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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  [Swinburne] is infinitely above me in all knowledge and power, and I should no more think of advising him or criticising him than of venturing to do it to Turner if he were alive again.... He is simply one of the mightiest scholars of his age in Europe.... In power of imagination and understanding he simply sweeps me away before him as a torrent does a pebble. I’m tighter than he is — so are the lambs and the swallows, but they’re not his match.

  This was generous and effective, but it is impossible to forget that an appeal had been made beforehand to Ruskin with regard to the propriety of publishing Poems and Ballads, and that he had professed to see no cause of offence. He was therefore bound in honour to support the culprit, although we may conjecture that he had not studied “Anactoria” or “Dolores” with any very close attention.

  When agreeing to reissue Poems and Ballads, Hotten, who was an astute purveyor, made verbal terms which afterwards proved very awkward. He published, in a very small edition, in paper covers, Cleopatra, which was new, and has never been reprinted, George Meredith having condemned it as “a farrago of the most obvious commonplaces of ‘Swinburne’s ordinary style.’” Hotten also suggested and even urged that the poet should accompany the republication of Poems and Ballads by a prose apology or defence. Other friends — Rossetti, Ruskin, and Joseph Knight in particular — thought the suggestion a good one, and urged Swinburne to accede to Hotten’s request. At first he was unwilling, in the extravagance of wounded pride, to take the slightest notice of his assailants. “Their verdict,” he wrote, “to me is a matter of infinite indifference; it is of equally small moment to me whether in such eyes as theirs I appear moral or immoral, Christian or pagan.” But he gave way on the reflection “that science must not scorn to investigate animalcules and infusoria,” and he consented “for once to play the anatomist.”

  The early weeks of September 1866 were occupied with the composition of Notes on Poems and Reviews. This is the earliest, and on the whole the freshest and most vivacious, of Swinburne’s controversial writings. It is not in any sense an apology; there is much more of the red flag than the white sheet about it. It is the protest of a very angry and arrogant young man against what he considers to be at once an injustice and an impertinence. The attitude is sublime in its defiance, and might at a touch become ridiculous. It is saved from that anticlimax by a deft adroitness, and by the remarkable purity of the style. Swinburne was writing prose extremely well when he composed his amusing Notes on Poems and Reviews.

  It is notoriously difficult to reply with grace to a charge of indelicacy, which, in our chilly climate, is equivalent to a charge of want of good sense and good manners. The victim may bow the head, like Dryden, or attack the plaintiff’s attorney, like Byron; Swinburne adopted an attitude which more closely resembled that of Congreve under the lash of Jeremy Collier. He denied the truth of his critics’ animadversions, questioned their good faith, and lavished contempt on their pretensions to purity, learning, and taste. He said that he was not “virtuous” enough to know what the reviewers meant, nor “vicious” enough to explain or imagine. “Ma corruption,” he amusingly quoted, “rougirait de leur pudeur.” The only fault he recognised in himself was that he had underrated “the evidence which every day makes clearer, that our time has room only for such as are content to write for children and girls.” This was the strength of his position, and the point at which his pamphlet did most service to literature. Swinburne’s analysis of particular lyrics, his elaborate irony and appeal to French authorities which were already becoming obscure, his loftiness, his bursts of coloured rhetoric — these are merely more or less entertaining. But his passionate appeal for a reasonable and manly liberty of utterance, his indignation at the idea that nothing must be published which is not “fit and necessary food for female infancy” — this struck a new note, or revived a forgotten note, of wholesome freedom, and permanently strengthened the hands of all those who “profess to deal neither in poison nor in pap.”

  The Notes were written at Holmwood, close to Henley-on-Thames, where Algernon’s parents were now settled. Later in August he paid Lord Houghton a visit at Fryston, and the greater part of September he spent at Penllwyn, near Aberystwyth, with a young Welsh squire, whose acquaintance he had made towards the close of the preceding year, but with whom he now became intimate. This was George Powell of Nant-Eôs, who continued to be for several years Swinburne’s close companion and confidant. The poet bathed in the sea, climbed the downs, and raced on horseback along the sands, recovering in the open air, as he always magically did, the youth and splendour of which London so fatally robbed him. He was particularly happy at Aberystwyth this September, gazing over the bay of Cardigan to the tender west, “where,” as he wrote, “the shadows of all happy and holy things live beyond the sunset a sacred and a sleepless life,” at peace with nature and himself after the fierce and fiery controversies of the summer.

  There is no question that the riotous notoriety given to Poems and Ballads had a disturbing influence on Swinburne’s temperament. It made. him exacting and self-conscious. Up to this time he had lived the life of a wonderful child, depending, with great simplicity, on the affection of a narrow circle of friends, who were far too strongly devoted to him to allow his irresponsible moods to worry them. But now he was thrown, with a sudden immense publicity, on the world in general, and exposed to the flatteries and the insults of a crowd of strangers. A legend sprang up about him, and the wildest stories passed from mouth to mouth, and even found expression in the press, He became irritable under what he held to be injustice, although indeed he had courted a sensation. In this juncture he looked for help from his friends, but several of those on whom he most depended were absent. Lady Trevelyan was dead. Whistler, Burton, and Leighton were out of England. The Rossettis, the Burne-Joneses, and George Howard (afterwards Lord Carlisle), indeed, were loyal and helpful, but Swinburne fell into the hands of other and later associates, whose company was not always of advantage to him.

  In particular, about this time, he became involved, like Rossetti and Ruskin, in the ambitions of the strange young Anglo-Portuguese, Charles Augustus Howell, who became his man of business, the partner of his amusements, the confidant of his literary projects, and often his main channel of communication with the world. For seven or eight years, until the arrival of Theodore Watts on the scene, Howell was to Swinburne all that Atticus was to Cicero. From a material point of view it is not clear that Swinburne suffered as D. G. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Ruskin are said to have done from the vagaries of Howell, but a worse factotum could scarcely have been found for Swinburne in these critical and fervid years.

  No relationship of this early period has been so little understood as that with Whistler, which now underwent an unhappy modification. Swinburne and Whistler had, for three or four years, lived in an intimacy which was of much advantage to the poet, who found in the extraordinary painter a companion as hyperaesthetic as himself, and yet not hurtful to him. Their mutual peculiarities of character did not clash, and an artistic sympathy of great warmth, and disturbed by no jealousy, united them. No piece in the Poems and Ballads was more discussed than “Before the Mirror,” an ode of ardent admiration for Whistler’s noblest picture, now known as “The Little White Girl.” Whistler had been attacked in 1865 as outrageously as Swinburne was in 1860, and the publication of this poem was an act of signal intellectual courage. But when his own turn came Swinburne received no comfort from Whistler. The reason was that Whistler spent almost the whole of 1866 at Valparaiso, and probably knew nothing of what was going on in England. But Swinburne thought that he ought to have written to him from Chile, and he resented the painter’s silence. Ile did not go near Whistler’s mother, that admirable woman to whom Swinburne owed so much, and when Whistler reappeared in London, and settled at 96 Cheyne Walk in February 1867, Swinburne was cross, and held aloof. This coldness continued, although courteous relations were afterwards resumed; and the two remained on fair terms until the de
plorable quarrel in 1888.

  These are private considerations; in the public view, Algernon Swinburne in the winter of 1866 was simply the young man of almost fabulous genius, who had produced a sensation among lovers of poetry such as had not been approached since the youth of Tennyson. As an eminent critic, then an undergraduate at Oxford, has said, “It simply swept us off our legs with rapture.” At Cambridge the young men joined hands and marched along shouting “Dolores” or “A Song in time of Revolution.” The volume was mixed up with other fire-crackers in the preparation for the Fifth of November. It stood for passion and flame and revolt, it raced beside the swiftest of its admirers and easily beat them. As Mr. Saintsbury, himself an ardent youth in those days, outside any circle of personal relations with the poet, has recorded, “all the metaphors and similes of water, light, wind, fire, all the modes of motion” seemed to inspire and animate this wonderful poetry, which took the whole lettered youth of England by storm with its audacity and melody.

  During the month of October Notes on Poems and Reviews, “my defensive and offensive Laus Diabolo,” was published, and was received with considerable favour. It was seen through the press by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, who, by excision of several of the most unguarded passages, curbed the noble indignation of the poet. The Notes were on the whole favourably received. Even the Saturday Review executed a more or less respectful recantation. About the same time a small volume of criticism of Swinburne’s poetry was published by Mr. W. M. Rossetti; this was excellent in tone and laudatory without partiality or exaggeration. Meanwhile, the notoriety of Poems and Ballads showed no sign of diminution, and it was at this time that George Augustus Sala, called upon at a public dinner to give thanks for poetry, replied that he did so “in the names of the clever (but I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne, and of the moral (but I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper.” The United States caught the infection, and Swinburne wrote to a friend (Nov. 21, 1866): “I have gone through five editions in as many days in America; a sterile success which brings much clamour and no profit with it.” His American publisher, G. W. Carleton, made a spirited fight, but had, he complained, “a rough time of it.” He bowed before the storm and withdrew the book, neglecting, so the poet asserted, to pay him any royalties, although the price of single copies went up to five dollars.

  On the other hand, there were rapturous admirers everywhere, and “a lady in Florence has written a poem about me and my critics, in which it is stated that the seven leading angels of heaven are now occupied in singing my praises before God, and returning thanks to him for my existence. This is cheerful to know.” Lord Houghton defended his young friend in the Examiner, under the signature, “Nothing if not critical,” and Professor Henry Morley was another apologist. In the shelter of Holmwood the poet settled down to an active winter. He was now studying with warm appreciation the writings of Whitman; he wrote to Houghton (Nov. 2, 1866): “If you have read the Drum Taps of the great Walt (whose friends have published a pamphlet in his defence), I daresay you agree with me that his dirge or nocturn over your friend Lincoln is a superb piece of music and colour. It is infinitely impressive when read aloud.” He reflected upon Walt Whitman while writing the last chapters of his William Blake, a critical Essay, which he completed in November 1866, although it was delayed in publication till 1868. In the same month he began the Song of Italy, which he thus announced in a letter of November 29th:

  I have been doing more verses on Italia (excuse — I can’t spell it English wise) — which some people think as good at least as my best things. Of course as a fanatic I can’t judge; it looks to me simply flat and inadequate; but I think the verses are good for me, however bad they may be for her (I mean it).

  A brief return to London not merely brought all this creative activity to an end, but violently affected his health. He seemed unable to resist succumbing to the most debilitating irregularities. His family insisted on his hurrying back to Holmwood, where he quickly recovered, and presently resumed the Song of Italy, which he completed in February 1867. The winter passed peacefully at Holmwood, where, as “poetry is at a discount and music idolised,” the unfortunate Algernon professed himself subjected to a double torture. For music he had no gift nor appreciation. Not to put too fine a point upon it, he was totally devoid of “ear,” and to listen to a performance on any instrument drove him wild with petulance and impatience. At Holmwood poetry was not delighted in, and the piano was triumphant. But this was a crease in the roseleaf, and, in matter of fact, he was profoundly happy and serene at home.

  CHAPTER VI.

  SONGS OF THE REPUBLIC (1867-1870)

  WHEN 1867 opened Swinburne was still in a selfconscious state of upheaval, still, as he put it, “the centre of such a moral chaos that even our excellent Houghton maintains a discreet and consistent neutrality.” His late publishers pretended ignorance of his address, and dismissed all his correspondence to the Dead Letter Office. This and other impertinences produced in him a sort of reckless dejection. He had braved public opinion, and now he shrank from an obloquy which he had courted, and the extent of which he exaggerated. Yet he had no intention of pacifying his enemies; he even planned a more determined attack on their susceptibilities. On the 11th of January he wrote to Burton, who was now consul at Santos in Brazil:

  II — have in hand a scheme of mixed verse and prose, — a sort of étude à la Balzac plus the poetry — which I flatter myself will be more offensive and objectionable to Britannia than anything I have yet done. You see I have now a character to keep up.

  His opening work in 1867, however, was the completion of a long “Ode on the Insurrection in Candia,” which he had begun at Aberystwyth. This is the earliest poem in which we detect the transcendental tone that was to fill the volume of Songs before Sunrise. It is a fine performance, learnedly constructed, but it is a little dull, and in later years the poet disliked to hear it mentioned. He was conscious, I think, of a slight insincerity in the enthusiasm it expressed, for though he was very deeply concerned for Mentana and Custozza, he did not really care whether the Candians insurrected or not. The Ode was a false start in the race for Italy, and it was at this precise awkward moment that it occurred to the Master of Balliol, Dr. Jowett, who had never ceased to follow Swinburne’s career with interest, that his intellectual high spirits might be utilised and his thoughts led away from Cotytto and Astarte by concentrating his energies on the Republican movement in Italy. This movement was then vitalised in England by the presence amongst us of the devoted and inspiring Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72), who, having left Italy under sentence of death, had now been long resident in London.

  Swinburne’s political aspirations, and his occasional political poems, had been increasingly in sympathy with the Republic which Mazzini designed, but he was still unacquainted with the great leader in whose honour he had written an ode ten years before. Certain friends now met at the house of George Howard, whither Jowetl came, and Mazzini, brought by Karl Blind, to discuss, as Lord Carlisle afterwards put it, “what could be done with and for Algernon.” Accordingly Mazzini, informed of the promise and situation of the tempestuous young poet, consented to take intellectual charge of him. He was shown the “Ode on the Insurrection in Candia,” and he wrote a letter to Swinburne (in March 18G7) in which he expressed his admiration of the spirit and form of it. Swinburne, never suspecting collusion, took this letter round to show his friends as a heaven-sent missive from the blue. Karl Blind was then instructed to bring Swinburne to Mazzini’s lodgings. Ile did so, with the help of Thomas Purnell, and the result is described in a letter the next morning:

  I unworthy spent much of last night sitting at my beloved Chief’s feet. He was angelically good to me.

  II ead him my Italian poem all through and he accepted it in words I can’t trust myself to try and write down.... To-day I am rather exhausted and out of sorts.

  III — l — y a bien de quoi. There’s a tradition in the Talmud that when Moses came down from Sinai he was drunken with the ki
sses of the lips of God.

  It is conceivable that Mazzini also was rather exhausted next day, for A Song of Italy contains nearly one thousand verses. Swinburne dashed off a dedication, “with all devotion and reverence, to Joseph Mazzini,” and sent the little volume to press.

  In the meantime, in April of this year, on a false report in some French newspaper of the death of Baudelaire, Swinburne wrote the most highly-finished of all his elegiacal poems, the “Ave atque Vale.”

  “I have written” (May 23rd) “a little sort of lyric dirge for my poor Baudelaire,” he modestly put it. Modelled, like most great English elegies, on the Lament for Bion of Moschus, this grave and stately threnody has a soberness, a dignity, which distinguish it among the fervid writings of its author. Nowhere else has Swinburne come nearer to the majesty and depth of emotion of the purest Greek literature, nor clothed his thought in severer language: