THE INSPIRED PARRAKEET
I remember the first poet I ever met in my youth; one of the “pure”
poets, a dreamy soul, who lived in the ugly city of New York, and wrote
about beauty in distant Nineveh and Tyre. He earned his living in a
book-store, where he faded slowly, and his hair came to look as if the
moths had been feeding on it. Only once I saw fire in his eyes, and that
was when the name of Swinburne was mentioned. “Swinburne is a _god_!” he
exclaimed.
Yes, Algernon Charles Swinburne is no mere poet; he is divinity, before
whose high altar the art-for-art’s-sakers perform obeisance. He was born
in 1837, of an aristocratic county family in the North of England. So he
always had plenty of money, and lived his own life in the aristocratic
fashion. They sent him to Eton at the age of twelve, and then to Oxford,
but respectability failed to “take” with him.
He was the strangest figure in which the soul of a poet was ever housed.
As a child he had been beautiful, but something must have gone wrong
with his glands, so that his head grew faster than his body. He
developed a noble brow, but a weak mouth and receding chin; his enormous
head was lighted by two bright green eyes, and covered with a shock of
vivid red hair. When he became excited, which he was liable to do at a
moment’s notice, his arms and legs began to jerk convulsively, and he
would rush about the room, orating vehemently, perhaps hopping upon the
sofa, like a bright-colored parrakeet. He was an omnivorous reader, and
knew all the poetry there was in the world--most of it by heart, and
would pour it out by the hour, in Latin, Greek, French, Italian or
English. If he became too much excited, he would suddenly have a fit and
fall unconscious, to the terror of the company; but after a while he
would come to, just as lively and full of words as ever.
In his childhood and youth, according to the English custom, they filled
him up with Greek and Latin verses; he absorbed the bad as well as the
good, wine and women as well as song. Then he came under the spell of
Victor Hugo, who filled him with a fervor for liberty. It is an
interesting illustration of the influence a great poet can exert.
Swinburne worshipped Hugo with frenzied extravagance, and remained a
disciple of republicanism all through his seventy-two years; and this
without the slightest actual contact with republicanism, without
anything in his environment or his actions to explain such revolutionary
fever.
Worldly impracticability was carried to its last extreme in this
combustible youth; he always had to have somebody to take care of him,
and fell under the spell of one personality after another: Rossetti,
William Morris, Mazzini, and finally Watts-Dunton, who literally saved
his life. Swinburne would come up to London and engage in what he called
“racketing”--by which he meant stimulating his frenzies with alcohol. He
would keep this up until he was completely prostrated, and then his
father or one of his friends would carry him off to the country and
mount guard over him, and there he would live a quiet and placid
literary life until the world lured him forth again. By the time he was
forty he had carried his dissipation to such extremes that he was all
but wrecked. One by one his friends had to give him up, and he was
living in wretched lodgings at the point of death.
It was then that Watts-Dunton took charge of his affairs once for all,
and turned his country house into a sort of literary sanitarium, and
kept the poet for thirty years, strictly forbidding any but respectable
citizens to call upon him. Here the queer little parrakeet hopped about
in the library, and gradually grew old and deaf, and wrote a great deal
of prose and verse of little consequence. Some critics fight with the
moralists over the question, Is it better for a poet to die drunk and
inspired, or to live sober and dull? My friend, George Sterling, writes
me on this point: “I still refuse, probably from personal experience, to
believe that alcohol helps the artist to function at his best.”
Swinburne’s first great work, published at the age of twenty-eight, was
an imitation Greek play, “Atalanta in Calydon.” As poetry it is
marvelous; nobody since Shelley had poured out such a torrent of
glorious words. All the tricks of the trade are in it--how many you can
learn from Professor Saintsbury, who lists them: “equivalence and
substitution, alternative and repetition, rhymes and rhymeless
suspension of sound, volley and check of verse, stanza construction,
line-and pause-moulding, foot-conjunction and contrast.” Such are the
weapons in the armory of those who have read all the poetry there is in
the world!
What else is there beside verbal splendor and technical tricks? The
answer is: The familiar Greek aristocratic personages, struggling in
vain against their gods; the old Greek fatalism and pessimism, taken up
as a literary exercise and carried to un-Hellenic extremes. It might
have puzzled you, perhaps, that a poet of republicanism and revolt
should also be a poet of pessimism; but you would have been ill-advised
to ask the question of Swinburne, for once, when a friend ventured to
criticize his work, he stared for a moment or two of horror, then
uttered a shrill scream, and rushed upstairs to his room, and seized his
manuscript and spent hours tearing it into shreds and throwing it into
the fire--and then spent the rest of the night rewriting it from memory!
Swinburne could not think, he could only feel, and so he was capable of
pouring his poetic frenzy into absolutely contradictory ideas. So we
have these magnificent choruses of “Atalanta,” in which man’s despair at
his own fate is voiced with overwhelming poignancy:
For a day and a night and a morrow,
That his strength might endure for a span
With travail and heavy sorrow,
The holy spirit of man....
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.
But then, if that be true, what is the use of struggling for liberty and
overthrowing tyrants? What indeed is the use of writing beautiful verses
and reading proofs and wrangling with publishers and critics?
Manifestly, no use whatever. Nevertheless, Swinburne would read a news
item about Napoleon the Little, and he would fly into another frenzy,
and write a poem in which he called for the blood of tyrants. He
collected all these into his “Songs before Sunrise,” which constitute
one of the bibles of liberty. When I meet an art-for-art’s-saker, I
never fail to ask him if he has read Swinburne’s “Prelude,” in which
the poet describes his conversion to the cause of human service.
Play then and sing; we too have played,
We likewise, in that subtle shade.
We too have twisted through our hair
Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear,
And heard what mirth the Mænads made.
Such has been the poet’s life; but now he has reformed, and taken up the
duty of passing on the light of the intelligence to his fellows:
A little time that we may fill
Or with such good works or such ill
As loose the bonds or make them strong
Wherein all manhood suffers wrong.
And that leads us by a natural transition to the “Marching Song,” a
battle-cry of the revolution:
Rise, ere the dawn be risen;
Come, and be all souls fed;
From field and street and prison
Come, for the feast is spread;
Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead.
“My other books are books,” Swinburne declared, “but ‘Songs before
Sunrise’ is myself.” His respectable biographer, Edmund Gosse, is both
puzzled and shocked by this, and points out how completely Swinburne’s
hopes of republicanism have failed to be realized in the modern world.
Yes; the poet failed to see that the lords of finance, the fat men of
the bourgeoisie, would subsidize autocracy and subsidize superstition,
as a means of riveting slavery upon the human mind and body for another
century. But let Professor Gosse take care of his health for a few years
more, and he may see that Daylight which was heralded in the “Songs
before Sunrise.”
We have stepped ahead of our story and omitted to mention Swinburne’s
earlier volume of miscellaneous work, “Poems and Ballads,” which was
published shortly after “Atalanta,” and gave the Victorian age the worst
shock of its existence. This was the time of Tennyson at his most
mawkish, the time of “Maud” and “Enoch Arden”; literary England had not
seen anything really indecent since Byron’s “Don Juan,” nearly half a
century ago. But here came this young aristocrat--the son of an
admiral, and therefore beyond prosecution for anything that he might
do--throwing out upon the world an inspired glorification of sexual and
alcoholic riot.
Swinburne was, of course, just as sincere in his praise of Venus and the
vine as he was in his praise of liberty; more sincere, in fact, because
he practiced what he preached in the former case, but he omitted to go
off and die in the cause of liberty as Byron had done. Some of his
licentious poetry is perfect from the technical point of view; but, on
the other hand, “Poems and Ballads” contains the worst combination of
words ever put into a poem: “the lilies and languors of virtue and the
roses and raptures of vice.” It is pleasant to be able to record that
Swinburne had the wit to ridicule his own habit of silly alliteration;
see the parody called “Nephelidia”: “From the depth of the dreamy
decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,” and
so on.
In “Thus Spake Zarathustra” there is a doctrine of freedom, which is
summed up: I ask you, not free _from_ what, but free _to_ what? And that
is what I should like to point out to young poets who uncritically
accept Swinburne as a god. It is possible to be entirely free to do what
you please, and yet not please to do many silly and destructive things.
Young poets are free to write as eloquent verses as they know how; and
they may put into those verses a celebration of all things beautiful and
just and noble in the world. On the other hand, they may put in a
celebration of debauchery; and they may try it out for themselves, and
fall slaves to alcohol and drugs, and end in the mad-house or a
suicide’s or drunkard’s grave--like Baudelaire and Verlaine and Musset
and Poe and Dowson, and that brilliant, unhappy genius whose story we
have next to read.