SWINBURNE I How were the roses so fresh and so fair! I do not suppose that anybody now alive (I speak of lovers of poetry) who was not alive in 1832 and old enough then to enjoy the first perfect work of Tennyson, has had such a sensation as that which was experienced in the autumn of 1866 by readers of Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads. And I am sure that no one in England has had any such sensation since. THUS HUS wrote Mr. George Saintsbury, some twentytwo years ago, in a volume called Corrected Impressions: and it is certain that no one survives today to compare the emotional experiences of 1832 and 1866, to report to us. Indeed of the men who in 1866 were old enough to wage war over Poems and Ballads the greater number pre-deceased its author, and by this time a very few remain. Mr. Saintsbury, who happily survives (but will not be called "Doctor"), was an under-graduate in 1866. He tells us: The autumn must have been advanced before [the book] did come out, for I remember that I could not obtain a copy before I went up to Oxford in October, and had to avail myself of an expedition to town to "eat dinners" in order to get one. Three copies of the precious volume, with "Mox on" on cover and "John Camden Hotten" on title-page, accompanied me back that night, together with divers maroons for the purpose of enlivening matters on the ensuing Fifth of November. The book was something of a maroon in itself. . . . We sat next afternoon, I remember, from luncheon time till the chapel bell rang, reading aloud by turns in a select company Dolores and The Triumph of Time, Laus Veneris and Faustine, and all the other wonders of the volume. The hubbub raised over Poems and Ballads in 1866 still, after half a century, interrupts criticism with an echo too loud for its real importance, even for its historical importance. It was not, to be sure, a mere hubbub of the market-place, and for much of it that sounded in the market-place, Swinburne and his friends were largely to blame. The Pre-Raphaelites had a tribal way of shouting their wares before producing them. In Goblin Market "Come buy! Come buy!" habitually dinned as noisily as in any vulgar one, and Alexander the coppersmith could colourably plead, nine times out of ten, that he had not started the tumult. Dante Gabriel Rossetti in particular had always a nervous sense of the public opinion it was proposed to offend; his own poems appeared in circumstances (creditable enough if hidden) which, made public, to an uncharitable world suggested réclame. There can be no doubt, we think (after reading many Memoirs), that his friends did Swinburne little service together with much disservice by puffing his book beforehand. "Now we were told, first, that a volume of extraordinarily original verse was coming out; now, that it was so shocking that its publisher repented its appearance; now, that it had been re-issued, and was coming out after all." Nor can it be said that, when the storm burst, Swinburne either handled his craft or comported himself in a way to make easy weather. The book did challenge the world: it did contain matter of offence and he well knew it. When we have allowed everything for the sensitiveness of a poet, it remains true that a man who throws down a challenge should be prepared to keep his head when the glove is taken up. But the real marvel of Poems and Ballads lay, of course, in its poetry, as in that lay the real innovation. Other poets had been scandalous-plenty of thembefore Swinburne; and the possible changes that true poetry can ring on the libidinous are, after all, pretty few. But here was a man who, five hundred years after Chaucer, in the long line of descent which already boasted Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning-all so great and all so different-had suddenly discovered a new door and thrust it open upon what seemed endless vistas of beauty. Here was a man who, coming after these mighty inventors, could take the language in which they had wrought, and convert it to a music as unlike any of theirs, as absolutely fresh and original, as it was patently the music of a peer. Swinburne constantly held that all great poets must be conscious of their greatness. He himself could be as arrogant as any one, when provoked; but although self-centred, he was too noble a gentleman to be arrogant by habithe was even over-prone to abase himself before the greater gods of Parnassus: and in the following anecdote he is made to assert a claim which many will think not overweening. He was not disinclined, on occasion, to refer to himself with an engaging frankness, as if he were speaking of some one else. At Jowett's dinner-table R. W. Raper once asked him which of the English poets had the best ear. Swinburne replied with earnestness and gravity: "Shakespeare without doubt; then Milton; then Shelley; then, I do not know what other people would do, but I should put myself." Although our memory reach short of Mr. Saintsbury's, we can bring a small illustration of the sway this genius held over young men in 1880. The wave of enthusiasm had fallen into a trough with Bothwell. The splendid choruses in Erechtheus had lifted it a little; but Erechtheus as a whole failed to "amuse," and the worshippers had an uneasy sense that their master was fumbling in an art for which he lacked instinct as well as tact; that, when prolixity should have warned him as the surest signal of a mark missed, Swinburne had not even the eyes to see that his prolixity was prolix. But in 1878, with Poems and Ballads, Second Series, on the wonderful crests of such lyrics as The Year of the Rose, A Forsaken Garden, A Wasted Vigil, and the supreme Ave atque Vale, the wave surged up anew to its summit: and if we missed the adventurous feeling of naughtiness, that too was restored to us, after a fashion, in 1880, by Heptalogia— for youth loves parodies, and to see fun poked at pontifical seniors. Memory recalls a night in the autumn of that year, a set of rooms in Balliol-but men dropped in from other colleges and stayed until close upon midnight -a voice chanting the Heptalogia to wild shouts of laughter, the company taking fire and running back, like flame over stubble, to race through the audacities of Poems and Ballads even back to the Circean choruses of Atalanta-"hounds of spring on winter's traces": And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night, Follows with dancing and fills with delight And soft as lips that laugh and hide ¡ And then, almost suddenly-even in breasts that continued to echo the memory of it-all this enthusiasm had died down; and while Swinburne went on writing, writing of stars and love, and waves and flames that were deathless or breathless or tattered or battered or shattered, none of them mattered, none of them contained any longer any hope; all were galvanic-reflex action of genius after death. That is the real tragedy which has to be explained in the biography of a man whose life yields the picturesque biographer very little or very little that can be told— of incident for escape or resource. It would still be the real tragedy and kernel of the whole matter had Swinburne's life been crowded with spirited actual adventure. Swinburne was a tremendous force in poetry: the force died; the man outlived it, and died, many years later, solicitously tended. He had in his day the hearts of all young lovers of poetry at his feet. He has left an indelible mark on English verse: and for this, to the end, the younger generation venerated him as a great figure, a spent god and asleep under the pines (Putney). He was the last man in the world to leave a cause for a ribbon or a handful of silver. But he who had inspired parodists innumerable and many pale imitators, has left us no school of poets. Upon the literature of Victorian England he made an amazing irruption, and passed. |