the wonderful volume now reprinted, the first series of _Poems and
Ballads_, Swinburne has said with tact, precision, and finality all that
need ever be said on the subject. He records, with a touch of not
unkindly humour, his own 'deep diversion of collating and comparing the
variously inaccurate verdicts of 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.' And, admitting that there was work in it of both
kinds, he claims, with perfect justice, that 'if the two kinds cannot be
distinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to an
artist whose medium or material has more in common with a musician's
than with a sculptor's.' Rarely has the prying ignorance of ordinary
criticism been more absurdly evident than in the criticisms on _Poems
and Ballads_, in which the question as to whether these poems were or
were not the record of personal experience was debated with as much
solemn fury as if it really mattered in the very least. When a poem has
once been written, of what consequence is it to anybody whether it was
inspired by a line of Sappho or by a lady living round the corner? There
may be theoretical preferences, and these may be rationally enough
argued, as to whether one should work from life or from memory or from
imagination. But, the poem once written, only one question remains: is
it a good or a bad poem? A poem of Coleridge or of Wordsworth is neither
better nor worse because it came to the one in a dream and to the other
in 'a storm, worse if possible, in which the pony could (or would) only
make his way slantwise.' The knowledge of the circumstances or the
antecedents of composition is, no doubt, as gratifying to human
curiosity as the personal paragraphs in the newspapers; it can hardly
be of much greater importance.
A passage in Swinburne's dedicatory epistle which was well worth saying,
a passage which comes with doubled force from a poet who is also a
scholar, is that on books which are living things: 'Marlowe and
Shakespeare, Æschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty
shelves of libraries.' To Swinburne, as he says, the distinction between
books and life is but a 'dullard's distinction,' and it may justly be
said of him that it is with an equal instinct and an equal enthusiasm
that he is drawn to whatever in nature, in men, in books, or in ideas is
great, noble, and heroic. The old name of _Laudi_, which has lately been
revived by d'Annunzio, might be given to the larger part of Swinburne's
lyric verse: it is filled by a great praising of the universe. To the
prose-minded reader who reads verse in the intervals of newspaper and
business there must be an actual fatigue in merely listening to so
unintermittent a hymn of thanksgiving. Here is a poet, he must say, who
is without any moderation at all; birds at dawn, praising light, are not
more troublesome to a sleeper.
Reading the earlier and the later Swinburne on a high rock around which
the sea is washing, one is struck by the way in which these cadences, in
their unending, ever-varying flow, seem to harmonise with the rhythm of
the sea. Here one finds, at least, and it is a great thing to find, a
rhythm inherent in nature. A mean, or merely bookish, rhythm is rebuked
by the sea, as a trivial or insincere thought is rebuked by the stars.
'We are what suns and winds and waters make us,' as Landor knew: the
whole essence of Swinburne seems to be made by the rush and soft flowing
impetus of the sea. The sea has passed into his blood like a passion and
into his verse like a transfiguring element. It is actually the last
word of many of his poems, and it is the first and last word of his
poetry.
He does not make pictures, for he does not see the visible world without
an emotion which troubles his sight. He sees as through a cloud of
rapture. Sight is to him a transfiguring thrill, and his record of
things seen is clouded over with shining words and broken into little
separate shafts and splinters of light. He has still, undimmed, the
child's awakenings to wonder, love, reverence, the sense of beauty in
every sensation. He has the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost
unparalleled abundance. There is for him no tedium in things, because,
to his sense, books catch up and continue the delights of nature, and
with books and nature he has all that he needs for a continual inner
communing.
In this new book there are poems of nature, poems of the sea, the lake,
the high oaks, the hawthorn, a rosary, Northumberland; and there are
poems of books, poems about Burns, Christina Rossetti, Rabelais, Dumas,
and about Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books in
this volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism,
and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greater
Burns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist,
the poet of strenuous laughter.
But love and wine were moon and sun
For many a fame long since undone,
And sorrow and joy have lost and won
By stormy turns
As many a singer's soul, if none
More bright than Burns.
And sweeter far in grief and mirth
Have songs as glad and sad of birth
Found voice to speak of wealth or dearth
In joy of life:
But never song took fire from earth
More strong for strife.
* * * * *
Above the storms of praise and blame
That blur with mist his lustrous name,
His thunderous laughter went and came,
And lives and flies;
The war that follows on the flame
When lightning dies.
