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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Years have sped from us under the sun,

  Through blossom and snow-tides twenty-one,

  Since first your hand as a friend’s was mine,

  In a season whose days are yet honey and wine

  To the pale close lips of Remembrance, shed

  By the cupbearer Love for desire of the dead.

  A great portion of this volume of 1878 was ready for the Press at least two years earlier.

  On the 10th of September, 1876, when he spent a long day at my house, he read nearly half of what now forms that collection to my wife and myself.

  On one of the last occasions when he went into general society, he met “in a crush” at Lord Houghton’s a young Oxford man who asked his host to present him to Swinburne. This was Oscar Wilde, of whom Swinburne four years later (April 4, 1882) gave the following description to an American friend:

  I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody, and had no notion that he was the sort of man to play the mountebank as he seems to have been doing. A letter which he wrote to me lately about Walt Whitman was quite a modest, gentleman-like, reasonable affair without any flourish or affectation of any kind in matter or expression. It is really very odd. I should think you in America must be as tired of his name as we are in London of Mr. Barnum’s and his Jumbo’s.

  Of Swinburne’s life at the time little can be recorded, and less that is agreeable. In January 1878 he spent a boisterous month with John Nichol in Glasgow, where he published some political sonnets in a college magazine. Mr. Donald Crawford, who had not seen Swinburne since they were undergraduates together at Balliol, met him in Glasgow, and was pained at his physical condition; “the pleasant voice remained, but all the traits of fairyland were gone.” The most gifted of Nichol’s pupils, the unfortunate John Davidson, who was now an usher at Alexander’s Charity, Glasgow, sent Swinburne some of his unpublished verses.

  Swinburne received him in Nichol’s house with great affability, laying his hand upon Davidson’s head in a sort of benediction, and addressing him as “Poet.” My friend Mr. Alexander Hedderwick remembers Swinburne at this time “marching about the Quadrangle, very fashionably dressed, in a close-fitting long Melton coat of dark blue, and the neatest of little shoes, his top hat balanced on his great mop of hair, a marvel to our rough Glasgow students.” From February 1877 to June 1879 he was in a state of constant febrility and ill-health in London, and permanently, if I remember right, in his rooms in Great James Street. He positively refused to go down to Holmwood at the summons of his mother, who wrote, in July 1878, that she had not seen him since April of the preceding year.

  Lord Houghton found him in a sad condition, but not all the entreaties of his family would induce him to stir, or to permit them to visit him, until June 1879, when he was persuaded to spend a month at Holmwood. The succeeding months of August and September were the most deplorable in his whole career. When he seemed actually at the doors of death, Theodore Watts, with the approval of the distressed and bewildered Lady Jane Swinburne, arrived very early one morning and carried the poet by force to his own rooms, which were now close by. Thence, as soon as he was partially recovered, to Putney, where in an amazingly short space of time Swinburne regained his health so that he was soon once more writing with unabated vigour.

  CHAPTER VIII

  PUTNEY (1879-1909)

  IN September 1879 Swinburne was removed, as has been said, in a state of health which seemed almost desperate, from Watts’ rooms in Great James Street, to the upper storey of a semidetached villa at Putney, which Theodore Watts now took for the purpose. He was at first too ill to see any one or to write a letter, yet, such was his recuperative vitality, that by the middle of October he was once more able to resume his correspondence and his literary work, and to enjoy regular exercise out-of-doors. He wrote to Lord Houghton:

  I keep no chambers in town henceforth, or (probably) for ever — finding after but too many years’ trial that in the atmosphere of London I can never expect more than a fortnight at best of my usual health and strength. Here I am, like Mr. Tennyson at Farringford, “close to the edge of a noble down.” and I might add “Far out of sight, sound, smell of the town,” and yet within an easy hour’s run of Hyde Park Corner and a pleasant drive of Chelsea, where I have some friends lingering.

