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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Come soon and hear it.... It sums up what I have to say of my great old friend on all accounts whether critical or personal — and I know how much he would have preferred to have it said in verse, the best that I could command which I have certainly done all I can to give him, and to make as worthy of him as may be — wishing earnestly that it were nearer that inaccessible mark of worthiness. But the limit of eight hundred lines is pitifully narrow for such a Titanic charge as the panegyric of such a Titan.

  These are generous words, and yet even in the looseness of their arrangement they betray a growing and a fatal weakness. The sense of proportion had always been capricious in Swinburne’s constitution; it was now leaving him altogether, and the power of logical expression was accompanying it. In his determination to do honour to Landor, he omitted to ask himself whether an extremely allusive and obscure piece of versified rhetoric in 800 lines was a practical means of concentrating attention on the object, and he poured forth stanzas in which great lines were frequent and luminous passages, occasional, but the total effect of which was merely foggy and fatiguing.

  The faults into which he had slipped were not unobserved by the reviewers and the public. Songs of the Springtides met with a lukewarm, and Studies in Song with a very cold, reception. The poet was greatly disappointed, and in a letter to a friend he wrote that he had become, like Imogen, a castaway: “Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion”; but he failed to appreciate the cause of the decline in his, popularity.

  The very quiet year 1881 slipped by at Putney almost without an incident. For some time past Swinburne had been afflicted by a growing deafness, a malady to which, I understand, the members of his family are liable. After the crisis in his health, this hardness of hearing became more serious, and it gradually closed general society to him. His principal business in 1881 was the continuation of Mary Stuart, in which he completed the trilogy of which Chastelard and Bothwell had been parts. This drama was published before Christmas, and Swinburne also contributed to the Fortnightly Review a prose Note on the Character of Queen Mary. The play has the negative merit of brevity, in comparison at least with Bothwell, but it is much less interesting. Possibly the poet now knew too much of his subject and was hampered at every turn by too accurate information. Swinburne was disappointed at the coldness of the critics and at the indifference of the public. Two things, however, consoled him, a letter from the venerable author of Philip van Artevelde, “the one English poet living for whose opinion as an authority on poetic drama I care a cracked farthing” — and an invitation from the editor of the new edition of the Encyclopœdia Britannica to write the article on Mary Queen of Scots. But for us the best outcome of all was the set of seven “Adieux à Marie Stuart,” in which Swinburne regained for a moment all his pristine freshness and charm. These lyrics, indeed, have the melancholy interest of being perhaps the very latest in which he revealed a new aspect of his poetical genius.

  The Historiographer-Royal for Scotland, Professor P. Hume Brown, has been so kind as to oblige me with the following estimate of Swinburne’s contributions to the study of Queen Mary:

  It was the opinion of Goethe that “for the poet no characters are historical,” and he exemplified it in transforming the Egmont of history, a man of mature years and the father of eleven children, into an irresponsible youth unfettered by family ties. If we may judge from Swinburne’s three dramas devoted to the s fortunes of Mary Stuart, he held stricter views than Goethe regarding the poet’s licence in dealing with historical events and historical characters. Nowhere in these plays does he seriously deviate from the facts of history as they are known to us. He puts his own construction on the motives and aims of the historical personages who appear on his stage, and on the causal connection of the events in which they are concerned, but his construction is based on satisfactory evidence. The plays in themselves and the article on Mary contributed by Swinburne to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, indeed, leave us in no doubt that he had not only carefully studied the facts immediately bearing on the fate of Mary, but by wide reading in the contemporary literature had steeped himself in the atmosphere of the period in which his characters lived and moved. In his selection of events, their sequence, and connection he appears to have generally followed Froude. This is notably the ease in the last of the three dramas; in all the five acts that compose it the speeches of the different characters are for the most part based on the text of Froude. In the main, also, Swinburne’s conception of Mary’s character is the same as Froude’s — though with a difference. For both, craft and passion are the dominating traits of her nature, and both equally recognise the qualities wherein lay her personal charm. But while Froude’s narrative makes prominent the bad that he saw in her, Swinburne presents her character as a whole, and exhibits her good and evil qualities in equal relief. Yet it is evident that there was one action of Mary which, perhaps characteristically, Swinburne could not forgive — her consenting to the execution of Chastelard. The tragic suggestion in all the three dramas, indeed, is that Mary’s misfortunes, ending in her doom at Fotheringay, are the nemesis consequent on that action, and it is the part of Mary Beaton, between whom and Chastelard’s love Mary had fatally intervened, to keep the fact before the mind of the reader. The last words of the trilogy, uttered by Mary Beaton, link the fate of Chastelard with that of her who betrayed him:

  I heard that very cry go up

  Far off long since to God, who answers here.

  Swinburne was now approaching a critical point in his career. The reception of his three latest volumes of verse by the reviewers and by the public had shown that through repetition of effect, or through a flagging of his natural vivacity, he had lost to a serious degree that power of exciting curiosity and stimulating discussion which had so pre-eminently attended his publications fifteen years earlier. Every poet of a large ambition desires to produce one poem on a scale which shall demand permanent and universal attention. Browning had achieved a great success with The Ring and the Book, and it was at that time, about 1868, that Swinburne resolved to ensphere all that was most glowing in his own imagination in one rounded epic poem. From a very early date the story of Tristan de Léonois (or Tristram of Lyonesse), son of the sister of Mark, King of Cornwall, had attracted him; it was the subject of his earliest published verses, contributed to an Oxford magazine in 1858; still further back, according to his later report, that romantic lover had been his “close and common friend” at Eton. There is evidence to show that from school-time onwards Swinburne never ceased to propose to himself the writing of an epic on the story of Tristram.

  There were many reasons for his deliberate adoption of the legend woven in the eleventh century around the notion of how Iseult and Tristram drank the magic potion intended for Iseult and her husband. This romance, of which there survive many mediaeval versions, was created by the Celtic spirit, accompanied on “la harpe Bretonne.” It possesses a charm of mystery and passion which lifts it far above all other purely mediaeval legends. It was preserved and arranged by Frenchmen — it is the Anglo-Norman version of Thomas of Brittany, which represents it best, — but in the intense quality of its melancholy emotion it is essentially Celtic. Here was a story of love and adventure, celebrated over the whole world of Europe, at the centre of it an associate of our great national heroes of the Round Table, the scene of it laid in British waters, a story told centuries ago in an English version which is lost. Matthew Arnold had touched it, but it still awaited an annexing poet.

  Love in its romantic aspect had a perennial attraction for Swinburne, and the tale of Tristram and Iseult was romantic to extravagance. In all the other great stories of the world love had been an appanage or an ornament; in this, for the first time, and in the quivering Celtic abandonment, it was the essence of the event. Moreover, that ecstatic devotion to and observation of the various moods of the sea which so remarkably distinguished Swinburne above all other poets found its full scope in the story of the sailing of the Swallow across the per
ilous Cornish waters. Gaston Paris has exclaimed in examining the Tristram saga, “quelle part elle prend à l’action, cette mer immense et incertaine!” In the days of Swinburne’s youth, when he associated closely with Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones, the legend of Tristram and Iseult was often discussed, and it was tacitly admitted to be predestined to extended treatment by Swinburne.

  After long meditation, he began his epic in 1871, as soon as Songs before Sunrise was off his hands, and he wrote the Prelude, in 258 lines, in a tumult of improvisation. This he immediately published in a holiday-book called Pleasure. Then the breeze of inspiration fell, and for a long time he wrote no more, absorbed in Bothwell and in other things. But he never abandoned his intention, and during the eleven years which followed, he was every now and then composing what he called “parcels of Tristram.” But it was not until 1881 that he took it vigorously in hand, and in the following April he finished it.

  It was published in July 1882, in an unfortunate form. The one epic of a great poet should, of course, have made its undistracted appeal to the public in a single, handsome volume, but there was great alarm in Putney as to the reception of a poem so amatory in tone. Watts, though he regarded Tristram as Swinburne’s highest poetical effort, feared a repetition of the scandal of 1866, and fancied that the second and fourth cantos might be challenged by the Public Prosecutor. To modify the dreaded effect of these passages, a very thick book was produced, in which Tristram was eked out and half concealed by nearly 200 pages of miscellaneous lyrics. Swinburne, who submitted to everything that Watts suggested, acquiesced in this arrangement, but took a humorous view of it. He told Lord Houghton (June 6, 1882) that he should “expect the Mothers of England to rally round a book containing forty-five ‘songs of innocence’ — lyrics on infancy and childhood.” But there proved to be no cause for anxiety. The amatory complexion of Tristram was not objected to by anybody. What was objected to in the poem, alas! was its lack of vital interest.

  It requires some care to define the cause of the comparative failure of Tristram of Lyonesse, the work on which Swinburne had been engaged from his thirty-fourth to his forty-sixth year, and which he had intended to be the very top-stone of his poetical monument. The subject seemed to suit him. He had always studied with interest the tragic symptoms of a culpable love, the passion of guilty lovers lifted by their ecstasy into a condition where their moral sense was paralysed, and where greatness could only be achieved by their apprehensions, sufferings and long-drawn deaths. He had entered with high intelligence into the intensely mediaeval characteristics of the legend. After the drink, the old French version makes the lovers say, “C’est notre mort que nous y avons bue,” and Swinburne exactly responds to this keynote of the poem when he says, “all their life changed in them, for they quaffed Death.” But as we read the poem, we become more and more persuaded that the story was ill-fitted in any modern hands for epical treatment, being essentially lyrical, while story-telling was the weakest side of Swinburne’s multiform talent. There is a total want of energy in the narrative of Tristram; there are no exploits, no feats of arms; the reader, avid for action, is put off with pages upon pages of amorous hyperbolical conversation between lovers, who howl in melodious couplets to the accompaniment of winds and waves.

  It is perhaps the uniformity of effort in the texture of Tristram which produces a sense of fatigue. The Prelude — composed, as we have seen, so early as 1871 — is a magnificent performance. Written, like the whole poem, in heroic couplets, it is as learned and brilliant a piece of studied versification as we meet with in the whole of English literature. The taste for this particular kind of verse may rise or fall, it may be now in the fashion or now out of it, but nothing can permanently oust the ‘Prelude’ to Tristram from its position at the very forefront of poetical accomplishment. In what he sets forth to do, Swinburne’s achievement here can only be compared with that of Shelley in Epipsychidion, which as a metrical feat the ‘Prelude’ surpasses. For sustained splendour of language the zodiac of amorous constellations, each with its feminine star (11. 101-156), is unequalled. Again, at the close of the last canto, the final scene of the dying Tristram, perplexed with the juggle of the white sail and the black, is admirably told, and the closing lines are very striking. But between these extremities, and relieved by marvellous maritime effects, there are long stretches of monotony caused by strain and effort to make every passage a purple one. The poem is less a story than a homily on the theme that Love is

  So strong that heaven, could Love bid heaven farewell,

  Would turn to fruitless and unflowering hell;

  So sweet that hell, to hell could love be given,

  Would turn to splendid and sonorous heaven, —

  a theme that Dryden himself could not illustrate in the redundancy of an epic.

  When Tristram of Lyonesse was off his hands, Swinburne was taken by Watts for a rather lengthy visit to Guernsey and Sark, which greatly benefited his health, although he quaintly complained to Mrs. Lynn Linton of the Puritanical restraints of the former; “Sunday in Guernsey,” he wrote to her, “is to a Scotch Sabbath what a Scotch Sabbath is to a Parisian Sunday.” On the other hand, he was more than ever bewitched by the wonders of the island of Cymodoce. He occupied a great deal of his time in bathing in the sea, and this afterwards led to a ridiculous imbroglio, of which I am sorry to say that I was the innocent cause. I happened to tell the extraordinary old R. H. Horne— “Orion” Horne — of Swinburne’s feats of swimming, whereupon Horne, who was in his eightieth year, must needs, without warning me, write Swinburne a challenge to a public contest in natation. The peculiar funniness of Horne did not appeal to Swinburne’s sense of humour, and he was very angry. “Orion” proposed the Westminster Aquarium as the scene of the race, and offered to share the proceeds with Swinburne!

  In the autumn of 1882 Swinburne was invited by Victor Hugo to come over to Paris and be present at the fiftieth anniversary of the first (and sole previous) representation of Le Roi s’amuse. The friends started, and put up at an hotel in the Rue Saint-Honoré. In later years, it was a legend at Putney that this had been a very wonderful occasion, but as a matter of fact it was rather a warning to the poet to try no more such adventures. Swinburne, very rightly, would accept no attention which was not shared with Watts, and Watts was unknown in Paris. Watts had not realised what a royal position Victor Hugo occupied, nor to what a degree he was surrounded by idolators. Swinburne must have known it quite well; he had helped to set Victor Hugo on the throne, and he would recollect the envoi of Théodore de Banville’s ballade:

  Gautier parmi ces joailliers

  Est prince, et Leconte de Lisle

  Forge l’or dans ses ateliers;

  Mais le père est là-bas, dans l’île.

  It is certain that the English visitors found themselves “out of it” in the press of adulation. On the 22nd of November, the great night, they were indeed presented to the super-man for a moment, but in such a whirl of social excitement that they were hardly sure that Hugo realised who Swinburne was, and they saw him no more.

  Watts reported at the time that Swinburne “was disappointed with both the poet and the play”; this is incredible, but he may have been annoyed at not seeing more of the deity. I received a letter from Swinburne while he was in Paris, in which he spoke of the play and of the occasion, but did not mention Victor Hugo. Moreover, his deafness made it impossible to follow the piece. This was the last occasion on which he left the shores of England. In this year he received a visit from James Russell Lowell, who had attacked Swinburne’s early poems with strange vehemence. But he now made himself “very pleasant,” and the old quarrel was healed.

  After a considerable interval, during which he refrained from writing verse, largely because he felt that his excessive fluency had been carrying him too loosely on a wild prosodical gallop, he returned to poetry in the month of January 1883. He determined, for the sake of selfdiscipline, to abandon for a time his broad and sweepin
g measures, and to curb his Pegasus with a rigidly-determined fixed form. He chose the rondeau, that metrical structure in thirteen lines, knit together by two rhymes, and with a refrain thrice repeated, the laws of which were laid down by Clément Marot in the sixteenth century. Swinburne anglicised the word, and called his little poems “roundels,” which, however, was not fortunate, because another and still earlier form of verse, which is quite distinct, bears the name of “rondel.” The essential laws which govern the construction of the rondeau admit a very considerable elasticity within their circle, and Swinburne showed a marvellous aptitude in combining variety with an exact observance of the essential laws. He composed one hundred of those little poems, which he published in a small quarto, dedicated to his old and beloved friend Christina Rossetti, in the spring of 1883, The roundels were largely, though much less universally than has been said in haste, concerned with the praise of babes, since Swinburne’s passion for infancy was now at its height; but they really formed a garland of delicate records of meditation, stored up through many years, and now first enshrined in metrical form.

  To Swinburne’s unsurpassed maestria, the strict laws of the rondeau offered no cause of delay. He composed A Century of Roundels with extraordinary swiftness and ease. He began the collection in the middle of January 1883; by the 6th of February he had finished twenty, four more by the 9th, and three more on the following day. All were completed before the end of March. The original MSS., written on half-sheets of note-paper, were sent as they were, uncopied, to the printers, and, when returned from the press, were presented to Miss Isabel Swinburne. They bear very little mark of correction, and may be considered as almost improvisations. The final envoi gives an impression of the daintiness and spontaneity of this very charming book: