May 5, 1894. Aloofness of Mr. Swinburne's Muse.
There was a time--let us say, in the early seventies--when many young
men tried to write like Mr. Swinburne. Remarkably small success waited
on their efforts. Still their numbers and their youth and (for a while
also) their persistency seemed to promise a new school of poesy, with
Mr. Swinburne for its head and great exemplar: exemplar rather than
head, for Mr. Swinburne's attitude amid all this devotion was rather
that of the god than of the priest. He sang, and left the worshippers
to work up their own enthusiasm. And to this attitude he has been
constant. Unstinting, and occasionally unmeasured, in praise and
dispraise of other men, he has allowed his own reputation the noble
liberty to look after itself. Nothing, for instance, could have been
finer than the careless, almost disdainful, dignity of his bearing in
the months that followed Tennyson's death. The cats were out upon the
tiles, then, and his was the luminous, expressive silence of a sphere.
One felt, "whether he received it or no, here is the man who can wear
the crown."
And Her Tendency towards Abstractions.
It was not, however, the aloofness of Mr. Swinburne's bearing that
checked the formation of a Swinburnian school of poetry. The cause lay
deeper, and has come more and more into the light in the course of Mr.
Swinburne's poetic development--let me say, his thoroughly normal
development. We can see now that from the first such a school, such a
successful following, was an impossibility. The fact is that Mr.
Swinburne has not only genius, but an extremely rare and individual
genius. The germ of this individuality may be found, easily enough, in
"Atalanta" and the Ballads; but it luxuriates in his later poems and
throughout them--flower and leaf and stem. It was hardly more natural
in 1870 to confess the magic of the great chorus, "Before the
beginning of years," or of "Dolores," than to embark upon the vain
adventure of imitating them. I cannot imagine a youth in all Great
Britain so green or unknowing as to attempt an imitation of "A
Nympholept," perhaps the finest poem in the volume before me.
I say "in Great Britain;" because peculiar as Mr. Swinburne's genius
would be in any country, it is doubly peculiar as the endowment of an
English poet. If there be one quality beloved above others by the
inhabitants of this island, it is concreteness; and I suppose there
never was a poet in the world who used less concreteness of speech
than Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Palgrave once noted that the landscape of
Keats falls short of the landscape of Shelley in its comparative lack
of the larger features of sky and earth; Keats's was "foreground work"
for the most part. But what shall be said of Shelley's universe after
the immense vague regions inhabited by Mr. Swinburne's muse? She sings
of the sea; but we never behold a sail, never a harbor: she sings of
passion--among the stars. We seem never to touch earth; page after
page is full of thought--for, vast as the strain may be, it is never
empty--but we cannot apply it. And all this is extremely distressing
to the Briton, who loves practice as his birthright. He comes on a
Jacobite song. "Now, at any rate," he tells himself, "we arrive at
something definite: some allusion, however small, to Bonny Prince
Charlie." He reads--
"Faith speaks when hope dissembles;
Faith lives when hope lies dead:
If death as life dissembles,
And all that night assembles
Of stars at dawn lie dead,
Faint hope that smiles and trembles
May tell not well for dread:
But faith has heard it said."
"Very beautiful," says the Briton; "but why call this a 'Jacobite
Song'?" Some thorough-going admirer of Mr. Swinburne will ask, no
doubt, if I prefer gush about Bonny Prince Charlie. Most decidedly I
do not. I am merely pointing out that the poet cares so little for the
common human prejudice in favor of concreteness of speech as to give
us a Jacobite song which, for all its indebtedness to the historical
facts of the Jacobite Risings, might just as well have been put in the
mouth of Judas Maccabæus.
Somebody--I forget for the moment who it was--compared Poetry with
Antæus, who was strong when his feet touched Earth, his mother;
weaker when held aloft in air. The justice of this criticism I have
no space here to discuss; but the difference is patent enough between
poetry such as this of Herrick--
"When as in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes."