It is no more than fair to confess at the outset that my knowledge of
Swinburne's work until recently was of the scantiest. The patent faults
of his style were of a kind to warn me away, and it might be equally
true that I was not sufficiently open to his peculiar excellences.
Gladly, therefore, I accepted the occasion offered by the new edition of
his Collected Poems[5] to enlarge my acquaintance with one of the
much-bruited names of the age. Nor did it seem right to trust to a hasty
impression. The six volumes of his poems, together with the plays and
critical essays, have lain on my table for several months, the
companions of many a long day of leisure and the relish thrown in
between other readings of pleasure and necessity. Yet even now I must
admit something alien to me in the man and his work; I am not sure that
I always distinguish between what is spoken with the lips only and what
springs from the poet's heart. Possibly the lack of biographical
information is the partial cause of this uncertainty, for by a curious
anomaly Swinburne, one of the most egotistical writers of the century,
has shown a fine reticence in keeping the details of his life from the
public. He was, we know, born in London, in 1837, of an ancient and
noble family, his father, as befitted one whose son was to sing of the
sea so lustily, being an admiral in the navy. His early years were
passed either at his grandfather's estate in Northumbria or at the home
of his parents in the Isle of Wight. From Eton he went, after an
interval of two years, to Balliol College, Oxford, leaving in 1860
without a degree. The story runs that he knew more Greek than his
examiners, but failed to show a proper knowledge of Scripture. If the
tale is true, he made up well in after years for the deficiency, for few
of our poets have been more steeped in the language of the Bible. In
London he came under the influence of many of the currents moving below
the surface; the spell of that master of souls, Rossetti, touched him,
and the dominance of the ardent Mazzini. Since 1879 he has lived at "The
Pines," on the edge of Wimbledon Common, with Mr. Watts-Dunton, in what
appears to be an ideal atmosphere of sympathetic friendship. Mr.
Douglas's recent indiscretion on _Theodore Watts-Dunton_ tells nothing
of the life in this scholarly retreat, but it does contain many
photogravures of the works of art, the handicraft of Rossetti largely,
which adorn the dwelling with beautiful memories.
Such is the meagre outline of Swinburne's life, nor do the few other
events recorded or the authentic anecdotes help us much to a more
intimate knowledge of the man. Yet he has the ambiguous gift of
awakening curiosity. Probably the first question most people ask on
laying down his _Poems and Ballads_ (that _peche de jeunesse_, as he
afterwards called it) is to know how much of the book is "true." Mr.
Swinburne has expressed a becoming contempt for "the scornful or
mournful censors who insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or
sensation attempted or achieved in it as either confessions of positive
fact or excursions of absolute fancy." One does not like to be classed
among the _scornful or mournful_, and yet I should feel much easier in
my appreciation of the _Poems and Ballads_ if I knew how far they were
based on the actual experience of the author. The reader of Swinburne
feels constantly as if his feet were swept from the earth and he were
carried into a misty mid-region where blind currents of air beat hither
and thither; he longs for some anchor to reality. In the later books
this sensation becomes almost painful, and it is because the earlier
publications, the _Atalanta_ and the first _Poems and Ballads_, contain
more of definable human emotion, whatever their relation to fact may be,
that they are likely to remain the most popular and significant of
Swinburne's works.
The publication of _Atalanta_ at the age of twenty-eight made him
famous, _Poems and Ballads_ the next year made him almost infamous. The
alarm aroused in England by _Dolores_ and _Faustine_ still vibrates in
our ears as we repeat the wonderful rhythms. The impression is deepened
by the remarkable unity of feeling that runs through these voluble
songs--the feeling of infinite satiety. The satiety of the flesh hangs
like a fatal web about the _Laus Veneris_; the satiety of disappointment
clings "with sullen savour of poisonous pain" to _The Triumph of Time_;
satiety speaks in the _Hymn to Proserpine_, with its regret for the
passing of the old heathen gods; it seeks relief in the unnatural
passion of _Anactoria_--
Clothed with deep eyelids under and above--
Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love;
turns to the abominations of cruelty in _Faustine_; sings enchantingly
of rest in _The Garden of Proserpine_--
Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep,
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
Now the acquiescence of weariness may have its inner compensations, even
its sacred joys; but satiety with its torturing impotence and its
hungering for forbidden fruit, is perhaps the most immoral word in the
language; its unashamed display causes a kind of physical revulsion in
any wholesome mind. My own feeling is that Swinburne, when he wrote
these poems, had little knowledge or experience of the world, but, as
sometimes happens with unbalanced natures, had sucked poison from his
classical reading until his brain was in a kind of ferment. While in
this state he fell under the spell of Baudelaire's deliberate perversion
of the passions, with results which threw the innocent Philistines of
England into a fine bewilderment of horror. That the poet's own heart
was sound at core, and that his satiety was of the imagination and not
of the body, would seem evident from the abruptness with which he
passed, under a more wholesome stimulus, to a very different mood.
Unfortunately, his maturer productions are lacking in the quality of
human emotion which, however derived, pulsates in every line of the
_Poems and Ballads_. There is a certain contagion in such a song as
_Dolores_. Taking all things into consideration, and with all one's
repulsion for its substance, that poem is still the most effective of
Swinburne's works, a magnificent lyric of blended emotion and music. It
is a personification of the mood which produced the whole book, a cry
of the tormented heart to our Lady of Satiety. It is filled with regret
for a past of riotous pleasure; it pants with the lust of blood; it is
gorgeous and heavily scented, and the rhythm of it is the swaying of
bodies drunken with voluptuousness:
Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;
Thou art fed with perpetual breath,
And alive after infinite changes,
And fresh from the kisses of death;
Of languors rekindled and rallied,
Of barren delights and unclean,
Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid
And poisonous queen.
Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?
Men touch them, and change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice;
Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,
These crown and caress thee and chain,
O splendid and sterile Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.
No doubt you will find here in germ all that was to mar the poet's later
work. The rhythm lacks resistance; there is no definite vision evoked
out of the rapid flux of images; the thought has no sure control over
the words. Dolores is almost in the same breath the queen of languors
and raptures; she is pallid and rosy, and a hostile criticism might find
in the stanzas a succession of contradictions. Compare the poem with the
few lines in _Jenny_ where Rossetti has expressed the same idea of
man's inveterate lust:
Like a toad within a stone
Seated while Time crumbles on;
Which sits there since the earth was cursed
For Man's transgression at the first--
and the difference is immediately apparent between that concentration of
mind which sums up a thought in a single definite image and the
fluctuating, impalpable vision of a poet carried away by the
intoxication of words. All that is true, and yet, somehow, out of this
poem of _Dolores_ there does arise in the end a very real and memorable
mood--real after the fashion of a mood excited by music rather than by
painting or sculpture.
The _Poems and Ballads_ are splendid but _malsain_; they are impressive
and they have the strength, ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly
or indirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body. The change on passing
to the _Songs Before Sunrise_ (published in 1871) is extraordinary.
During the five years that elapsed between these volumes the two master
passions of Swinburne's life laid hold on him with devastating
effect--the passion of Liberty and the passion of the Sea. Henceforth
the influence of Mazzini and Victor Hugo was to dominate him like an
obsession. Now, heaven forbid that one should say or think anything in
despite of Liberty! The mere name conjures up recollections of glory
and pride, and in it the hopes of the future are involved. And yet the
very magnitude of its content renders it peculiarly liable to misuse. To
this man it means one thing, and to another another, and many might cry
out in the end, as Brutus did over virtue: "Thou art a naked word, and I
followed thee as though thou hadst been a substance!" Certainly nothing
is more dangerous for a poet than to fall into the habit of mouthing
those great words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, and the like,
abstracted of very definite events and very precise imagery. To
Swinburne the sound of liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind of
frothing mania. It is true that one or two of the poems on this theme
are lifted up with a superb and genuine lyric enthusiasm. The _Eve of
Revolution_, for instance, with which the _Songs Before Sunrise_ open,
rings with the stirring noise of trumpets:
I hear the midnight on the mountains cry
With many tongues of thunders, and I hear
Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky
With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer,
And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly,
Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear....
But even here the reverberation of the words begins to conceal their
meaning, and such abstractions as "the roar of the hours" lead into the
worst of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longer hymns to liberty are
nearly unreadable--at least if any one can endure to the end of _A Song
of Italy_, it is not I. And as one goes through these rhapsodies that
came out year after year, one begins to feel that Swinburne's notion of
liberty, when it is not empty of meaning, is something even worse. Too
often it is Kipling's gross idolatry of England uttered in a kind of
hysterical falsetto. It was not pretty at a time of estrangement between
England and France to speak of "French hounds whose necks are aching
Still from the chain they crave"; and one needed not to sympathise with
the Boers in the South African war to feel something like disgust at
Swinburne's abuse:
....... the truth whose witness now draws near
To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam,
Down out of life.