  His prophecy was fulfilled; The Pines, Putney Hill, continued to he his address for the remainder of his life, that is for nearly thirty years. During this long period, Swinburne led an existence of the greatest calm, passivity, and resignation, without a struggle and apparently without a wish for liberty of action. He abandoned all attempt at initiative, in return for benefits of watchful care, assiduous protection, and a relief from every species of responsibility. His life was “sheltered” like that of a child, and he was able to concentrate his faculties upon literature and his dreams without a shadow of disturbance. “A child at play with his toys,” an acute and indulgent observer of those days called him, “a child turning for comfort, self-forgetfulness, and consolation to poetry, itself, in a sense, a toy.”

  Watts undertook to relieve him of all business worries. Swinburne was not a lodger at The Pines, but joint-householder with Watts, and in theory all expenses were to be equally divided. The poet wrote to John Nichol: “My own little money matters have been getting into such an accursed tangle that unless Watts had once more taken them in hand I should ere now” (the winter of 1879) “have found my assets reduced to what the old Enemy calls ‘Zero, or even a frightful minus quantity.’” Swinburne was easily annoyed by business letters, the receipt of which made him quiver with irritation. For the remainder of his life he handed such unpleasant objects to his friend, without glancing at them. An exception must be noted in his correspondence about the publication of his books, which he always insisted on conducting with Mr. Andrew Chatto himself.

  His days were divided with an almost mechanical precision. Swinburne was never an early riser, but towards the middle of every morning, no matter what the weather, he went out for a long walk, generally in the one direction up Putney Hill and over the Heath, but sometimes along the Richmond Road to the Mortlake Arms and then through Barnes Common as far as Barnes Green and the Church. For many years he was a constant visitor at the shop of the Misses Frost, at the corner of Ridgeway and High Street, going into Wimbledon; from these ladies he regularly bought his newspapers and ordered his books, and their house was the bourne of his walk in a southerly direction. Very seldom he crossed the river northwards into London.

  In storm and rain, always without an umbrella, the little erect figure, with damp red curls emerging from under a soft felt hat, might be seen walking, walking, “pelting along all the time as fast as I can go,” so that he became a portent and a legend throughout the confines of Wandsworth and Wimbledon. He always returned home a little while before the mid-day luncheon, or dinner; and at 2.30, with clock-work regularity, he “disappeared to enjoy a siesta,” which sometimes lasted until 4.30. Then he would work for a while, and Watts-Dunton reported to Mr. Wise that in the afternoon he often sat in his study on the ground floor, and “heard Swinburne in his own room overhead walking round and round the floor for ten minutes at a time, composing, and then silence would fall for five minutes while Swinburne was writing down the new stanza or sentence, and then the promenade would begin again as before.” The rest of the day was mostly spent among his books, which were not only numerous, but included many that were choice and rare.

  In the evening his regular habit was to read aloud. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Swinburne was an insatiable and continuous novel-reader. He was so fond of Dickens that he read through the whole of his novels every three years, and Watts-Dunton used to declare that Swinburne had read them aloud to him “at least three times.” This was his favourite reading, but he could, and did, read anything in the shape of a novel which the circulating library supplied. His casual remarks about novels were often piquant, and familiar. I remember that he dismissed Guy D ever ell as “too
hasty, too blurred and blottesque,” and said of Uncle Silas that the hero “would be more ghastly if he were less ghostly.” He took a vivid interest in the novels of his young kinsman, Mr. Richard Bagot, and particularly in the earliest, A Roman Mystery, where the study of lyeanthropy attracted him.

  He explained to me once that he did not regard current novels as literature but as life, and that in his absolutely detached existence they took the place of real adventures. In these conditions his health became perfect; he developed into a sturdy little old man, without an ache or a pain; and he who had suffered so long in London from absence of appetite and wasting insomnia, for the last thirty years of his life at Putney ate like a caterpillar and slept like a dormouse.

  Since many months the first act of the third play of the Queen Mary trilogy had been written, and even set up in type. But there was no more of it in existence when the poet retired to Putney. As soon as he felt his strength return, he took up again this MS. and wrote some of the Walsingham scenes, but he was not attuned to the subject, and laid it down again. Mary Stuart progressed by fits and starts, and was not completed until 1881. At Christmas 1879 Swinburne was feverishly engaged in completing his long-promised prose book, A Study of Shakespeare, which appeared early in the following year. His articles in the Fortnightly Review had in 1875 procured Swinburne the friendship of Halliwell-Phillipps, who supplied him with documents and volumes which considerably modified, and perhaps disturbed, the views he had hitherto expressed regarding the imaginative development of Shakespeare’s mind. But Halliwell-Phillipps warmly supported Swinburne’s general criticism, and he was the most prominent and outspoken of the few Shakespearean experts who now took Swinburne’s side in the great battle with Furnivall.

  We have already noted that relations between the poet and the official representative of Shakespearean criticism were strained as early as the end of 1875. But the breach between Furnivall and Swinburne was not final until January 1880, when the storm at last broke out in full fury. Furnivall now lost all self-command, and wrote of “Mr. Swinburne’s shallow ignorance and infinite self-conceit.” He told him “to teach his grandmother to suck eggs”; he told him that his ear was “a poetaster’s, hairy, thick and dull.” Presently Furnivall took to parodying Swinburne’s name, with dismal vulgarity, as “Pigsbrook” (to which injury the poet archly retorted by dubbing Furnivall “Brothelsdyke”); and he assailed the poet’s private friends with insolent post-cards to the poet’s disadvantage. He brought down upon himself the reproof of Halliwell-Phillipps, and of another of the most eminent of his own supporters, Aldis Wright, who told Furnivall that he was behaving “like an angry monkey.” A large number of the influential members of the New Shakspere Society expostulated with Furnivall in a signed protest. He struck all the names of these signatories out of the list of members, and sent them a printed letter (April 25, 1881), telling them — they included the seventh Duke of Devonshire, Jebb, and Creighton— “I am glad to be rid of you.” His behaviour, in short, was that of a man demented, though we may conjecture that he was not quite so angry as it amused him to pretend to be.

  Swinburne, however, was scarcely less to blame, except that he spoke only for himself, and had no duty to a body of subscribers. But it is obvious that, when Furnivall began to be rude, Swinburne should have withdrawn severely from the controversy. Instead of doing that, he exercised his ingenuity in infuriating his antagonist. He had a diabolical cleverness in tormenting Furnivall, and he knew how to hint the exact charge which would excite that unfortunate man to frenzy. Swinburne would ask his friends, as I well remember, whether such “a flagellant note,” which he would read in MS. to us, spluttering with ecstasy as he did so — would not make “Dunce Furnivall dance till the sweat pours down his cheeks”? He used to say that at each fresh sample of unprovoked impertinence all the French and Irish particles of his blood tingled with an instinct answering to that of Bussy d’Amboise or Sir Lucius O’Trigger.

  He took nothing seriously until Browning accepted the presidency of the New Shakspere Society. That did shake Swinburne’s complacency, and he wrote calling upon me to sympathise with him in his rage at “Browning’s having disgraced himself for life by his acceptance of the presidency of a blackguard’s gang of blockheads.” More slinging of mud went on, until everybody began to be sick of the subject, and newspaper editors declined to insert any more letters on either side. Furnivall kept up for some time, by halfpenny post, a running fire of scurrilities, and then the grotesque warfare came to a sullen end. But, to the close of his life, to speak to Swinburne of “pause-tests” and “rhyme-tests” was like calling out “Rats!” to a terrier.

  Swinburne now occupied himself in preparing for the press a volume which appeared anonymously towards the beginning of 1880, and considerably mystified the reading world. This was The Heptalogici; or, the Seven against Sense, including parodies of Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Coventry Patmore, Robert Lord Lytton, Rossetti and Swinburne himself. On this delightful fool’s cap few of the bells were recent. The imitation of Patmore had been made as early as 1859, and those of the Brownings in 1863-64, for the amusement of the Pre-Raphaelite circle of that day; the Tennyson was written in 1877. The Rossetti sonnet is probably much earlier. It was at Theodore Watts’ suggestion that Swinburne now added “Nephelidia,” which is a parody of his own most alliterative and redundant poetry, so that by a laugh against himself he might make pleasantly innocuous the satire on the others. There exists in MS. another fragmentary parody by Swinburne of himself, in the measure of “Dolores.”

