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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  The source of the political ardour of Swinburne and the form taken by his lyrical apocalypse are somewhat obscure. We are not accustomed in the history of literature to find a poet so passionately excited about problems of statecraft which do not affect his own life in any way, and with the results of which he will never be brought in contact. When Tyrtaeus or Campbell pours forth battle-songs it is because he is a Lacedaemonian or an Englishman, and is personally identified with England or Sparta. But when Swinburne writes an ode to the bereaved Signora Cairoli in which he says:

  But four times art thou blest,

  At whose most holy breast

  Four times a God-like soldier-saviour hung; or when he addresses Italy:

  The very thought in us how much we love thee

  Makes the throat sob with love and blinds the eyes, we are embarrassed by the knowledge that he had no relations and hardly any acquaintances in a country which he only visited twice, as a tourist, for a few weeks.

  There is a similarity of emotional political utterance in Songs before Sunrise and in such series of recent patriotic canzoni as are contained in the Elettra or the Gesta d’Oltremare of Gabriele D’Annunzio, but in the latter case it is an Italian who blows the clarion of a new dawn in his own Italy. It is certainly strange to find an equal ecstasy in Swinburne, who was not a participator, but a spectator. Yet the vehemence of the passion was absolutely genuine, and it was overpowering. But this apparent causelessness of the emotion, and its vain violence as of a whirlwind in a vacuum, add to our difficulty in placing ourselves in a sensitive relation with a noble body of poetry.

  Swinburne’s own attitude to Songs before Sunrise, however, should not be overlooked. To the end of his life he continued to regard it as the most intimate, the most sincere, and the most important of all his writings. He was greatly disappointed if any critic, however lavish of praise in other quarters, depreciated it; and over and over again he repeated to his private friends his conviction that his “other books are books, Songs before Sunrise is myself.” He wished it to be studied in relation with A Song of Italy, “or rather as the steamer of which that was the tug.” He wrote to Stedman, several years later: “Of all I have done I rate ‘Hertha’ highest as a single piece, finding in it the most of lyric force and music combined with the most of condensed and clarified thought. I think there really is a good deal compressed and condensed into that poem.”

  There is an aspect of Songs before Sunrise, moreover, which must not be overlooked in our estimate of the personal attitude of the poet. He was infatuated with the dream of Italian revolution, but there was something higher and vaster behind the dream. The purely intellectual quality in this body of lyrical verse was admirable, and so original as to be almost unparalleled since the days of ancient Greece. Swinburne conceived the Republic, not merely as a convenient method of democratic government, but as being the tangible embodiment of freedom in the action of society at its very highest development. This was a conception not easily intelligible to the readers of popular poetry, but it did not pass without honourable recognition from the advanced leaders of philosophic thought. In particular, Professor W. K. Clifford early insisted on the intellectual importance of Swinburne’s idealism, giving his lyrics a prominence which philosophers habitually grudge to poets. He described Swinburne as one “into whose work it is impossible to read more or more fruitful meaning than he meant in writing it,” and this is the answer to the reproach of those who find themselves borne so vehemently on the tide of his melody that they fail to note the course of their pilot.

  Swinburne’s claim to be considered as among the most purely philosophical of all the English poets is founded on several numbers of Songs before Sunrise, none of which are directly occupied with the aims of Mazzini or the errors of Napoleon III. In “Mater Triumphalis,” in the “Prelude” and the “Epilogue,” in “The Litany of Nations,” in “Hertha” pre-eminently, we see a statement of Swinburne’s loftiest doctrine. They establish that the summit of freedom is that condition in which the Spirit of Humanity acts and moves with the severest ethical propriety. In the phrase of Epictetus, which Swinburne loved to repeat, it is when “the little soul” is least hampered by “the corpse which is Man” that human nature reaches its altitude. Liberty, Swinburne used as the name for the Soul, when it succeeds in breaking and casting off the shackles of its dead rudiments and survivals. This is an organic action, the result of the exalted union of the best parts of humanity. Liberty, in other words, is “the Mother of Life, personifying herself in the good works of mankind.” It is that ideal which T. H. Green (with whom, we may recollect, Swinburne had been associated at Oxford) was to define ten years later as “The maximum of power for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves.” The emotion of the poet in presence of the supreme and eternal characteristics of the universe gave to the noblest parts of Songs before Sunrise an intensity unique in English literature, and probably to be compared with nothing else written since the Greeks produced cosmological hymns in the fifth century B.C.

  It has been alleged that Swinburne imitated Victor Hugo in the form of Songs before Sunrise. Doubtless the attitude of a man whom he admired so enthusiastically, and of whom he so utterly approved, was not without its effect. But the more closely we seek for a prototype to Swinburne’s republican lyrics in those of Hugo the less surely shall we find it. Neither Les Contemplations nor Les Châtiments offers really a parallel case.

  Indeed, Les Quatre Vents de l’esprit, in certain parts, much more closely approximates to Songs before Sunrise, but it was published ten years later, and shall we dare to advance the theory that Hugo imitated Swinburne? It is true that on rare occasions the careful reader may find in Les Châtiments phrases and even stanzas that must have influenced the English poet. No more curious example could be pointed to than

  Quand l’Italie en deuil dressa, du Tibre au Pô,

  Son drapeau magnifique,

  Quand ce grand peuple, après s’être couché troupeau,

  Se leva république,

  C’est toi, quand Rome aux fers jeta le cri d’espoir,

  Toi qui brisas son aile.

  Toi qui fis retomber l’affreux capuchon noir

  Sur sa face éternelle!

  But in the political poetry of Victor Hugo there is far more that is personal, episodical, actual, in other words, amusing, than in Songs before Sunrise, where the solemn fierceness and tenderness are never relieved by a note of domestic or rustic realism. Perhaps such pieces as “Before a Crucifix” and “To Walt Whitman in America” conic nearest to introducing this variety of tone and colour, yet nothing here is so “amusing,” in the true sense, as “Le Chasseur Noir” or “Souvenir de la Nuit du 4.” On the other hand, there is a purity of language, a Simonidean grace, revealed not once nor twice, but over and over again in Songs before Sunrise, which is more delicate, more exquisite, than all but the best of Victor Hugo. When Swinburne writes “The Pilgrims,”

  “The Oblation,”

  “Quia Multum Amavit,” and so many others, he breaks the alabaster box of spikenard over the bowed head of the goddess of Liberty.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE MIDDLE YEARS (1870-1879)

  WHEN Swinburne was in his thirty-fourth year an incident occurred which would be too trifling for record in the career of a man of action, but which exercised on his cloistered spirit an extraordinary influence. In 1804 he had been elected a member of the Arts Club, to which many of his immediate associates belonged. Swinburne, whose movements in London were extremely precise, was accustomed to spend a part of every day in the Club, where he wrote his letters, enjoyed the conversation of his friends, and occasionally entertained strangers. In a life so monotonous as his, the Club was a wholesome and an important element of daily change. Unfortunately, during the summer of 1870, in circumstances which were widely related at the time, he had a difference with the Committee of the Arts Club, and he was asked to resign. He considered that he had been harshly
treated, and there arose in his mind a spirit of resentment and suspicion which took up its abode there, and never completely left him. From that day forth, Swinburne never consented to be a candidate for any public or private body of men; he held himself persistently aloof from all general companionship. Without losing his charming amiability, and almost childlike sweetness, towards those of whose fidelity he was certain, he became affected with a suspiciousness and a tendency to take offence which showed themselves in outbursts of disconcerting violence, and made the tone of the controversies which he now more and more lightly courted often as unseemly as it was extravagant.

  Nor was this strange duality of sweetness and fierceness the only anomaly of his character, for from this time forth the discrepancy between his behaviour in London and in the country became more remarkable than ever. It is not necessary to dwell on much that was distressing, and even alarming, in his town habits, but to those who only saw him at Holmwood, or during his visits to Jowett, or at Ashburnham, the legend of a tempestuous Algernon seemed a fable. An interesting letter from Henry Kingsley, written at Datchet in 1871, exactly defines the situation:

  The Swinburnes and ourselves are neighbours and friends. The Admiral and Lady Jane Swinburne have bought Holmwood, old Lady Stanley of Alderley’s home. They are very agreeable neighbours to us, for they have the best library of its size I have ever seen.

  I believe Algy is very eccentric in London, but I never see him there. Here he is a perfectly courteous little gentleman.

  It was towards the end of December 1870 or the beginning of January 1871 that I was presented to Swinburne at an evening-party in the studio of Ford Madox Brown, to whose family and hospitable house in Fitzroy Square I had been introduced by William Bell Scott. On this occasion I had the privilege of meeting for the first time several persons now celebrated. Mrs. William Morris, in her ripest beauty, and dressed in a long unfashionable gown of ivory velvet, occupied the painting-throne, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who, though still almost young, was yet too stout for elegance, squatted, — for some part of the evening at least, — on a hassock at her feet. The “marvellous boy, that perished in his prime,” Oliver Madox Brown, carrying on his arms and shoulders tame white rats, shattered the nerves of the ladies. Spontaneity of behaviour in society was at that time encouraged by the Pre-Raphaelites. But among so much that was wonderful, I continued riveted to the aspect of Swinburne, who indulged me with quite a long conversation. His kindness, at once, became like the kindness of an elder brother. In some ways he fulfilled, and more than fulfilled, the promise of my hero-worship.

  At the same time, I have to confess that there was something in his appearance and in his gestures which I found disconcerting, and which I have a difficulty in defining without a suspicion of caricature. He was not quite like a human being. Moreover, the dead pallor of his face and his floating balloon of red hair, had already, although he was but in his thirty-third year, a faded look. As he talked to me, he stood, perfectly rigid, with his arms shivering at his sides, and his little feet tight against each other, close to a low settee in the middle of the studio. Every now and then, without breaking off talking or bending his body, he hopped on to this sofa, and presently hopped down again, so that I was reminded of some orange-crested bird — a hoopoe, perhaps — hopping from perch to perch in a cage. The contrast between these sudden movements and the enthusiasm of his rich and flute-like voice was very strange. In course of a little time, Swinburne’s oddities ceased to affect me in the slightest degree, but on this first occasion my impression of them was rather startling than pleasant.

  Whether in London or at Holmwood, Swinburne was now always at work. Before Songs before Sunrise had left the press he was closely occupied with a dramatic continuation of that history of Mary, Queen of Scots, which he had begun in Chastelard. This was to become Bothwell. It was planned on a very large scale, and Swinburne felt “at times crushed under the Tarpeian weight” of his materials. Nevertheless, he finished a first act, which Frederick Locker set up in type for him, but which he afterwards modified; and he wrote a scene or two more, then dropping the scheme for two or three years. In the early summer of 1871 his extravagances reduced him to such a state of health that his father, warned by Lord Houghton, came up to town and carried him off to Holmwood, where he promptly recovered. Jowett proposed that he should recuperate by paying him a visit at Oxford, and Swinburne arrived late in May. Taine, who was spending a long time in England in 1871, met Swinburne at the Lodge of Balliol College on the 3rd of June. He wrote home to his wife next day as follows:

  Présenté à M. Swinburne le poète; ses vers sont dans le genre de Baudelaire et de Victor Hugo: petit homme roux en redingote et cravate bleue, ce qui faisait contraste avec tous les habits noirs et cravates blanches: il ne parle que raidi, rejeté en arrière avec un mouvement convulsif et continu des membres comme s’il avait le delirium tremens — très passionné pour la littérature française moderne, Hugo, Stendhal, et pour la peinture. Son style est d’un visionnaire malade qui, pour système, cherche la sensation.

  Matthew Arnold appears to have been staying with Jowett at the same time, and Taine formed an even less favourable impression of him.1 A few days later Swinburne was taken unwillingly to the Senate House to see an honorary degree conferred upon Taine, about whom he was not enthusiastic. He frequently escaped from Balliol to visit Brasenose, where Walter Pater, with whom he was now for a short time intimate, entertained him; and Exeter College, where he was welcome to Bywater, who once gave me a most amusing account of how Jowett swooped down on Swinburne, and carried him off like an indignant nurse, with a glare at Bywater as he did so. Jowett invited him to join a reading-party at Tummel Bridge, near Pitlochry, and Swinburne started on the 11th of August. He now gave much practical help in Jowett’s scheme for editing a Children s Bible, which appeared in 1873. He was by this time the subject of great public curiosity, and a whisper having been spread abroad that he would appear at church, “the sacred edifice was unusually full, owing to men of reading-parties” who came from far and wide with “the uncanonical purpose” of bringing down the poet. But this, as Jowett observed, “was taking a very bad shot.” One visitor, however, gratified his curiosity, but not at church. Algernon wrote (Aug. 24, 1871):

  Browning is our neighbour in these latitudes; he came over the day before yesterday in high feather. I have just read his new poem — it has very fine things in it, especially the part about Hercules — much finer than anything said about him by Euripides. But the pathos of the subject is too simple and downright for Browning’s analytic method.

  Swinburne found Pitlochry “very refreshing and good for the health, having a fine river to swim in and fine hills to climb.”

  Jowett considered that Algernon did not see enough people of various kinds, and he frequently invited him to the hospitable lodge of Balliol. The Master’s choice of guests was somewhat miscellaneous, and it was about this time that he asked Blanche, Countess of Airlie, an old friend, to come to Oxford to meet Swinburne, George Eliot, and the first Lord Westbury. The idea of this remarkable trio alarmed Lady Airlie, who begged to be allowed to come “when Mr. Jowett was alone.”

  Early in September, at Jowett’s instigation, Swinburne started from Pitlochry for an excursion “with an Oxford man named Harrison, whom I met chez Jowett,” mainly on foot, first through Glencoe, then up the Caledonian Canal to Inverness, and finally to the Far West of the Highlands, to Lochs Maree and Torridon. The latter made a profound impression upon him. He wrote of it, at the time, as the divinest combination of lakes, mountains, straits, sea-rocks, bays, gulfs and open sea ever achieved by the forces of Hertha in her most favourable and fiercely maternal mood. I had a divine day there [Sept. 14], and swam right out of one bay round a beautiful headland to the next, and round again back under shelves of rock shining double in the sun above water and below.

  When, nearly a quarter of a century later, he published the noble ode called “Loch Torridon, the vision was
still bright in his memory. Some of the walking was over rough country, and one afternoon Swinburne became footsore, and then plaintive, and then deeply depressed and quite silent. Suddenly, however, they came upon a water-fall, and in an instant he was transformed, dancing before it in an ecstasy of delight and adoration; and in spite of his lameness he went on gaily, chanting one French lyric after another. This was told to Mr. Andrew C. Bradley by Edwin Harrison himself, who died many years ago.

  The tour closed at Knockespock, the house of Algernon’s uncle, Sir Henry Percy Gordon, in Aberdeenshire, where he was extremely happy; so that this proved a very fortunate half-year, at the close of which Algernon could, surprisingly, be described as “grown stout and sunburnt.” But he insisted on returning to his old habits of life in London, where, in October, his father, having been warned anonymously of his condition, found him, and carried him off to Holmwood. He rapidly recovered, as usual.

  In the autumn and winter of 1871 Swinburne was mainly occupied on two enterprises of very various value and importance. One of these was the commencement of his solitary epic, Tristram of Lyonesse, the sumptuous prelude to which he finished at Tummel Bridge; and the other was his share in the controversy of the friends of D. G. Rossetti with the egregious “Thomas Maitland,” who virulently attacked what he called “The Fleshly School of Poetry” in a magazine article. This pseudonymous criticaster turned out to be Mr. Robert Buchanan, who (in a letter of March 1872) confessed to Robert Browning that he had been largely prompted “by the instinct of recrimination.” Swinburne’s principal exploit in a vivacious series of skirmishes was a long pamphlet entitled Under the Microscope (1872), where force and learning are somewhat thrown away upon a theme not of permanent - interest, and where the writer’s prose style suffers from an inordinate abuse of ironical invective.