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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Under the ceaseless vigilance of his faithful shield and companion the placid months went by until, in November 1903, after one of his long walks in the rain, Swinburne caught a chill which presently developed into a dangerous attack of pneumonia. With great difficulty his life was saved by the assiduity and skill of Sir Thomas Barlow. From this time forth his lungs remained delicate, but he lived nearly six years longer. Several publications amused his leisure during the placid close of his career — a collection of lyrical poems, A Channel Passage (1904); a novel, Love’s Cross-Currents (1905, but written twenty-nine years earlier); and the opening of a drama, The Duke of Gandia (1908, but started in 1882). He persisted in writing verses, as he frankly confessed, “to escape from boredom.” He continued to enjoy good health, although now as prematurely old as in early days he had been conspicuously young for his years. Nothing foreshadowed a change when only a fortnight before his death he received at The Pines Mr. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, who has been kind enough to give me his impressions of the visit. “Mr. Swinburne,” he writes, “returned from his usual walk, looking tired, but not evidently unwell. After luncheon he invited me to go up to his study and look at his books. They were fewer than one might expect to find in the study of a famous man-of-letters. Swinburne displayed his collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists with ingenuous pride, and when I ventured to compliment him on his rarities, he smiled and said, ‘Yes! not bad for a poor man, are they?’ Glancing at the other books on the shelves, I caught sight of various volumes of Victor Hugo, very much the worse for wear. In reply to some remark about them, Swinburne replied, ‘They ought to go to the binder, but I can’t bear to part with them.’”

  It was, therefore, in the unabated fervour of a life-time that death found this faithful lover of Marlowe and Hugo. His illness was brief and scarcely painful. The sharpness of Easter in 1909 produced an epidemic of influenza at The Pines, which affected every member of Watts-Dunton’s household, and in Swinburne’s case brought on what soon became double pneumonia, His physician, Dr. Edwin White, sent for Sir Douglas Powell, but the course of the disease could not be arrested, and the poet died, very peacefully, on the 10th of April 1909, having entered his seventy-third year by five days.

  Algernon Swinburne was buried in the romantic churchyard of Bonchurch, in the midst of the graves of his family. He lies in that beautiful orchard-terrace, within an apple-cast of the garden in which his childhood was so happily spent. On loud nights the trumpet of the sea is audible from the spot where he sleeps, and so, in the words dedicated to his memory by the greatest of his successors,

  ... here, beneath the waking constellations,

  Where the waves peal their everlasting strains,

  And their dull subterrene reverberations

  Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains —

  Him once their peer in sad improvisations,

  And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes, —

  I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines

  Upon the capes and chines.

  CHAPTER IX

  PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

  THE connection which undoubtedly exists, in certain cases only, between imaginative gifts of a high order and peculiarities of physical conformation, has never been explained. It is not by mere accident that Chopin and Raphael and Shelley have a constitution and an appearance so unlike those of ordinary mortals, nor is it the rule that men of genius are, like Walter Scott and Robert Browning, healthy examples of the ordinary type. There is no rule or custom in the matter, and great talents blow where they list. Nevertheless there is a tendency to strangeness, an excess or violence of delicacy, which is proverbially associated with poetry, and with the bardic appearance of exclusively aesthetic persons. This, although not the rule, is more than the exception, and, where it occurs, is not to be neglected as an element in the general analysis of character. In the case of Swinburne the physical strangeness exceeded, perhaps, that of any other entirely sane man of imaginative genius whose characteristics have been preserved for us. It must be defined with as much exactitude as is possible without falling into the error of caricature.

  Algernon Swinburne was in height five feet and four and a half inches. He carried his large head very buoyantly on a tiny frame, the apparent fragility of which was exaggerated by the sloping of his shoulders, which gave him, almost into middle life, a girlish look. He held himself upright, and, as he was very restless, he skipped as he stood, with his hands jerking or linked behind him while he talked, and, when he was still, one toe was often pressed against the heel of the other foot. In this attitude his slenderness and slightness gave him a kind of fairy look, which I, for one, have never seen repeated in any other human being. It recurs to my memory as his greatest outward peculiarity.

  His head was bigger than that of most men of his height; as Sir George Young tells us, when he entered Eton at twelve years old his hat was already the largest in the school. Mr. Lindo Myers, who came over with him from Havre in the autumn of 1868, writes to me, that, Swinburne’s hat having been blown overboard, “when we got to Southampton, we went to three hatters before we found one hat that would go on, and then we had to rip the lining out. His head was immense.” In the late Putney days, when he became bald, this bigness of his head was less noticeable than when it had been emphasised by the vast “burning bush” of his red hair, which in early days he wore very much fluffed out at the sides. Lord Redesdale always used to speak of Algernon’s “zazzera.” This is an old Italian word for a great head of blond hair combed out to its full circumference. A poet of the sixteenth century, quoted by the Dizionario della Crusca, says “Biondo fue nella chioma, sicchè tutta la sua zazzera sembrava splendore d’oro.” This might have been written of Swinburne in his youth. The orb of this mop reduced the apparent thickness of his neck, which, looked at merely in relation to his falling shoulders, was excessive, yet seemed no more than was necessary to carry the balloon of head and hair. In a guarded and ironic sketch of life “At The Pines” — a sketch which deserves close attention — Mr. E. V. Lucas remarks that Swinburne’s eyes in the later years “were fixed and mirthless.” He had always had this steady look. “Above the eyes, however,” Mr. Lucas proceeds, “all was different and magnificent — a dome lofty and aloof as one could ask, curiously like Shakespeare’s.” One of the contradictions which we meet with in every attempt to analyse Swinburne’s character is to be found in the fact that although he seemed so fragile and so light, the muscular endurance of his frame was remarkable. His untiring little legs might have been made of steel wire.