  As a matter of fact, the caricatures are quite inoffensive, except the “Last Words of a Seventh-Rate Poet,” in which the idiosyncrasies of the second Lord Lytton are virulently dealt with. The writer whose pen-name was “Owen Meredith” was at that time Viceroy of India, but he shortly afterwards returned, and Lord Houghton entertained him at a small luncheon, to which Swinburne and Watts were bidden. Lord Houghton’s intention, no doubt, was to bring about a reconciliation, but the quarrel being a purely abstract one and Swinburne extremely deaf, it was not until he left Houghton’s house that he learned that he had been in a room with his pet aversion.

  The Heptalogia, the dates of composition of which have never before, I believe, been stated, deserves particular attention, because it is, in the main, a work of Swinburne’s prime. We have seen that the parodies on the two Brownings, and especially “The Poet and the Woodlouse,” belong to the period of his highest intellectual vigour. He told R. W. Raper, with exultant humour, that he (Algernon) could parody Robert Browning’s discords with impunity, since Browning could never revenge himself by parodying his harmonies. The imitation of Mrs. Browning is perhaps the very best parody in existence, because it does not merely reproduce the material form and the verbiage of a mannered writer, but it enters into her very brain. Thus, and not otherwise, would Mrs. Browning have expressed herself if she had been the victim of a sunstroke or intoxicated with ether:

  I am fed with intimations, I am clothed with consequences,

  And the air I breathe is coloured with apocalyptic blush;

  Ripest-budded odours blossom out of dim chaotic stenches,

  And the Soul plants spirit-lilies in sick leagues of human slush, shouts the Woodlouse, and if the hand is the hand of Algernon, the voice is unquestionably the authentic voice of Elizabeth.

  In the course of January 1880 Swinburne published a volume of lyrical verse entitled Songs of the Springtides. This consisted of three long odes, and a supplementary celebration of Victor Hugo’s seventy-eighth birthday. “Thalassius” is the vaguely autobiographical story of a poet, whose father is the sun and his mother the sea, and who has been found, as a laughing babe, on a reach of shingle upon some unnamed coast.

  “On the Cliffs” is a eulogy of the genius of Sappho, expressed in terms of hyperbole; translations of the best-remembered fragments of the Lesbian are introduced in mosaic. “The Garden of Cymodoce,” which has already been mentioned, is a
glorification of the beauties of the island of Sark. The finest page in “Thalassius,” perhaps in the volume, is that describing the bull-voiced mimes bellowing below the throne of Nero. The two first odes are irregular, but in “The Garden of Cymodoce” a number of stanzaic forms are used, and there is a chorus about the sea-anemones of Sark, where

  No foot but the sea-mew’s there settles

  On the spikes of thine anthers like horns,

  With snow-coloured spray for thy petals,

  Black rocks for thy thorns.

  Unfortunately, clever as this is, it reads like a parody out of The Heptalogia. The “Birthday Ode for Victor Hugo” is a sort of critical puzzle, explained by a dated key at the end. The author, as if for a wager, contrives to allude in succession to every one of Victor Hugo’s writings, without naming any. It might be recommended as a fireside game in a cultured family to read Swinburne’s descriptions and guess what work of Hugo’s each refers to. For instance, on hearing the words,

  As keen the blast of love-enkindled fate

  That burst the Paduan tyrant’s guarded gate, a bright child would shout Angelo!

  Throughout this year 1880 Swinburne was writing indomitably, both in prose and verse.

  The poems contained in the volume called Studies in Song were all composed between February and August. Watts was responsible for the effort Swinburne was now making to write descriptive or landscape poetry; he urged the poet to devote himself during their summer holidays more to positive observation and less to abstract passion. Of “By the North Sea,” which was finished in July 1880, Swinburne wrote, “Watts likes it better than anything I ever did, and in metrical and antiphonal effect I prefer it myself to all my others”; yet this poem is but an imitation of the “Epilogue” of 1866. The composition of enormous critical odes, that section of all his writings which is probably the least read, had now become a habit with Swinburne. All this year he was plunged once more in the study of Landor, and perhaps to excess, for the Song for the Centenary of Landor is one of the most tiresome of all his works. It is only right, however, to display his own attitude to it. He wrote to me (July 5, 1880) of this poem: