"Change darkens and lightens around her, alternate
in hope and in fear to be:
Hope knows not if fear speak truth, nor fear whether
hope be not blind as she:
But the sun is in heaven that beholds her immortal,
and girdled with life by the sea."
I suspect, then, that a hundred years hence, when criticism speaks
calm judgment upon all Mr. Swinburne's writings, she will find that
his earlier and more definite poems are the edge of his blade, and
such volumes as "Astrophel" the heavy metal behind it. The former
penetrated the affections of his countrymen with ease: the latter
followed more difficultly through the outer tissues of a people
notoriously pachydermatous to abstract speech. And criticism will then
know if Mr. Swinburne brought sufficient impact to drive the whole
mass of metal deep.
A Voice chanting in the Void.
At present in these later volumes his must seem to us a godlike voice
chanting in the void. For, fit or unfit as we may be to grasp the
elusive substance of his strains, all must confess the voice of the
singer to be divine. At once in the range and suppleness of his music
he is not merely the first of our living poets, but incomparable. In
learning he has Robert Bridges for a rival, and no other. But no
amount of learning could give us 228 pages of music that from first to
last has not a flaw. Rather, his marvellous ear has taken him safely
through metres set by his learning as so many traps. There is one
metre, for instance, that recurs again and again in this volume. Here
is a specimen of it:--
"Music bright as the soul of light, for wings an eagle,
for notes a dove,
Leaps and shines from the lustrous lines wherethrough
thy soul from afar above
Shone and sang till the darkness rang with light whose
fire is the fount of love."
These lines are written of Sir Philip Sidney. Could another man have
written them they had stood even better for Mr. Swinburne. But we are
considering the metre, not the meaning. Now the metre may have great
merits. I am disposed to say that, having fascinated Mr. Swinburne, it
must have great merits. That I dislike it is, no doubt, my fault, or
rather my misfortune. But undoubtedly it is a metre that no man but
Mr. Swinburne could handle without producing a monotony varied only by
discords.