  As Watts-Dunton, towards his eightieth year, and when his memory was certainly not any longer very fresh, chose to select D. G. Rossetti’s painting of Swinburne, dated 1861, and now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, as that which he particularly recommended, it seems needful to explain why this opinion must not be endorsed. If posterity accepts the view that Rossetti’s portrait “brings back” the appearance of Swinburne “more than any other,” the conception of what he really looked like will be entirely lost. That drawing is a careful Pre-Raphaelite study, but it is essentially unlike its subject. The proportions of the face are wrong; the forehead is reduced in height and breadth; the nose is too fleshy; the weakness of the mouth is avoided; the chin is square and prominent, instead of pointed and retreating; and the throat is almost a goitre. But the great fault of this picture, as a portrait, is that, though individual features may be correct, the whole gives a false conception of general character. Rossetti has painted his young friend as a Knight of the Table Round, languishing for the Sangraal and for remote adventures. The real Swinburne was not heavy, burly, and almost lethargic, like this Arthurian conception of him, but light with the lightness of thistle-down, when aroused as alert as a terrier, and habitually thrilled with a quite modern type of intellectual energy.

  It is in the expression of the eyes that Rossetti has peculiarly gone astray; he has made the eyes large, and à fleur
de tête, and gazing languorously sideways; whereas Swinburne’s greenish-grey eyes (which Rossetti has painted light-blue) were small, and deeply set, and were fixed straight before him with surprising intensity. Mr. Adams’ impression of what the poet looked like in 1862, at almost the very time when Rossetti was painting him, gives the true portrait: “A tropical bird, high-crested, long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterance and screams of humour.” Pellegrini’s famous coloured drawing, made in the winter of 1874, displays him very accurately, with of course the caricaturist’s exaggeration, as he looked twelve years after Mr. Adams saw him at Fryston, but here again the eyes are wrong. No artist seems to have contrived to record the flashing concentration of Swinburne’s level look.

  The mental and moral characteristics which distinguished the actions of this singular being were no less remarkable than the physical. In dealing with Algernon Swinburne’s character we are struck with the fact that it was, to a very unusual extent, what the biologists call epigenetic, that is to say, its qualities owed very little to heredity. When we examined his parentage we saw that no one at all resembling him intellectually had hitherto been observed either in the Swinburne or in the Ashburnham family, while such idiosyncrasies as could have been inherited were purely physical, and neither mental nor moral. He was started in life so original that he resisted all the pressure of education, and it would be difficult to find another man, brought up at Eton and Oxford, who has continued so unlike all other human beings as Swinburne was. Yet he was neither abnormal nor a monster. In favourable conditions he was lovable, gentle, capable of the most generous enthusiasm, active, essentially healthy and sound; what distinguished him from others was not a degeneracy or disease, but a difference. He was successfully modelled in a mould unlike most, and perhaps all, of his fellow-creatures. His deeper faculties worked in a very curious way, and sometimes baffled analysis altogether.

  This analysis is rendered the more difficult because of the discrepancies which showed themselves in his behaviour. Intrinsically, Swinburne’s character was as firm as a twist of iron, which bends under pressure, but is otherwise unaffected by outer forces. From the earliest record of his childhood to that of his last hours at Putney, we see him unchanged by conditions and unaffected by opinion. This gives his career a certain rigidity, which appears to be belied by the fact that he was dependent, even to excess, upon the support of others, and that his conversation and correspondence took the colour of his associates. When he was successively “under the influence,’’ as it is called, of Jowett or Burton, of Rossetti or Watts-Dunton, Swinburne bowed his will in the direction of each of them in turn, dipping towards them like a magnetic needle towards its pole. In the same way, there were people who repelled him, in spite of his admiration of their gifts and his desire to be affected by them; especially this was true of Ruskin and Browning. When he was in a state of magnetic induction, Swinburne would appear to a superficial observer so docile, so absorbed in renunciation, as to have no personal force left. He reposed, in passive adoration, upon the bosom of the adored one, — the great instance of this, in the intellectual sphere, being his attitude to Victor Hugo. It is probable that if Hugo had suddenly become insane, without that fact being explained to Swinburne, the latter would have continued to accept, without the slightest suspicion, the ravings of his idol. Yet who was more shrewd than he in observing a lapse in Browning or a fault in Byron?

  Although so far removed from the type with which his contemporaries were familiar, Swinburne was not conscious of any difference, and strove to avoid everything like affectation or eccentricity. He was invariably dressed with care, in the exact mode of the hour, — at least until he went to Putney, when his retirement from all society excused a less punctilious clothing. At the moment of his great notoriety, a firm of London tailors published a portrait of Swinburne as “an illustration of our full dress suit”! His hair was always unusually long, but he accounted for that by saying that it was a concession to the painters, who preferred it so. His manners were elaborate, and, when he chose, exquisite; in this respect he was very human: he could be radiantly courteous if he pleased, and he could be of a stony stiffness.

  He was a little too ready, in middle life, to take offence, and he showed it by an excess of dignity and hauteur: he would respond to an explosion of familiarity by a prodigious bowing and stiffening of his arrogant little body. Often, or at least sometimes, he gave an impression of defiance, which was really an instinct of self-defence, for he disliked promiscuous contact and a “hail-fellow-well-met” behaviour. But to a man or woman with whom he found himself in pleasant relations, he was suave and gracious in the extreme, only apt to bewilder a newly-made acquaintance by taking for granted in him an exact agreement of interests with himself. Thus have I seen an architect gratified by receiving Swinburne’s pointed attentions, yet driven to despair in the effort to discover what could be the Arden of Feversham which was the subject of his conversation.

  In a valuable letter to myself the late Dutch novelist, J. M. W. van der Poorten-Schwartz, who paid his respects to Swinburne in his later days, has recorded of him: “In the unique diversity of the British race he struck me at once as an Englishman of birth. I knew nothing about his social position, but he was manifestly a foreigner and an English aristocrat.” The acuteness of this remark is double, because in calling the poet “manifestly a foreigner,” the visitor expressed his sense of that unlikeness to all his contemporaries which has already been mentioned, and in insisting upon his “birth” he showed recognition of the poet’s remarkable distinction of manner. He was essentially an aristocrat, in spite of the boisterousness of his republicanism, and in this combination or contrast the examples of Mirabeau and of Landor help us to understand Swinburne, of whom it might be justly remarked, as it was of the author of Gebir, that he was one “not only rebellious himself, but a promoter of rebellion in others.” This attitude of political non-conformity showed itself, as we have seen, in his early Oxford days, and it persisted to the end of his life. It was largely an exotic sentiment, fostered by literature, by his early love of Italy and Italian things, and by the romance which surrounded Mazzini as with a halo. If a reader has the curiosity to isolate all that Swinburne has said about republicanism apart from Italy, and France in relation to Italy, he will be surprised to find how small the residue is.

  In particular, there is not, so far as I recollect, in all the voluminous writings of Swinburne a single line in which the English Constitution or the Monarchy is attacked. In a few pieces, such as An Appeal (Nov. 20, 1867), we find England called upon to “put forth thy strength, and release” persecuted republicans in other countries. In “The Twilight of the Lords” he seems to call for a constitutional change; but it is only in the visionary verses called “Perinde ac Cadaver” that anything can be pointed to that resembles a reproach to this country for not joining the confederacy of the liberated nations, and even then the answer comes in the question, “We have filed the teeth of the snake, Monarchy, how should it bite?” In the “Litany of Nations,” when it is England’s turn to speak, she invokes Milton and Shelley with rhetorical remoteness, and characteristically describes “the beacon-bright Republic” as “far-off sighted.” This attitude to the Government of his own country must not be overlooked, because Swinburne was perfectly fearless, and, if it had pleased him to do so, would have attacked English institutions as freely as he denounced “Strong Germany girdled with guile.” But, as a matter of fact, he adored his own country to the verge of Jingoism, and resented with what seemed to strangers inconsistent violence the slightest criticism of Queen Victoria. Lady Ritchie remembers his saying with great simplicity, in answer to the question, “What would you give for England?”

  “I would give my life.” At the time of the Land League agitation, a Fenian emissary visited The Pines, with a request that Swinburne would write an Ode on the Proclamation of an Irish Republic. Watts-Dunton used to give a humorous description of the swift retreat of the burly
visitor in the wind of the rage of the indignant poet, who bid him begone before he so far overcame his repulsion as to kick the intruder down stairs. What he did write was “The Ballad of Truthful Charles,” which no one has yet had the fortitude to place in his collected poems.

  It is riot to be questioned that, under the pressure of Theodore Watts, Swinburne’s political opinions took a singular volte-face after 1879. The author of Songs before Sunrise and Songs of Two Nations ought to have been a pro-Boer, but he was violently the reverse. He developed a strong dislike to Mr. Gladstone, and he hated his scheme of Home Rule, which the early rhapsodist would have welcomed. At the time of the Midlothian campaign, 1879-80, Swinburne wrote the following lines in a lady’s album:

  Choose, England: here the paths before thee part.

  Wouldst thou have honour? Be as now thou art;

  Wouldst thou have shame? Take Gladstone to thy heart.