Probably the poet thought he was giving voice to a righteous and
Miltonic indignation. The best criticism of such a sonnet is to turn to
Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints."
I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne's driving up late to a dinner
and entering into a violent altercation with the cabman, to the vast
amusement of the waiting guests within the house. That incorrigible wag
and hanger-on of genius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the party and
acted as chorus to the dialogue outside. "The poet's got the best of
it, as usual," drawls the chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel in
Cockspur Street, and never goes anywhere except in hansoms, which,
whatever the distance, he invariably remunerates with one shilling.
Consequently, when, as to-day, it's a case of two miles beyond the
radius, there's the devil's own row; but in the matter of imprecation
the poet is more than a match for cabby, who, after five minutes of it,
gallops off as though he had been rated by Beelzebub himself." Really,
'tis a bit of gossip which may be taken as a comment on not a few of
Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty.
Not less noble in significance is that other word, the sea, which
Swinburne now uses with endless reiteration. In his reverence for the
weltering ocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom, he does of
course only follow the best traditions of English poetry from _Beowulf_
to _The Seven Seas_ of Kipling, who is again in this his imitator. Nor
is it the world of water alone that dominates his imagination, but with
it the winds and the panorama of the sky ever rolling above. Already in
the _Poems and Ballads_ there is a hint of the sympathy between the poet
and this realm of water and air. One of the finest passages in _The
Triumph of Time_ is that which begins:
I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.
I will go down to her, I and none other,
Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me.
But for the most part the atmosphere of those poems was too sultry for
the salt spray of ocean, and it is only with the _Songs Before Sunrise_,
with the obsession of the idea of liberty, that we are carried to the
wide sea "that makes immortal motion to and fro," and to the "shrill,
fierce climes of inconsolable air." Thenceforth the reader is like some
wave-tossed mariner who should take refuge in the cave of Aeolus; at
least he is forced to admire the genius that presides over the gusty
concourse:
Hic vasto rex Aeolus antro
Luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras
Imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat.
Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis
Circum claustra fremunt.
The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might seem. There is a
picture of Swinburne in the _Recollections_ of the late Henry Treffry
Dunn which almost personifies him as the storm-king:
It had been a very sultry day, and with the advancing twilight,
heavy thunder-clouds were rolling up. The door opened and
Swinburne entered. He appeared in an abstracted state, and for a
few minutes sat silent. Soon, something I had said anent his last
poem set his thoughts loose. Like the storm that had just broken,
so he began in low tones to utter lines of poetry. As the storm
increased, he got more and more excited and carried away by the
impulse of his thoughts, bursting into a torrent of splendid verse
that seemed like some grand air with the distant peals of thunder
as an intermittent accompaniment. And still the storm waxed more
violent, and the vivid flashes of lightning became more frequent.
But Swinburne seemed unconscious of it all, and whilst he paced up
and down the room, pouring out bursts of passionate declamation,
faint electric sparks played round the wavy masses of his
luxuriant hair.... Amidst the rattle of the thunder he still
continued to pour out his thoughts, his voice now sinking low and
sad, now waxing louder as the storm listed.
The scattered poems in his later books that rise above the _Poems and
Ballads_ with a kind of grandiose suggestiveness are for the most part
filled with echoes of wind and water. That haunting picture of crumbling
desolation, _A Forsaken Garden_, lies "at the sea-down's edge between
windward and lee." One of the few poems that seem to contain the cry of
a real experience, _At a Month's End_, combines this aspect of nature
admirably with human emotion:
Silent we went an hour together,
Under grey skies by waters white.
_Our hearts were full of windy weather,
Clouds and blown stars and broken light._
And the sensation left from a reading of _Tristram of Lyonesse_ is of a
vast phantasmagoria, in which the beating of waves and the noise of
winds, the light of dawns breaking on the water, and the floating web of
stars, are jumbled together in splendid but inextricable confusion. So
the coming of love upon Iseult, as she sails over the sea with
Tristram, takes this magnificent comparison:
And as the august great blossom of the dawn
Burst, and the full sun scarce from sea withdrawn
Seemed on the fiery water a flower afloat,
So as a fire the mighty morning smote
Throughout her, and incensed with the influent hour
Her whole soul's one great mystical red flower
Burst....
Further on the long confession of her passion at Tintagel, while
Tristram has gone over-sea to that other Iseult, will be broken by those
thundering couplets:
And swordlike was the sound of the iron wind,
And as a breaking battle was the sea.
But even to allude to all the passages of this kind in the poem--the
swimming of Tristram, his rowing, and the other scenes--would fill an
essay. In the end it must be confessed that this monotony of tone grows
fatiguing. The rhythmic grace of the metre is like a bubble blown into
the air, floating before our eyes with gorgeous iridescence--but when it
touches earth, it bursts. There lies the fatal weakness of all this
frenzy over liberty and this hymeneal chanting of sky and ocean; it has
no basis in the homely facts of the heart. Read the account of Tristram
and Iseult in the wilderness bower; it is all very beautiful, but you
wonder why it leaves you so cold. There is not a single detail to fix an
image of the place in the mind, not a word to denote that we are
dealing with the passion of individual human beings. Then turn to the
same episode in the old poem of Gottfried von Strassburg; read the scene
where the forsaken King Mark, through a window of their forest grotto,
beholds the lovers lying asleep with the sword of Tristram stretched
between them:
He gazed on his heart's delight, Iseult, and deemed that never
before had he seen her so fair. She lay sleeping, with a flush as
of mingled roses on her cheek, and her red and glowing lips apart;
a little heated by her morning wandering in the dewy meadow and by
the spring. On her head was a chaplet woven of clover. A ray of
sunlight from the little window fell upon her face, and as Mark
looked upon her he longed to kiss her, for never had she seemed so
fair and so lovable as now. And when he saw how the sunlight fell
upon her he feared lest it harm her, or awaken her, so he took
grass and leaves and flowers, and covered the window therewith,
and spake a blessing on his love and commended her to God, and
went his way, weeping.
It is good to walk with head lifted to the stars, but it is good also to
have the feet well planted on earth. If another example of Swinburne's
abstraction from human interest were desired, one might take that
rhapsody of the wind-beaten waters and "land that is lonelier than
ruin," called _By the North Sea_. The picture of desolate and barren
waste is one of the most powerful creations in his later works (it was
published in 1880), yet there is still something wanting to stamp the
impression into the mind. You turn from it, perhaps, to Browning's
similar description in _Childe Roland_ and the reason is at once clear.
You come upon the line: "One stiff, blind horse, his every bone
a-stare," and pause. There is in Swinburne's poem no single touch which
arrests the attention in this way, concentrating the effect, as it were,
to a burning point, and bringing out the symbolic relation to human
life. Yet I cannot pass from this subject without noticing what may
appear a paradoxical phase of Swinburne's character. Only when he lowers
his gaze from the furies and ecstasies of man's ambition to the
instinctive ways of little children does his art become purely human. It
would be easy to select a full dozen of the poems dealing with
child-life and the tender love inspired by a child that touch the heart
with their pure and chastened beauty. I should feel that an essential
element of his art were left unremarked if I failed to quote some such
examples as these two roundels on _First Footsteps_ and a _A Baby's
Death_:
A little way, more soft and sweet
Than fields aflower with May,
A babe's feet, venturing, scarce complete
A little way.
Eyes full of dawning day
Look up for mother's eyes to meet,
Too blithe for song to say.
Glad as the golden spring to greet
Its first live leaflet's play,
Love, laughing, leads the little feet
A little way.
* * * * *
The little feet that never trod
Earth, never strayed in field or street,
What hand leads upward back to God
The little feet?
A rose in June's most honied heat,
When life makes keen the kindling sod,
Was not more soft and warm and sweet.
Their pilgrimage's period
A few swift moons have seen complete
Since mother's hands first clasped and shod
The little feet.
Despite the artificiality of the French form and a kind of revolving
dizziness of movement, one catches in these child-lyrics a simplicity of
feeling not unlike Longfellow's cry, "O little feet! that such long
years." Swinburne himself might not relish the comparison, which is none
the less just.
It is not often safe to attempt to sum up a large body of work in a
phrase, yet with Swinburne we shall scarcely go astray if we seek such a
characterisation in the one word _motion_. Both the beauty and the fault
of his extraordinary rhythms are exposed in that term, and certainly his
first claim to originality lies in his rhythmical innovations. There had
been nothing in English comparable to the steady swell, like the waves
of a subsiding sea, in the lines of _Atalanta_ and the _Poems and
Ballads_. They brought a new sensuous pleasure into our poetry. But with
time this cadenced movement developed into a kind of giddy race which
too often left the reader belated and breathless. Little tricks of
composition, such as a repeated caesura after the seventh syllable of the
pentameter, were employed to heighten the speed. Moreover, the longer
lines in many of the poems are not organic, but consist of two or more
short lines huddled together, the effect being to eliminate the natural
resting-places afforded by the sense. And occasionally his metre is
merely wanton. He uses one verse, for example, which with its
combination of gliding motion and internal jingles is uncommonly
irritating:
Hills and _valleys_ where April _rallies_ his radiant squadron of
flowers and _birds_,
Steep strange _beaches_ and lustrous _reaches_ of fluctuant sea that
the land _engirds_,
Fields and _downs_ that the sunrise _crowns_ with life diviner than
lives in _words_,--
a page of this sets the nerves all a-jangle.
And if Swinburne is one of the obscurest of English poets, it is due in
large part to this same element of motion. A poem may move swiftly and
still be perfectly easy to follow, so long as the thought is simple and
concrete; witness the works of Longfellow. Or, on the other hand, the
thought may be tortuous and still invite reflection, so long as the
metre forces a continual pause in the reading; witness Browning. Now, no
one will accuse Swinburne of overloading his pages with thought; it is
not there the obscurity lies. The difficulty is with the number and the
peculiarly vague quality of his metaphors. Let me illustrate what I mean
by this vagueness. I open one of the volumes at random and my eye rests
on this line in _A Channel Passage_:
As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life
or of sleep.
If one were reading the poem and tried to evoke this image before his
mind, he would certainly need to pause for a moment. Or I open to
_Walter Savage Landor_ and find this passage marked:
High from his throne in heaven Simonides,
Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tears
That the everlasting sun of all time sees
All golden, molten from the forge of years.
The sentiment is simple enough, and it might be sufficient to feel the
force of this in a general way, were it not that the metaphorical
expression almost compels one to pause and form an image of the whole
before proceeding. Such an image is, no doubt, possible; but the
mingling of abstract and concrete terms makes the act of visualisation
slow and painful. At the same time the rhythm is swift and continuous,
so that any pause in the reading demands a deliberate effort of the
will. The result is a form of obscurity which in many of the poems is
almost prohibitive for an indolent man--and are not the best readers
always a little indolent? And there is another habit--trick, one might
say--which increases this vagueness of metaphor in a curious manner.
Constantly he uses a word in its ordinary, direct sense and then repeats
it as an abstract personification. I find an example to hand in the
stanzas written _At a Dog's Grave_:
The shadow shed round those we love shines bright
As _love's_ own face.
It is only a mannerism such as another, but it recurs with sufficient
frequency to have an appreciable effect on the mind.
Indeed, if this vagueness of imagery were only an occasional appearance,
the difficulty would be slight. As a matter of fact, no inconsiderable
portion of Swinburne's work is made up of a stream of half-visualised
abstractions that crowd upon one another with the motion of clouds
driven below the moon. He is more like Walt Whitman in this respect than
any other poet in the language. Whitman is concrete and human and very
earthly, but, with this difference, there is in both writers the same
thronging procession of images which flit by without allowing the reader
to concentrate his attention upon a single impression; they are both
poets of vast and confused motion. Swinburne is notable for his want of
humour, yet he is keen enough to see how close this flux of
high-sounding words lies to the absurd. In the present collected edition
of his poems he has included _The Heptalogia, or Seven against Sense_, a
series of parodies which does not spare his own mannerisms. Some
scandalised Philistines, I doubt, might even need to be told that
_Nephelidia_ was a parody:
Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch
on the temples of terror,
Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead
who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death:
Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional
exquisite error,
Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by
beatitude's breath.
Pretty much all the traits of Swinburne's style are there--the long
breathless lines with their flowing dactyls or anapaests, the unabashed
alliteration, the stream of half-visualised images, the trick of
following an epithet with its own abstract substantive, the sense of
motion, and above all the accumulation of words. Of this last trait of
verbosity I have said nothing, for the reason that it is too notorious
to need mentioning. It may not, however, be superfluous to point out a
little more precisely the special form his tautology assumes. He is
never more graphic and nearer to nature than when he describes the
ecstasy of swimming at sea. He is himself passionately fond of the
exercise, and once at least was almost drowned in the Channel. Let us
take, then, a stanza from _A Swimmer's Dream_:
All the strength of the waves that perish
Swells beneath me and laughs and sighs,
Sighs for love of the life they cherish,
Laughs to know that it lives and dies,
Dies for joy of its life, and lives
Thrilled with joy that its brief death gives--
Death whose laugh or whose breath forgives
Change that bids it subside and rise.
Pass the fault of beginning with the abstraction "strength"--the first
two lines are graphic and reproduce a real sensation; the second two
lines are an explanatory repetition; the last four dissolve both image
and emotion into a flood of words. It is the common procedure in the
later poems; it renders the regular dramas (with the exception of the
earlier _Chastelard_) almost intolerably tedious.
And what is the impression of the man himself that remains after living
with his works for several months? The frankness with which he parodies
his own eccentricities might seem to indicate a becoming modesty, and
yet that is scarcely the word that rises first to the lips. Indeed, when
I read in the very opening of the Dedicatory Epistle that precedes the
present edition of his poems such a statement as that "he finds nothing
that he could wish to cancel, to alter, or to unsay, in any page he has
ever laid before his reader," I was prepared for a character quite the
contrary of modest, and as I turned page after page, there became fixed
in my mind a feeling that I should hesitate to call personal
repulsion--a feeling of annoyance at least, for which no explanation was
present. Only when I reached _Atalanta in Calydon_, in the fourth
volume, did the reason of this become evident. That poem, exquisite in
many ways, is filled with talk of time and gods, of love and hate, of
life and death, of all high-sounding words that lend gravity to poetry,
and yet in the end it is itself light and not grave. The very needless
reiteration of these words, their bandying from verse to verse, deprives
them of impressiveness. No, a true poet who respects the sacredness of
noble ideas, who cherishes some awe for the mysteries, does not buffet
them about as a shuttlecock; he uses them sparingly and only when the
thought rises of necessity to those heights. There is a lack of
emotional breeding, almost an indecency, in Swinburne's easy familiarity
with these great things of the spirit.
And this judgment is confirmed by turning to his prose. I trust it is
not prejudice, but after a while the vociferous and endless praise of
Victor Hugo in his essays had a curious effect upon me. I began to ask:
Is the critic really thinking of Hugo alone, or is half of this frenzied
adulation meant for his own artistic methods? "Malignity and meanness,
platitude and perversity, decrepitude of cankered intelligence and
desperation of universal rancor," he exclaims against Sainte-Beuve; and
over the other critics of his idol he cries out, "The lazy malignity of
envious dullness is as false and fatuous as it is common and easy." Can
one avoid the surmise that he has more than Hugo to avenge in such
tirades? It is the same with every one who is opposed to his own notions
of art. Of Walt Whitman it is: "The dirty, clumsy paws of a harper whose
plectrum is a muckrake." Of a French classicist: "It is the business of
a Nisard to pass judgment and to bray." And of those who intimate (he is
ostensibly defending Rossetti) that beauty and power of expression can
accord with emptiness or sterility of matter: "This flattering unction
the very foolishest of malignants will hardly in this case be able to
lay upon the corrosive sore which he calls his soul." Sometimes, I
admit, this manner of invective rises to a sublimity of fury that sounds
like nothing so much as a combination of Carlyle and Shelley. For
example: "The affection was never so serious as to make it possible for
the most malignant imbecile to compare or to confound him [Jowett] with
such morally and spiritually typical and unmistakable apes of the Dead
Sea as Mark Pattison, or such renascent blossoms of the Italian
renascence as the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers who is
now in Aretino's bosom." It's not criticism; it's not fair to Mark
Pattison or to John Addington Symonds, but it is sublime. It is a storm
of wind only, but it leaves a devastated track.
Enough has been said to indicate the trait of character that prevails
through these pages of eulogy and vituperation. It is not nice to apply
so crass a word as _conceit_ to one who undoubtedly belongs to the
immortals of our pantheon, yet the expression forces itself upon me.
Listen to another of his outbursts, this time against Matthew Arnold:
"His inveterate and invincible Philistinism, his full community of
spirit and faith, in certain things of import, with the vulgarest
English mind!" Does not the quality begin to define itself more exactly?
There is a phrase they use in France, _epater le bourgeois_, of those
artistic souls who contrast themselves by a kind of ineffable contempt
with commonplace humanity, and who take pleasure in tweaking the nose,
so to speak, of the amiable plebeian. Have a care, gentlemen! The
Philistine has a curious trick of revenging himself in the long run. For
my own part, when it comes to a breach between the poetical and the
prosaic, I take my place submissively with the latter. There is at least
a humble safety in retaining one's pleasure in certain things of import
with the vulgarest English mind, and if it were obligatory to choose
between them (as, happily, it is not) I would surrender the wind-swept
rhapsodies of Swinburne for the homely conversation of Whittier.