Fly, white butterflies, out to sea,
Frail pale wings for the wind to try,
Small white wings that we scarce can see,
Fly.
Here and there may a chance-caught eye
Note in a score of you twain or three
Brighter or darker of tinge or dye.
Some fly light as a laugh of glee,
Some fly soft as a low long sigh:
All to the haven where each would be,
Fly.
The happy and shrouded remainder of Swinburne’s life is summed up in the titles of his books. Without anxieties or duties of any kind, his energy concentrated itself on literature, and he became the book-monk of a suburban Thebais. All the charming part of his character blossomed forth anew, his gallantry, his tenderness, his loyalty. The caprices and irritabilities which had marred the surface of his nature disappeared. Yet there were disadvantages. He became less amusing and stimulating, although perhaps more lovable, than he had been in his tumultuous youth; and it would be sacrificing too much at the mere altar of virtue were we to pretend that he did not, as a figure, lose much of his significance. The temperament of Watts, which was more practical and vigorous than his own, exercised an unceasing well-meant pressure upon Swinburne, so that the poet grew to be little more than the beautiful ghost of what he had been in earlier years. As his own power of asserting himself decayed, or retired within concealed channels, it was inevitable that the weight, the opinions and the force of Watts should more and more take its place. Swinburne grew to live in, by and through Watts, till at length his own will existed only in certain streams of literary reflection, while even these were narrowed by the unconscious compulsion asserted by the domination of his companion.
The record of Swinburne’s further publications will necessarily be brief, since they hardly concern the biographer, however interesting they must be to the critic. In 1883 he paid a memorable visit to Jowett at Emerald Bank, Newlands, near Keswick. A Midsummer Holiday (1884) is a collection of lyrics, a considerable number being ballades of pure landscape description, a task imposed now upon him by Watts. At the close of this volume an odd freak of temper is revealed. Some foolish journalist had said that “no man living or who ever lived — not Shakespeare nor Michael Angelo — could confer honour more than he took on entering the House of Lords” (Dec. 15, 1883). This was apropos of Tennyson’s acceptance of a peerage, which was highly disapproved of at The Pines. Between the announcement and Tennyson’s taking his seat, Swinburne poured forth an amazing series of poems in vituperation of the House of Lords, the most innocuous of which occupy too much space in A Midsummer Holiday. “Clear the way, my Lords and lackeys!” he shrieks, and the appellations “serf” and “cur” and “sycophant” hurtle in vociferous sonnets, but all this indignation has no political significance; it was Tennyson whom he was really pursuing. Mingled with those oddities, however, there are to be found in the volume of 1884 some protestations of a sincere and beautiful patriotism. Swinburne spent the autumn of this year at the Mill House, Sidestrand, on the Norfolk coast.
In 1885 Swinburne published a blank verse play of Italian freedom, Marino Faliero, dedicated to Aurelio Saffi; in 1886 a prose Study of Victor Hugo, occasioned by Hugo’s death in the preceding year; a collection of Miscellanies reprinted; and a play, Locrine, which is more worthy of attention than any of the works just mentioned. Locrine is written in curious arrangements of rhyme; “there is something irregularly like them in Greene’s Selimus, as well as in Lord Brooke’s toughest of dramatic indigestibles,” as the author said in a letter long afterwards. Locrine was acted by a dramatic society early in 1899, and was found to be interesting and arresting by a literary audience. No other play of Swinburne’s was put on the boards during his lifetime.
It is useless to deny that Swinburne’s friendships, which had formed so important a part of his life, were considerably curtailed as soon as he retired to Putney. Watts-Dunton has recorded that “from this moment [in 1879] his connection with bohemian London ceased entirely.” It is not necessary to comment on this retrenchment, further than to point out that it put a stop to all companionship on the old footing. Some former friends accepted the embargo and ceased to communicate with the poet, considering themselves judged to be “bohemian.” Others, like Sir Richard Burton, braved this censure, and insisted on coming now and then to The Pines. During the first five or six years Swinburne was occasionally allowed to visit friends in London in the middle of the day, but his deafness was a growing difficulty. William Morris, who was a favourite with Watts, was always welcome at Putney, and Jowett even more so; these were held to be wholly untainted by the dangerous “bohemian” tendency. Morris latterly saw less and less of Swinburne, though he sent him nearly all the Kelmscott Press books. On one occasion he and Burne-Jones were together when they ran up against Swinburne, who seemed unable to recognise them. Ill-health kept Gabriel and Christina Rossetti aloof; the rest came more and more rarely. Death was busy in their ranks: D. G. R. passed away in 1882, Lord Houghton in 1885, Sir Henry Taylor in 1886, Inchbold in 1888, Burton in 1890, Jowett and Madox Brown in 1893, Christina Rossetti and John Nichol in 1894, W. Morris in 1896, and lastly Eliza Lynn Linton and Edward Burne-Jones in 1898. Swinburne was then left with scarcely a surviving friend from the old Pre-Raphaelite generation, except the long-estranged George Meredith, with whom he held no renewed communication till I had the gratification of bringing the old friends together again by letter on the occasion of Meredith’s seventieth birthday.
This emotional emptiness was filled by the vigilant and assiduous companionship of Theodore Watts (who, in 1896, became Watts-Dunton), and by the affectionate respect which came to the poet from younger men and women who had not known him in the pre-Putneyan days. Among these special mention must be made of Mr. Thomas J. Wise, Swinburne’s future bibliographer and editor, who was first taken to The Pines in 1886 by the Jewish poetess Mathilde Blind (1841-96), whom Swinburne had know’ll since her girlhood. Swinburne received such visitors with unwearied courtesy, and he took a pleasure in their attentions, especially when they were ladies who brought very young children with them. These visitors were always delighted with the welcome he gave them, and many of them have recorded their pleasant impressions of him. It is, however, essential to say that the very gentle, punctilious old gentleman who received them, after some delay, in the unvarying presence of Watts-Dunton, was very far indeed from being the brilliant being, the scarlet and azure macaw among the birds of the forest, who had been the wonder, the delight, and sometimes the terror of an earlier generation. He was the shadow of that splendid high-flyer. Nor were the poet’s own thoughts long absent from the wonderful days of his youth, nor from those old dead companions who had peopled it with dreams; and he celebrated most of these latter in verse.
There were exceptions, however, to Swinburne’s amiable attitude towards former friends long absent, and the most painful of these was the sudden violent attack on Whistler in the Fortnightly Review for June 1888. Nothing had been seen to lead up to this onslaught, which amused an idle public, but startled and grieved the victim. Whistler had been an intimate and a useful friend to Swinburne in the early ‘sixties, and the poet had responded warmly. In the summer of 1860 Swinburne had made strenuous endeavours to bring Ruskin to Whistler’s studio, and to modify the critic’s prejudice against the painter. Although Swinburne and Whistler had ceased to meet familiarly after 1879, there had been no rupture. As late as 1880, Swinburne wrote to Mrs. Lynn Linton that the paintings of Whistler “are second only to the very greatest works of art in any age.” But Theodore Watts had never liked Whistler, whose wit had treated the dignified critic with too capricious a levity. He chose to consider the American painter “a bit of a charlatan,” and he had instilled his prejudice into Swinburne. His own words were, “I persuaded Swinburne to write the really brilliant article.” It was not “brilliant”: it was marred by Swinburne’s worst affectations of hyperbole and irony, and
can only be regretted. Whistler made a brief reply in The World newspaper, in his characteristic manner, but rather sadly than fiercely. He never forgot the splendid lyric defence of his picture, “The Little White Girl,” which Swinburne had opportunely written in 1865; and so late as 1902 Whistler had the generosity to recall that poem as “a rare and graceful tribute from the poet to the painter — a noble recognition of work by the production of a nobler one.”
After 1884 Swinburne gave his lyrical talent a certain respite, and when he returned to the composition of verse, as he did in 1888, the beneficial results of this were manifest. He now wrote “The Armada” and “Pan and Thalassius,” the former an example of his redundant magnificence, the latter of his subtlety. These are the most solid contributions to Poems and Ballads: Third Series (1889), which is also notable as containing nine Border ballads of great value, written a quarter of a century earlier, duringthe Pre-Raphaelite period. These he had set up in type in 1877, and had then suppressed them. This volume was dedicated, in charming Omar Khayyam quatrains, to William Bell Scott, in memory of old Northumbrian days —
... when I rode by moors and streams,
Reining my rhymes into buoyant order
Through honied leagues of the northland border.
Scott had now reached his eightieth year and was dying. There was no trace then, nor until his memoirs were indiscreetly published two or three years later, of the undercurrent of envious feeling which Swinburne immediately resented with more violence than dignity.
The late Miss Edith Sichel, shortly before her lamented death, was kind enough to write out for me her solitary experience of the poet. It may be objected that, if once to “see Shelley plain” is a small thing, once to see Swinburne dimly is a still smaller one, but Miss Sichel’s nocturne is so drolly told that I make no apology for inserting it:
In the late autumn of 1890, I happened one evening at dusk to be walking along the edge of Wimbledon Common, in a thick white mist. Feeling that my shoelace was trailing on the ground, I bent down to tie it. While I was doing so, some one stumbled over me and cried out “Oh!” in a tone — almost a squeak — of passionate dismay. I looked up to find a white face immediately above me, and a blaze of red hair which seemed to part the mist like a flame. In a flash a small, thin-legged man’s figure tripped precipitately away, and the fog appeared to swallow him up as if he had been a vision. I felt as if I had seen some Azrael or Uriel of Blake’s creation. I think he wore a soft black wideawake, but of this I am not sure. After he had vanished, I walked on with the sense that something delightful had happened to me. This was all the intercourse that I ever had with Algernon Charles Swinburne.
The monotony of Swinburne’s life was broken into in a manner very agreeable to him by his being invited to take a leading part in the Eton Ninth Jubilee of 1891. He was asked to write the Ode for the occasion, a task which he accepted eagerly and executed promptly. In sending it in to the Vice-Provost, he amusingly wrote: “Here is my copy of verses — shown up in time, as I understand — and I only hope I shall not be put in the bill for showing up too few.” At the same time, he suggested that the boys should act, for the first time since the sixteenth century, “the very first comedy in the language,” Ralph Roister Doister, by Nicholas Udall, Henry VIII.’s Head Master of Eton. He was anxious to be present at the proceedings on the 23rd of June, when Dr. Warre, his former “form-fellow,” asked him to stay over the night at his house, but Watts-Dunton declined to sanction it, and the poet submitted with a little, sigh. Mr. Ainger, at the dinner in Mr. Everard’s garden, when Mr. A. J. Balfour was the principal guest, expressed the general feeling of regret at Eton that Mr. Swinburne had been “compelled” to refuse the invitation.
Swinburne’s publications now became less frequent. But in 1892 appeared a short play, The Sisters, which has already been dealt with as full of reminiscences of the poet’s childhood, but otherwise of scant importance. The lyrical harvest of six years was garnered in Astrophel, dedicated in lines of great tenderness to William Morris. Studies in Prose and Poetry, like A Study of Ben Jonson which preceded it, testified in redundant prose to the industry, activity, and pertinacity of the critic. Full of years and honours, Victor Hugo was dead at last, but the idolater still waved censers of eulogy in front of the shrine. Here, too, is reprinted the essay, written in 1887, in which Swinburne, who had been one of the earliest to welcome Walt Whitman as a “strong-winged soul with prophetic lips hot with the blood-beats of song,” enounced a full recantation.
Even as lately as February 1885 he had written, “I retain a very cordial admiration for not a little of Whitman’s earlier work,” and when I visited the Sage at Camden later in that year, Swinburne had sent him by me his “cordial regards.” But now the Muse of Walt Whitman was nothing but “a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage of the gutter amid the rotten refuse of her overturned fruit-stall.” This was an interesting example of the slow tyranny exercised on Swinburne’s judgment by the will of Watts, who had never been able to see merit in the work of Walt Whitman, and who frankly admitted that he “hated him most heartily.”
When Tennyson died, and during the long interregnum before the appointment of Alfred Austin, expert opinion was practically unanimous in desiring to see the laureateship offered to Swinburne. It is reported that Queen Victoria, discussing the matter with Gladstone, said, “I am told that Mr. Swinburne is the best poet in my dominions.” But Gladstone held the view that the turbulency of Swinburne’s political opinions, particularly as expressed with regard to certain friendly foreign powers, made it impossible even to consider his claims to the laurel. Swinburne preserved a complete silence on the subject, so far as the newspaper reporters were concerned. In private he expressed the conviction that Canon Dixon, the author of Mano, possessed the highest claim to be poet-laureate, or, failing him, Lord De Tabley. It will be observed that each of these poets was older than Swinburne, who had little knowledge of the verse of men born after 1850, and even less curiosity about their careers.
In the summer of 1895, when his mind was greatly occupied with memories of his childhood, and of the dear Northumbrian faces that had passed away so long ago, Swinburne started The Tale of Bolen, an Arthurian story of the Border country. This is, with the exception of Tristram, the longest narrative poem which he composed, and it is in many respects a very remarkable performance. It is unquestionably the best work of the last twenty years of his life. Yet for the biographer the principal interest of Bolen lies in the evidence it gives that Swinburne was now living more and more among the phantoms of the past. Like his hero before his death,
He drank the draught of life’s first wine
Again; he saw the moorland shine,
The rioting rapids of the Tyne,
The woods, the cliffs, the sea;
The joy that lives at heart and home,
The joy to rest, the joy to roam,
The joy of crags and scaurs he clomb,
The rapture of the encountering foam
Embraced and breasted of the boy,
The first good steed his knees bestrode,
The first wild sound of songs that flowed
Through ears that thrilled and heart that glowed,
Fulfilled his death with joy.
In these lines the legendary Sir Balen was forgotten, and the curtain of half a century fell back to reveal the little Algernon who once rode and climbed, swam and shouted, in the bright, sharp air of Northumberland.
A copy of The Tale of Balen was sent by Swinburne to William Morris, who was too ill to do more than glance at it. Morris died on the 3rd of October 1896. Though his name is not mentioned, Swinburne referred to Morris in the epilogue to A Channel Passage, in the lines:
No braver, no trustier, no purer,
No stronger and clearer a soul
Bore witness more splendid and surer
For manhood found perfect and whole
Since man was a warrior and dreamer
Than his who in hatred of wrong
Would fain have arisen a redeemer
By sword or by song.
With Morris’s socialistic aspirations Swinburne at no time found himself in sympathy, and the reference is therefore the more generous.
The Tale of Balen was dedicated to the only survivor who could share the earliest of these reminiscences, to the poet’s venerable mother, now settled at Barking Hall, where, on the 19th of July 1896, Lady Jane Swinburne was welcomed on the morning of her eighty-seventh birthday by an ode in which her son enshrined his tenderness, his reverence, and his adoring affection. But on the 26th of November of that same year “the woods that watched her waking” beheld that gracious form no more. The grief of her son was overwhelming, and it may be said that this formed the last crisis of his own life. From this moment he became even more gentle, more remote, more unupbraiding than ever. He went on gliding over the commons of Wimbledon with the old noiseless regularity, but it could hardly be said that he held a place any longer in the ordinary world around him.
The thirteen last years of Swinburne’s life were spent almost as if within a Leyden jar. Nothing could be more motionless than the existence of “the little old genius, and his little old acolyte, in their dull little villa.” Swinburne still brightened up, with punctilious courtesy, at the approach of any visitor who contrived to break through the double guard of the housemaid and of Watts-Dunton. He would still stand by his shelf of precious quartos and astonish a guest, as he did the Dutch novelist, Maarten Maartens, by presenting volume after volume for inspection, with “the strangely dancing quiver and flash of his little body, like a living flame.” Still on moderate pressure he would read aloud with a mannered outpour of tumultuous utterance, and then sink back, exhausted and radiant. Still he would talk, in the familiar tones, of the life-long objects of his admiration, of Landor and Hugo and Marlowe, of Northumberland and Niton and Sark, “bobbing all the while like a cork on the sea of his enthusiasms.” Still he would dream, with eyelids wide open, long gazing at the light in silence, until, as Mr. Coulson Kernahan has admirably said, “one could see by his flashing eyes that the hounds of utterance were chafing and fretting to fling themselves on the quarry,” and then the torrent of reminiscent speech would follow.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 372