In describing to me a few years later the episode of his being nearly drowned at Etretat, Swinburne said that as he floated to his death, as he supposed, he reflected with satisfaction that his republican poems were nearly ready for the press, and that Mazzini would “be pleased with” him. The natural meaning of this statement is that the collection ultimately called Songs before Sunrise was practically complete as early as October 1868, and we have already seen that large portions of it were written and revised by that time, although other pieces of importance were added sporadically during the next two years and a half. The indications of date in the poems themselves are of a very illusive kind. But it is believed that “Ilertha,” perhaps the most original and powerful of all Swinburne’s lyrical writings, was composed in the course of 1868.
On returning from Etretat, at any rate, he seems to have given the over-trumpeted Republic a quiet interval. He brought out at last his bulky prose volume, so long delayed, on William Blake. It was from the Rossettis, and as soon as Algernon came into close relation with them, that he first heard of that painter-poet. The name of the visionary was already a shibboleth among the Pre-Raphaelites. D. G. Rossetti had bought, so long back as 1847, a book of Blake’s drawings and MS. verses, and the great interest which he and his brother had ever since taken in the subject was crystallised by the labours of their friend, Alexander Gilchrist, who, having published a good Life of Etty, settled down to the far more difficult task of preparing a Life of Blake. Gilchrist died, still young, in 1861, and left this work unfinished; it was completed by his widow, Anne Gilchrist, with the help of the Rossettis. Swinburne was taken into everybody’s confidence about Gilchrist’s book, which appeared, at last, in two handsome volumes in 1863; it still marks a stage in the progress of art-criticism.
Swinburne’s William Blake, which was five years in hand, began, as a review of Gilchrist’s posthumous work, before he started for Italy in February 1864. At Florence, his conversations with Blake’s old friend, Seymour Kirkup, modified Swinburne’s views on some points. His review remained unprinted, and gradually expanded into a massive monograph. As he went on, and in the process of examining anew the MS. lyrics and the Prophetic Books of Blake, Swinburne’s opinions underwent considerable further change, and this is felt in the texture of his book as it now stands.
The William Blake, however, despite this disadvantage, is a work of high enthusiasm and solid erudition, which must always be read with respect, whatever new lights are projected on the art of Blake. It carried the just appreciation of his marvellous gifts much further on than the praiseworthy labours of the Gilchrists had done. Swinburne was the first critic to refrain from apologising for Blake as an eccentric or lunatic person with flashes of genius; he claimed systematic appreciation for his productions at large. The two most novel features of Swinburne’s criticism were his analysis of Blake’s mysticism and his laborious and illuminating examination of the Prophetic Books, which even the most initiated admirers had up to that time rejected as impenetrable. D. G. Rossetti himself attempted to dissuade Swinburne from what he condemned as labour lost, but Swinburne showed firmness as well as acumen in insisting on his defence of these difficult compositions. He wrote: “I am bound to register my protest against the contempt and condemnation which these Books have incurred, thinking them, as I do, not unworthy the trouble of commentary,” and the verdict of the best subsequent criticism has been wholly on his side. Gilchrist had expressed a wish that the old man who appears entering an open door, star in hand, at the beginning of Blake’s Jerusalem, could be induced to guide us through “those infinite dark passages and labyrinthine catacombs of invention,” which such books as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell present to us. Swinburne very pertinently replies that, as this is impossible, we had best apply our minds to finding out a pathway for ourselves.
At the close of this year, Swinburne undertook to make a selection from Coleridge’s Poems, and to write a critical essay. Of the latter enterprise he wrote (Dec. 21, 1868): “It will be a more congenial labour to me than the Selection from Byron, who is not made for selection — Coleridge is. In my eyes his good poems have no fault, his bad poems no merit; and to disengage these from those will be a pleasure to me.” — He performed the task with remarkable skill, and laid down for the first time, with complete courage, the lines which have been accepted ever since by the best judges of this capricious and difficult, but extremely fascinating poet. At Christmas 1868 Swinburne paid his first, and perhaps his only, visit to Cambridge, being entertained in college by a kindred spirit, Bendysshe of King’s.
In February 1869 Swinburne wrote to a friend: “I have been busy upon my new book, and have done a good deal of work, but not yet finished, though I see land, and most of the poems I read to you when unfinished are now complete or nearly.... I have written a modern companion-in-arms-and-metre to my ‘Hymn to Proserpine,’ called ‘Hymn of Man’ (during the session in Rome of the (Ecumenical Council), by the side of which Queen Mab is as it were an archdeacon’s charge, and my own previous blasphemies are models of Christian devotion.” In the spring of that year, after some quiet months at Holmwood and Oxford, visits to Jowett at Balliol College and to Mr. Julian Field at Merton College, Swinburne came again to London. He had given up his rooms in Dorset Street, and after a long interval took fresh ones at 12 North Crescent, Bedford Square, where he was to live when in town for the next four years and a half. He was now suffering from reaction after the very intense and prolonged excitement in which he had indulged, and he endured a good deal of discomfort from languor and irritability.
This was not a happy period in his life, and it was not a fertile one. After the immense activity and productivity of the three preceding years, 1869 and 1870 have very little to show. He wrote critical articles for the Fortnightly Review, and he composed at least one important poem, “The Eve of Revolution,” which seems to have been finished at Holmwood in July of the first-named year. A review of L’Homme qui rit brought from Victor Hugo a characteristic letter (July 14, 1869):— “Merci, ex imo corde, de votre magnifique travail sur mon livre. Quelle haute philosophie, et quelle intuition profonde vous avez! Dans le grand critique, on sent le grand poëte.” A scheme to bring out a volume of republican poems in that autumn fell through. Richard Burton, who was now appointed British consul at Damascus, returned from Brazil to London, in rather poor health; he was advised to take a course of the Vichy waters before proceeding to Syria. He proposed that Swinburne, who was already at Etretat, should join him at Boulogne. This was done, and the friends arrived at Vichy on the 24th of July 1809. Five days later the poet wrote: “Vichy suits me splendidly,” and indeed he was now entering upon some of the most completely happy moments of his life. He delighted in the breezy company of Burton, and at Vichy they found two other friends, Frederic Leighton and Adelaide Kemble (Mrs. Sartoris). Mrs. Sartoris sang to the friends, and her voice was still “in the days of its glory.” Swinburne, unskilled as he was in all the technical part of music, confessed her singing to be “miraculous and ravishing.” A quarter of a century later he declared that it was still vibrating in his brain. The memory of this enchanting encounter was celebrated by Swinburne in 1896, when, on hearing of Lord Leighton’s death, he wrote the poem called “An Evening at Vichy.”
While he was thus enjoying himself, he was lifted into the seventh heaven by an invitation from Victor Hugo, whose L’Homme qui rit he had rapturously reviewed in the current number of the Fortnightly, to come and visit him at Hauteville House in Guernsey. This came to nothing, but he made some stay in Paris, where he met Paul de Saint-Victor and perhaps Louis Blanc; while in the late autumn he seems to have spent several weeks in the neighbourhood of Grenoble. He had more correspondence with Victor Hugo who, on the 17th of November, called the attention of Paul Maurice to Swinburne’s high merits. “M. Swinburne,” Hugo now wrote, “est celui que Louis Blanc qualifiait dernièrement dans Le Temps: le premier poëte anglais actuel.” Swinburne was beginning to enjoy a
“European reputation,” or Victor Hugo would not have recommended a translation “en tout ou en partie” of his articles in Le Rappel. On his return to this country Swinburne had the happiness of seeing Mazzini again during his last brief visit to England, and the pride of conducting him to the house on Clapham Common of Swinburne’s excellent Greek friends, the Spartalis, whose acquaintance he had made at Madox Brown’s house. At Clapham Common, too, he met Ricciotti Garibaldi. In the winter he paid a short visit to George Meredith at Kingston.
Little marks the next year, 1870, except a very elaborate criticism, “reviewing the unborn” Poems of D. G. Rossetti, of which, in sending the MS. to John Morley on the 15th of April, Swinburne said: “I have now touched on every poem — in fact given a thorough and most careful analysis of the whole book. I never took so much pains in my life with any prose piece of work.” He seems to have been at Etretat again in the summer, for the last time; the outbreak of the war sent the friends flying back to England. It was at this time that he wrote the sonnets on Armand Barbès, who had died at the Hague in June. Swinburne was already safe in England when the French Republic was proclaimed by Gambetta, Ferry and Favrc in Paris, on the 4th of September. He instantly hailed the formation of the government of National Defence as the arrival of a French millennium, and within two days he had composed and sent to press his long Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic.
Swinburne’s business relations with J. C. Hotten since 1866 had not been happy. There was recriminatory correspondence about the number of copies printed and sold. A new publisher now appeared, in the person of Mr. F. S. Ellis (1830-1901), a friend of the whole Pre-Raphaelite circle, a man of the highest integrity, and an enthusiastic admirer, who promised the poets a brilliant format for their works. He was in partnership with Mr. G. M. Green, who died in 1872. Swinburne was strongly urged to transfer his earlier books to this new firm, but Hotten refused to surrender them, and threatened to go to law. Howell may, or may not, have arranged the matter very tactfully, but he was certainly to be sympathised with when he learned (Sept. 9) that Swinburne, without consulting him, had forwarded the Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic to Ellis, and had already seen and corrected the proofs. At the same time, Swinburne promised Ellis to give him the great book of republican lyrics which was now almost ready for the press.
The publication of the Ode highly incensed Hotten, who renewed threats of legal proceedings, based on conversations the accuracy of which Swinburne denied. Even when Songs before Sunrise was in type, Ellis hesitated to issue the book without legal sanction. It was to have been out in October 1870, but Hotten opposed publication, saying that he had a right to whatever Swinburne produced. A counter-blow was struck by insisting that Hotten should submit his accounts to examination. The dispute, which was costly and annoying, was prolonged into November, when it was submitted to the arbitration of Moy Thomas, who smoothed matters over. The quarrel with Hotten broke out again three years later, when all relations between him and Swinburne closed. But Ellis and Green, advised by their lawyers that they might now safely do so, published Songs before Sunrise at last in the spring of 1871.
Miss Alice Bird recollects Swinburne arriving at her brother’s house with the first proofs of Songs before Sunrise in his pocket, and a little later in the evening his dancing about the room convulsed with passion while he half-read, halfrecited them to her brother and herself. In particular, those in which Napoleon III. was denounced he repeated with such violence, and as she puts it amusingly to me, “with such poison,” that his voice sounded like the hissing of serpents, while he jigged round the room, his hair flying out behind him, and his arms flapping and fluttering at his sides. At these times, when he was transfigured by excitement, his wonderful head looked like that of a young god, if only the weak mouth and the receding chin could be ignored. Directly the storm of melody was over, and the poem put away, Algernon would sink down on a sofa with the gentleness of a child, and his voice would immediately resume its rich, soft cadences.
The Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic came out at a moment when public interest was wholly diverted from literature by the war, and it produced little effect. It is not one of Swinburne’s best efforts, and it lacks continuity and plan. The opening strophe, with its affluence of rhymes like peals of bells, is very beautiful, but this rapture leads to nothing, it is mere frantic ecstasy. The careful reader will note in the Ode occasional direct reminiscences of Shelley, such as are very rare in Swinburne; but he had been studying the text of Shelley minutely during the preceding summer, and he was always something of a chameleon. Very little knowledge of the real political condition of Europe or even of France is shown in the Ode. Only towards the close of the epode is there any recognition of the actual state and pressing danger of France; like many other people, Swinburne thought too much of the victory at Combières. His poem had not been four months in the hands of his readers before William I. was crowned German Emperor in the Galerie des Glaces of the palace of Versailles. Swinburne averted his eyes completely from the subsequent history of Europe.
The earlier portion of his own career closes with the publication of Songs before Sunrise, which is probably, — from a point of view detached from the attractiveness of subject, — Swinburne’s cardinal and crowning work. Nowhere else has he brought together so much lyrical writing, — and he was pre-eminently a lyrist, — which is uniformly rapid in movement, rich in thought, sumptuous in language, and uplifted in tone. There are superfluities here, but they are less conspicuous than they are in his later writings, while there is a total, and if we consider it, an extraordinary absence of the hectic and morbid ornament which had been at once the charm and the danger of Poems and Ballads. The forty poems of which the new volume is composed breathed so consistent a spirit of pure selfsacrifice and impassioned devotion that they amazed the admirers of “Félise” and “Dolores.” In his “Prelude,” one of the noblest exercises of reasoned imagination which exist in the English language, Swinburne explained the causes of the change:
A little time we gain from time
To set our seasons in some chime,
For harsh or sweet or loud or low;
With seasons played out long ago
And souls that in their time and prime
Took part with summer or with snow,
Lived abject lives out or sublime,
And had their choice of seed to sow
For service or disservice done
To those days dead and this their son.
A little time that we may fill
Or with such good works or such ill
As loose the bonds or make them strong
Wherein all manhood suffers wrong.
By rose-hung river and light-foot rill
There are who rest not; who think long
Till they discern as from a hill
At the sun’s hour of morning-song,
Known of souls only and those souls free,
The sacred spaces of the sea.
His muse had been “converted”; it was no longer in the service of sensual pleasure and of sloth; it repudiated the gardens of Armida. If other poets continued to “flush with love and hide in flowers” — and the allusion was to William Morris and his Earthly Paradise — Swinburne offered no blame:
Play then and sing; we too have played,
We likewise, in that subtle shade.
We too have twisted through our hair
Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear,
And heard what mirth the Maenads made, —
Till the winds blew our garlands bare,
And left their roses disarrayed, —
the winds of conviction that a nobler purpose than idling with “Pleasure slumberless and pale, and Passion with rejected veil,” demands the unfettered energy of a thinking man when the first dim goddesses of instinct, with their singing tongues of fire, are mute. The danger of sinking “helmless in middle turn of tide” lies before the soul that do
es not steer resolutely for the direct haven of duty, and what “duty” is had now revealed itself violently to the heart of Swinburne. He must no longer live for himself, for pleasure, for literature, even for England, but devote all the forces of his genius to celebrating the “serene Republic of a world made white,” and, if need be, to die for it. That caricature of him which Lady Trevelyan had made when he was a boy, striding across a barricade, might have been reproduced as a vignette to Songs before Sunrise.
But, after the passage of nearly half a century, and after so many vicissitudes of European history, the subject of this great group of solemn and generous poems is one which militates against our intelligent enjoyment of them. At the very outset, the Franco-German War disturbed the scheme of the poet and made bankrupt his golden raptures. Year by year, crisis by crisis, Europe was carried further and further along the stream of her destiny, and wider and wider from the course laid down with emphatic passion in such outbursts of prophecy as “The Eve of Revolution” or “The Litany of Nations.” It is difficult, and even before the close of 1871 it became almost as difficult as it is now, to enter into the delirium of instant hope of such a poem as “Mater Triumphalis,” or to appreciate the passion for an “immeasurable Republic” which inspired “Quia Multum Amavit.” There could be no doubt that Swinburne loved much, but when he addressed the vague spirit of republican Liberty in terms which a penitent might adopt at the altar of his God, he disconcerted his readers.
Thou art the player whose organ-keys are thunders,
And I beneath thy foot the pedal prest;
Thou art the ray whereat the rent night sunders,
And I the cloudlet borne upon thy breast, he sings; and our appreciation of the almost unparalleled beauty of the rhetoric is marred by a consciousness that this Liberty was largely a chimaera, a vain fancy of the poet’s own unselfish imagination.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 365