as a poet.
There were frequent attempts made by his friends to unravel the secrets of the volume of 1866, but Swinburne never gave them any help. Stedman undertook by a careful investigation to date the principal poems, and submitted his conjectures to the poet. He received in reply the baffling remark, “Your guess at some among them is quite right, but of course there are more.” In 1875, under pressure of this kind, Swinburne announced: “You will soon see the Poems and Ballads in a new edition, and all those written at college removed into the same volume with my two early plays, and labelled all together as Early Poems”; but he never carried out this scheme, and the interesting secret seems to have died with him.
We know that a great accession of lyrical fervour came upon him in 1862, when “Laus Veneris,” and “Faustine,” and “The Triumph of Time” were composed. I have examined drafts of the “Ballad of Life” and the “Ballad of Death,” which bear the same date, and in that year also several political poems, probably earlier in time of composition, were printed in the Spectator. “Hermaphroditus” was written in Paris in March 1863. “Itylus” and “Félise” may, with more or less certainty, be dated 1864. “Dolores” was composed at Ashburnham Place, in the late summer of 1865. Swinburne told me that the “Ode to Victor Hugo” was, he believed, written in that year. These are slight but not valueless indications, and it is possible that more and more definite data will in due time be forthcoming.
Meanwhile, Lord Houghton did not pause in his benevolent work of rousing public curiosity. His influence in social and literary circles was very considerable, and he threw himself with zeal into any cause which he took up. The new poet found himself excessively discussed beforehand, and Lord Houghton did not hesitate to add piquancy to his recommendations by hints of the highly-spiced quality of the dish that his young friend was preparing. Perhaps this was a little overdone, and the idle public somewhat too mysteriously warned, with nudge and wink, to look out for something vivid. A certain prejudice, pre-awakened, entered into the causes of the outburst which was to follow.
Meanwhile, on the 2nd of May 1866, Lord Houghton took the chair at the Anniversary Dinner of the Royal Literary Fund, in Willis’ Rooms. Here was an occasion for dauntless propaganda, and it was bravely taken. The Chairman bargained that, if he came, he must insist on his youthful and brilliant friend, Mr. Swinburne, being asked to reply for “Literature.” The Committee was more than cool, the brilliant and youthful friend absolutely refused, but Lord Houghton was not to be put by. When he wished for something, it was his custom to get it, and on the night of the 2nd of May, not merely was the author of Atalanta among the honoured guests, but Venables, in proposing “the Historical and Imaginative Literature of England,” called upon Charles Kingsley and Algernon Swinburne to reply. What Venables said is remarkable, both as indicating the high position that Swinburne had already achieved, and as showing an anxiety lest so spirited a steed might kick over the traces. He remarked:
The representative of that future generation is, I say without fear or hesitation, Mr. Swinburne. He alone, of his age, has shown his power to succeed in the highest walks of poetry.... I have no doubt that in the long career which is probably before him, Mr. Swinburne will take many easier and many pleasanter subjects [than Chastelard].... He will hardly exceed the beauty of the lyric flights which he has accomplished; and I am sure that he will feel that as the representative of the future in English poetry he has a great responsibility upon him.
Charles Kingsley endorsed “every word that Mr. Venables had said” in praise of Swinburne, who thereupon rose, in the midst of great curiosity and general acclamation, and recited, in shrill, monotonous tones, the short essay which he had learned by heart. The occasion was a very curious one, for never before, and never again through the whole of his life, was Swinburne to make a public appearance of this kind. He was “single-speech Algernon” in the fullest sense of the phrase.
His reply, preserved in the archives of the Royal Literary Fund, but never republished,
is a very curious epitome of his poetical creed. Brief as it was, Swinburne found means to enshrine in it his passion for Victor Hugo and his admiration for Baudelaire, and to enunciate, for the first time, that theory of the triplicity of mediaeval imagination which he was so very fond of repeating:
The Middle Ages brought forth a trinity of great poets: Dante, the Italian noble; Chaucer, the English gentleman; Villon, the French plebeian. Chaucer touches Dante with reluctance, almost with repulsion, uses him for a little, then recoils, and drops him as a child might drop a hot iron. But when Chaucer comes upon the poetry of France he feels instantly at home. The spirit of southern France brightens and warms his verse; the hot, sweet breath of Provence satiates and excites him. He translates, even (in part), the intolerable Roman de la Rose; but the real tribute to France is not there; it must be sought in his Court of Love, impregnated with Provençal fancy, permeated with Albigensian faith; in his Troilus and Cresside, filled from end to end with that fierce monotony of tenderness, that bitter absorption of life, which has made the heathenish love of Provençal fighters and singers a proverb to this day.
As a series of historical statements all this is out of date, but as evidence of the condition of Swinburne’s mind in this critical year 1866, it has permanent value. Among those who listened to these feverish outpourings of genius were, it is somewhat amusing to be told, Dean Stanley, Henry Reeve, Anthony Trollope, Sir Samuel Baker, and “the Rev. Leslie Stephen,” besides one or two personal friends, such as Frederic Leighton and Lord Milton.
With this evening’s work, the labour of preparing for the reception of Poems and Ballads was complete. The banquet was ready, the company assembled, but the principal guest failed to arrive. The volume had been announced to appear early in May; by the middle of July it had still not made its appearance. All the reasons for this delay are not quite defined, but it seems that an early copy of the bound volume being sent to the author in May, he immediately detected in it between twenty and thirty serious misprints, which had escaped him in the revise. How it had been possible for Swinburne to overlook so large a number of faults in his proofs it is not easy to conjecture, but the fact is certain. He returned the copy to Moxon forthwith, insisting that the errors might all be rectified as completely as possible. This involved a great deal of expense and delay. Mr. T. J. Wise, who discovered this fact, and who has carefully compared the original corrections in the poet’s handwriting with the final text, tells me that “to effect this revision some of the sheets had to be reprinted in toto; in certain cases portions only of the sheets were reprinted; in other instances, where punctuation only was involved, the missing stops were inserted by hand.” At any rate, it was an exasperating business, which delayed the final appearance of the book until late in the summer.
Algernon now experienced a loss which was, as Sir George Otto Trevelyan remarked to me in a letter which I print entire in an Appendix, “a very real and permanent misfortune to him.” Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, though still in middle life, had for some years been failing in health. Swinburne had submitted his poems to her as he wrote them, and it is believed that she was able to read some of the proofs of Poems and Ballads. She left England in a vain pursuit of recovery, and died at Neuchâtel in Switzerland on the 13th of May 1866. Her influence over Swinburne, who called her his “second mother,” had been uniformly sympathetic and wholesome, and during her lifetime the fear of grieving her was a constant check upon his extravagances. On occasion, Lady Trevelyan, whose social authority among people of various high distinction was great, exercised it practically in the defence of the young poet, whose character was, in some quarters, bitterly aspersed; and he was deeply and continuously grateful to her. In after years he never spoke of Lady Trevelyan without emotion.
On receiving his copy of Poems and Ballads, Richard Burton expressed his fear that the British public might be unwilling to swallow so much undiluted paganism. But no one had anticipated the storm of censure which now broke over Algernon’s radiant and mocking head. He might, however, have defied the common reviewer, since he had not a few supporters in the press, with Joseph Knight prominent among them. But an antagonist arose whose authority could not be disregarded, and whose ferocity was terrible. By far the most powerful organ of literary opinion in 1866 was the Saturday Review, in which, on the 4th of August, appeared a very long article entitled “Mr. Swinburne’s New Poems,” an article that not merely transformed the fortunes of that particular edition or volume, but created a prejudiced conception of the poet from which it is not too much to say that he suffered until the end of his life.
This review, which was brilliantly written, came from the pen of an Oxford man, afterwards not less famous than Swinburne himself, who had been for years at the University with him, but had never happened to meet him. By the odd fate of things, the writer later on became one of Swinburne’s closest friends and supporters, although he never distinctly withdrew from the position he had taken up in censuring the “libidinous songs” of 1866. It was in this review, which was a nine-days’ wonder in the world of letters, that strong publicity was first given to several phrases — such as “The lilies and languors of virtue, the roses and raptures of vice,” or “Thou art noble and nude and antique,” — which immediately became hack-lines and the prey of parodists. A quotation from this very powerful and mordant review may be given as the model of what was from this time forward to be alleged by Swinburne’s opponents:
Mr. Swinburne riots in the profusion of colour of the most garish and heated kind. He is like a composer who should fill his orchestra with trumpets, or a painter who should exclude every colour but a blaring red and a green as of sour fruit. There are not twenty stanzas in the whole book which have the faintest tincture of soberness. We are in the midst of fire and serpents, wine and ashes, blood and foam, and a hundred lurid horrors. Unsparing use of the most violent colours and the most intoxicated ideas and images is Mr. Swinburne’s prime characteristic.
But the moral charges were far severer than the literary. The poet was called “an unclean fiery imp from the pit” and “the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs.” He was accused of an “audacious counterfeiting of strong and noble passion by mad intoxicated sensuality.” He had “revealed to the world a mind all aflame with the feverish carnality of a schoolboy over the dirtiest passages in Lemprière.” All this and more, in the columns of the leading literary newspaper of the age, formed a loud and clear call for conclusive public reprobation.
The next week was the most agitating in Algernon’s life. As it happened, the Saturday Review had condemned the book before it was obtainable in the shops, the copy on which it based its attack having been delivered for criticism in advance of the regular publication. The note struck by the Saturday Review was immediately repeated, in more or less virulence and panic, by other newspapers. A report was spread abroad that the Times was preparing an attack on the book, which would include a demand for the criminal prosecution of the publisher. Payne had not hesitated, but on the 5th of August had curtly informed Swinburne that Poems and Ballads was withdrawn from sale. He did this, as Swinburne complained, “without consulting, without warning and without compensation,” a victim to sudden and craven panic. Swinburne was constitutionally unable to attend to business which required patience and selfrestraint, and D. G. Rossetti and his brother, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, took up the matter for him. They called at the house of Moxon, in Dover Street, and saw Bertram Payne, who treated them with scant respect. They reported on their return that the publisher was distracted with terror of the Public Prosecutor, and desired nothing so much as to be rid of the poet and all his friends.
On the other hand, Swinburne received warm support and sympathy from many sources, and several of them unexpected. George Meredith wrote to him not to care, although this was “decidedly the Era of the Tame Ox.” Lord Lytton, who had been an early admirer of Atalanta, wrote to him at once in most consolatory tones, and offered his practical help. Swinburne went down
to Knebworth, whither Forster was asked to meet him, and he stayed there for nearly a week. Meanwhile, Lord Lytton looked into his affairs, and arranged, through Joseph Knight, for the republication of Poems and Ballads by a firm more courageous than Moxon’s. Lytton described the poet, who was then in his thirtieth year, as one who looked sixteen, “a pale, sickly boy”; “he inspires one with sadness; but he is not so sad himself, and his self-esteem is solid as a rock.” With regard to the supposed immoral horrors of the poems, Lytton confessed himself with naiveté: “the beauty of diction and mastership of craft in melodies really so dazzled me that I did not see the naughtiness till pointed out.”
Lord Houghton, away for his health at Vichy, was inclined to underestimate the fury of the newspapers, but recommended reliance on the wisdom and experience of Lord Lytton. Accordingly, Swinburne removed all his publications from Messrs. Moxon, and also, as has only lately become known, withdrew the sheets of the practically complete monograph of William Blake, which were stored in that arrested condition till they were brought out two years later by John Camden Hotten, that somewhat notorious tradesman being now the only one who would take the risk of bringing out the works of a poet who had publicly been stigmatised for immorality.
Swinburne, though advised by Lord Houghton, had been very unwilling to put any work of his, “anonymous or pseudonymous or signed, into the hands of Hotten,” but beggars cannot be choosers, and he had to face the alternative of being crushed into complete obscurity or illuminated by that somewhat dingy imprint. For the existing copies of Poems and Ballads Hotten paid Moxon £200. In September all Swinburne’s books, with fresh title-pages and bindings, reappeared under this new sign, and once more the demand for prosecution was uttered. The cry was led, or so at least Swinburne believed, by the social reformer J. M. Ludlow (1821-1911), who appears at the same time to have called Victor Hugo a “quack.” Swinburne poured forth a string of amusing verse-invectives against Ludlow, but as they were not fitted for publication it is to be feared that the zealous friend of Kingsley and Maurice never saw them. Ludlow demanded the prosecution of Poems and Ballads, but there was no longer any ardent response, and an especial appeal to Ruskin to lead the popular clamour was received in terms which must have disconcerted the objectors. Although, as Sir I — T. Cooke slyly remarks, Ruskin “was not usually averse from reading moral lectures,” he refused to do it on this occasion. He replied:
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 362