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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Un peuple qui rugit sous les pieds d’une femme

  Passe, et son souffle emplit d’aube et d’ombre et de bruit

  Un ciel âpre et guerrier qui luit, comme une lame

  Sur l’avenir debout, sur le passé détruit.

  This renders admirably the colour of the drama, grey, with flashes of steel. We have here the same Queen Mary who animated Chastelard, but she has grown older, fiercer, and craftier, and she towers over a more turbulent crowd of figures. Yet the later work, though more powerful, is worse fitted for the stage than the earlier. It overtly undertakes to be less a play than a dramatic romance; the author himself dismisses it as “mon drame épique et plein de tumulte et de flamme.” The chronicle of events has certain chapters, rather than acts; one closes with the murder of Rizzio, a second with that of Darnley, a third with Mary’s marriage, and the successive battles leave us on the shore of Solway Firth.

  No work of Swinburne’s later years gave him so much satisfaction as Bothwell. It was his constant pleasure to read it aloud, and he often forgot, in doing so, how quickly the time passed. Through one burning afternoon in the summer of 1873 Lord Morley tells me that he listened for five solid hours to a reading of Bothwell, and I myself, whose leisure was of less value, spent one evening of the same year from dinner-time to midnight, in company with Edward Burne-Jones and Arthur O’Shaughnessy, at the round table at 3 Great James Street, while Swinburne, lighted by the two great serpentine candlesticks he had brought with him from the Lizard, shrieked, thundered, whispered, and fluted the whole of the enormous second act.

  Very little of 1874 was spent in London. After a Christmas at Holmwood, Swinburne stayed through January with Jowett at the Lizard. He announced himself “in love for life with Kynance Cove.” He made a brief appearance in town to see Bothwell through the press, and then withdrew to the country for six months, living partly at Holmwood, partly at The Orchard in the Isle of Wight, where in August he was very nearly drowned while swimming. His audacity in the sea always exceeded his strength, though never his endurance. At Niton, under “the right auspices of sun and flowers and solitude,” he read Hugo’s Quatre-vingt-treize, and was disposed to agree with Morley that it is, “at least from some points of view, the most divinely beautiful work of the great Master, who has written me since I last heard from you such a letter in acknowledgment of the dedication of Bothwell as I should like to show you, but have not the face to transcribe.”

  It was at this time that, during one of Swinburne’s visits to the Master of Balliol, Prince Leopold, afterwards Duke of Albany, and then an undergraduate of one and twenty at Christ Church, called on him, but missed him. The poet returned the call, but the prince was out. Swinburne, however, was made aware of Prince Leopold’s “genuine honest youthful interest in Art and Letters,” and on several occasions expressed much sympathy with and curiosity about him. He characteristically described the prince — at second-hand and probably from Jowett’s relation, — as “a thoroughly nice boy, modest and simple and gentle, devoted to books and poetry, without pretence or affectation,” and in 1877 he protested against certain attacks made against the character and capacity of Prince Leopold. It would be difficult to name any other Royal Personage — except Queen Victoria herself — for whom Swinburne ever expressed any complaisance.

  In April 1874 he was greatly, and justly, incensed by being put on the Byron Memorial Committee without his consent having been asked. This was particularly unfortunate in face of the excruciating prejudice against Byron in which he now indulged. The leader of this rather unlucky movement was Trelawney, Shelley’s friend, now in his eightieth year. This picturesque buccaneer called on Swinburne to apologise, and was perfectly successful in soothing his outraged feelings. “The piratical old hero calls me the last of the poets, who he thought all died with Byron.... A magnificent old Viking to look at.” Swinburne found very old men irresistible, and quite a friendship sprang up between him and Trelawney. All this time Swinburne was mainly engaged in an exhaustive study of Chapman, which was begun as a commission, because Hotten said that unless Swinburne wrote an introduction, he would not risk the publishing of a reprint of Chapman. The money-payment offered by Hotten was a less inducement to Swinburne than the prospect of reviving the work of a poet whom he intensely admired. Charles Lamb had insisted, in terms of high enthusiasm, upon the beauty of some passages in the dramatic writings of the author of Bussy d’Ambois, but the recovery of Chapman’s text, and the prominent position which he has since taken in the history of Elizabethan literature, are mainly due to Swinburne’s unwearied battle on behalf of Chapman’s claims.

  Some of my earliest recollections of the conversation of Swinburne deal with his impassioned recommendation of the profuse and fiery genius of Chapman. On one of my first visits to him, I remember that he read aloud to me, with extreme vivacity, a monstrous tirade from The Revenge. I was not — and am not now — able to share without reserve his noble rage, and several months later in a letter dated February 21, 1874, I was subjected again to stern reproof for my “obstinate refusal” to do justice “to Chapman — above all to the great cycle of French ‘Histories,’ which overflows with genius.” These views he was then recording in full and final shape in the elaborate essay which was prefixed to Herne Shepherd’s reprint, and was more luxuriously printed by itself in the volume called George Chapman: A Critical Essay, published at the close of 1874. The energy and ardour with which he worked upon the original text of these plays, which was excessively corrupt, affected Swinburne’s health and particularly his eyesight unfavourably; and he was persuaded to relax during part at least of the following year.

  It was after a beneficial rest that his cousin Mr. Mitford (Lord Redesdale), who had recently returned from a long diplomatic exile in the Far East, met him for the first time since their schooldays. Lord Redesdale writes to me about a small dinner-party at Whistler’s:

  I was very much struck by Swinburne’s appearance, the years had changed him so little. He had still the delicate features of a child. He looked so young that had it not been for the scanty beard, thin and straggling, that seemed quite unnatural, as if it had been not very skilfully stuck on by some theatrical Simmonds, he would have been the very Algernon of the ‘fifties. The illusion was kept up by the gentle music of his voice, as caressing as I had known it a quarter of a century earlier. After dinner we sat together for a long while talking over the sunshine of boyhood, two old schoolfellows content to chatter about Eton, Windsor, the unforgettable joys of the Thames, with now and then a dip into the family story. When we parted it was with an eagerly expressed resolve to meet again as soon as possible, but alas! that never came off. Swinburne fell ill, his doctor kept him in prison, and, once more and until the end, we drifted apart, not to meet again on this side of the Styx.

  It was on the completion of the critical essay on Chapman that Swinburne was first fired with the notion of producing a complete study of the whole series of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. This occupied his thoughts until the very close of his life, and he left the scheme uncompleted. It slowly matured in the form of a book in several volumes, to be entitled The Age of Shakespeare. This was still unfinished when he died. Swinburne had no intention of delaying it so long. Mr. T. J. Wise has discovered by a memorandum in Swinburne’s handwriting that this second series was to consist of essays on Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Day, Shirley, Brome, Nabbes, Davenport and (once more) Marlowe. Most of these were in type when he died, and the Nabbes and Marlowe were printed privately by Mr. Wise in 1914. This collection, therefore, which Swinburne began to compose more than forty years ago, and on the completion of which his heart was deeply set, may yet see the light in the form which he desired.

  Soon after the beginning of 1875, when he was staying with Jowett at Ashfield House, West Malvern, I had happened to point out to Algernon in one of my letters that he had allowed the centenary of Walter Savage Landor’s birth to pass unnoticed. Centenaries common
ly did pass unnoticed in those days. In his reply (January 30), he expressed himself extremely vexed that he should have missed this historical landmark, but pointed out to me that, in less than a fortnight, another event would take place, the anniversary of Charles Lamb’s birth. He suggested that we might commemorate with the same libations both the great men, who loved and admired each other in life, and whose memories, he thought, might fitly and gracefully be mingled after death in our affectionate recollection.

  Accordingly, he undertook to organise for the 10th of February what he called “our Passover feast in honour of a Lamb quite other than Paschal,” and proposed to come up to town specially for the purpose of making arrangements. I think it was the only time in his whole life that Swinburne ever “organised” anything; he was not gifted in a practical direction. However, he took up this Charles Lamb dinner very seriously, and came to town on Monday, the 8th, to settle all the details. He would not allow me to help him at all: “Leave it to me!” he said, in his grandest manner. Yet the dinner did come off. It was a rough entertainment, and the guests were few, but it did come off. There were but five of us who sat down to meat. There was Swinburne, of course, at the head of the table, looking very small in an immense armchair, but preserving a mien of rare solemnity. There was our dear and ever-cheerful William Minto, of Aberdeen, who left us so prematurely in 1803; there was that rather trying journalist, Thomas Purnell, who has also long been dead, and there wrere Theodore Watts and myself. That was the company, fit, perhaps, but certainly few. We met in a very old-fashioned hotel in Soho, and had a coarse, succulent dinner in the mid-Victorian style, very much I daresay in Charles Lamb’s own taste. The extreme dignity of Swinburne is the feature of the dinner which remains most conspicuously in my memory; he sank so low in his huge arm-chair, and sat so bolt upright in it, that his white face, with its great aureole of red hair, beamed over the table like the rising sun. It was magnificent to see him, when Purnell, who was a reckless speaker, “went too far,” bringing back the conversation into the paths of decorum. He was so severe, so unwontedly and phenomenally severe, that Purnell sulked, and taking out a churchwarden left us at table and smoked in the chimney-corner. Our shock was,the bill — portentous! Swinburne, in “organising,” had made no arrangement as to price, and when we trooped out into the frosty midnight, there were five long faces of impecunious men of letters.

  The year 1875 was marked by what appeared to be an extraordinary activity, but in fact Swinburne’s publications were more the result of previous labour than the evidence of what was actual. For instance, his essay prefixed to the reprint of Joseph and his Brethren was a re-cast of a sketch written about 1861. His volume of poems, ultimately issued as Songs of Two Nations, was a reprinted collection of A Song of Italy, Ode on the French Republic, and Dirae. Essays and Studies was a collection of his principal prose monographs, to which he merely added a preface and sundry notes. The Devil’s Due was a pseudonymous attack on Buchanan reprinted from the Examiner; Auguste Vacquerie, published in French in November of this year, was an improvised tribute of friendship. But Swinburne’s real activity in 1875 was not perceived by the public. He was hard at work on a history of the metrical progress of Shakespeare. This “history” was never published in the form which Swinburne originally intended, that is to say, exclusively from the prosodieal point of view. But he must be regarded as devoting the best of his leisure and the keenest of his penetration from this time until the publication of A Study of Shakespeare on a technical examination of the work of that poet. In a letter to me (Jan. 31, 1875) his purpose is clearly laid down:

  I am now at work on my long-designed essay or study on the metrical progress or development of Shakespeare as traceable by ear and not by finger, and the general changes of tone and stages of mind expressed or involved in this change or progress of style. I need hardly say that I begin with a massacre of the pedants worthy of celebration in an Icelandic saga,— “a murder grim and great.” I leave the “finger-counters and finger-casters” without a finger to count on or an (ass’s) ear to wag. Which do you think would be the best title for this essay — The Three Stages of Shakespeare, or The Progress of Shakespeare? If not (as I fear it is) too pretentious, the latter would perhaps be, — or sound, — best.

  Two months later he puts the same question to Mr. John Morley, and ultimately neither title proved appropriate to his scheme. In March he says:

  I am still engaged on the period where the influence of rhyme and the influence of Marlowe were fighting, or throwing dice, for the (dramatic) soul of Shakespeare. No one I believe has yet noted how long and hard the fight of the game was.

  A first instalment of this work appeared in the Fortnightly Review for May 1875, but the harsh reception it met with from Shakespearean experts somewhat discouraged the author. However, in January 1876 Mr. John Morley published a second, in which Swinburne controverted the views that Spedding, after consultation with Tennyson, had put forward in 1850 regarding the date and authorship of Henry VIII. These views had been adopted by the New Shakspere Society, which Furnivall had lately founded. A ridiculous controversy ensued, in our regret at which it must never be forgotten that Furnivall struck the first blow. Swinburne replied in a public letter which was a declaration of war, and the contest went rumbling on for six or seven years. Its manifestations, however, did not become acute until 1880, and we may leave consideration of it for the moment.

  In July, however, Swinburne turned from the exclusive contemplation of Shakespeare and his commentators to the production of a new poem. During a visit paid to Jowett at West Malvern, in that month, he sketched the plot of Erechtheus and wrote the first great chorus of the Athenian Elders. He finished the play in November, sent it immediately to press, and issued it soon after New Year’s Day, 1876. It is interesting to contrast the smoothness of composition and the regularity with which the scenes of Erechtheus passed from Swinburne’s pen, with the hesitations and innumerable false starts which delayed the progress of most of his earlier works, and were still delaying that of Tristram. This autumn he was in a very happy frame of mind, whether at Holmwood, or through a delightful September and October at Southwold, on the Suffolk coast, with Theodore Watts, and he was free from various pecuniary burdens and anxieties.

  It was an oasis in these rather desert years, and the influence of it may be felt in the technical perfection of Erechtheus. This is in several respects the most organic of Swinburne’s writings, though it may never have been found by the general reader the most interesting; while it can scarcely be denied that in the general conduct of this tragedy he rises, in an altitude of moral emotion that he reaches nowhere else, to an atmosphere which few modern poets have even attempted to breathe.

  The theme of this drama is of the quintessence of tragedy, and the tale is rapidly conducted on a very high plane of heroic human virtue. It combines a tender and thrilling treatment of emotion with an appeal to civic patriotism in the truest spirit of antiquity. It is the most Greek of all the compositions of Swinburne, because it follows, with the greatest success, closely and yet vividly, the exact classical models. It is not merely Greek, but it is passionately Athenian, and Athens is considered, not as a theme for antiquarian curiosity, but as the living symbol of the virtue of citizenship. Swinburne was never tired of reciting, like a thrush singing Greek, and with gestures of ecstasy, the odes in praise of Athenian liberty which break up the scenes of the Persœ. The state of Athens in the fourth century B.C. appeared to him to approach his ideal Republic more nearly than any other ancient or modern institution. Erechtheus may in this respect be considered in relation with the ode entitled “Athens,” written by Swinburne in 1881, although the latter is somewhat marred by the faults of verbosity and vociferation, which had during those years grown upon him. But in ode and drama alike, as well as elsewhere in Swinburne’s writings, there is full evidence of the enthusiasm with which he hailed the Athenian polity as the finest example in the world’s history of the ideal commonweal
th —

  The fruitful, immortal, anointed, adored

  Dear city of men without master or lord,

  Fair fortress and fostress of sons born free.

  “I praise the gods for Athens,” Swinburne said all his life.

  The Erechtheum, as we may read in Pausanias, was one of the most sacred places in Athens. It stood on the Acropolis, and its salient portion was the temple of Athene Polias, with three altars, one of which was dedicated to Poseidon and Erechtheus. This latter gives name to Swinburne’s drama. He was a king of Attica in legendary times, descended from a still more mythical monarch, who was the son of Earth. Hence the autochthonous origin of the family, a reference to which is essential to our comprehension of the story. Athens was attacked by the Thracians and hard pressed, when an oracle said that the only salvation possible for the city was the sacrifice of Chthonia, the daughter of the king who had sprung from the soil itself. Erechtheus takes a less prominent part in the play than his Queen Praxithea and their virginal victim. The noble endurance of the Mother and the delicate devotion of Chthonia are contrasted with a grace and pathos which are above praise. Events move rapidly; the innocent blood is poured forth, and “the holiness of Athens” is redeemed; but Erechtheus himself is slain by lightning at the moment of victory, and the sisters of Chthonia decline to survive her. The august figure of the stricken Praxithea stands alone on the stage for a moment, till Pallas Athena herself descends and embraces all Athens in a healing benediction. Erechtheus is less romantic and purer in its Hellenism than Atalanta in Calydon, but the stern outlines of its emotion are richly adorned by the lyrics of a chorus of Athenian Elders, of which the most celebrated is that which describes with inimitable brio the mythical rape of Chthonia’s elder sister Oreithyia by Boreas. These choruses display to the full the poet’s gift of splendour, and they present as well a reserve and purity of language, a cool beauty which he more rarely attains.