Here the homage is given with splendid energy, but with fine justice.
There are other poems of homage in this book, along with denunciations,
as there are on so many pages of the _Songs before Sunrise_ and the
_Songs of Two Nations_, in which the effect is far less convincing, as
it is far less clear. Whether Mazzini or Nelson be praised, Napoleon
III. or Gladstone be buffeted, little distinction, save of degree, can
be discerned between the one and the other. The hate poems, it must be
admitted, are more interesting, partly because they are more
distinguishable, than the poems of adoration; for hate seizes upon the
lineaments which love glorifies willingly out of recognition. There was
a finely ferocious energy in the _Dirae_ ending with _The Descent into
Hell_ of 9th January 1873, and there is a good swinging and slashing
vigour in _The Commonweal_ of 1886. Why is it that this deeply felt
political verse, like so much of the political verse of the _Songs
before Sunrise_, does not satisfy the ear or the mind like the early
love poetry or the later nature poetry? Is it not that one distinguishes
only a voice, not a personality behind the voice? Speech needs weight,
though song only needs wings.
I set the trumpet to my lips and blow,
said Swinburne in the _Songs before Sunrise,_ when he was the trumpeter
of Mazzini.
And yet, it must be remembered, Swinburne has always meant exactly what
he has said, and this fact points an amusing contrast between the
attitude of the critics thirty years ago towards work which was then new
and their attitude now towards the same work when it is thirty years
old. There is, in the _Songs before Sunrise_, an arraignment of
Christianity as deliberate as Leconte de Lisle's, as wholesale as
Nietzsche's; in the _Poems and Ballads_, a learned sensuality without
parallel in English poetry; and the critics, or the descendants of the
critics, who, when these poems first appeared, could see nothing but
these accidental qualities of substance, are now, thanks merely to the
triumph of time, to the ease with which time forgets and forgives, able
to take all such things for granted, and to acknowledge the genuine and
essential qualities of lyric exaltation and generous love of liberty by
which the poems exist, and have a right to exist, as poems. But when we
are told that _Before a Crucifix_ is a poem fundamentally reverent
towards Christianity, and that _Anactoria_ is an ascetic experiment in
scholarship, a learned attempt at the reconstruction of the order of
Sappho, it is difficult not to wonder with what kind of smile the writer
of these poems reflects anew over the curiosities of criticism. I have
taken the new book and the old book together, because there is
surprisingly little difference between the form and manner of the old
poems and the new. The contents of _A Channel Passage_ are unusually
varied in subject, and the longest poem, _The Altar of Righteousness_, a
marvellous piece of rhythmical architecture, is unusually varied in
form. Technically the whole book shows Swinburne at his best; if,
indeed, he may ever be said not to be at his best, technically. Is there
any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so
unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often
foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is
apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to
me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the
imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us
and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of a wave. Most poets
present us with their best effects deliberately, giving them as weighty
an accent as they can; Swinburne scatters them by the way. Take, for
instance, the line:
The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness
fell.
The line comes rearing like a wave, and has fallen and raced past us
before we have properly grasped what is imaginatively fine in the
latter clause. Presented to us in the manner of slower poets, thus:
The tyranny
Kindled in darkness fell,
how much more easily do we realise the quality of the speech which goes
to make this song.
And yet there is no doubt that Swinburne has made his own moulds of
language, as he has made his own moulds of rhythm, and that he is apt,
when a thought or a sensation which he has already expressed recurs to
him, to use the mould which stands ready made in his memory, instead of
creating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference in
the form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, in
translating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated,
he misses the naïve quality of the French which Rossetti, in a version
not in all points so faithful as this, had been able, in some subtle
way, to retain. His own moulds of language recur to him, and he will not
stop to think that 'wife,' though a good word for his rhyme scheme, is
not a word that Villon could have used, and that
Deux estions et n'avions qu'ung cueur,
though it is perfectly rendered by Rossetti in
Two we were and the heart was one,
is turned into a wholly different, a Swinburnian thing, by
Twain we were, and our hearts one song,
One heart.
Nor is 'Dead as the carver's figured throng' (for 'Comme les images, par
cueur') either clear in meaning, or characteristic of Villon in form. Is
it not one of the penalties of extreme technical ability that the hand
at times works, as it were, blindly, without the delicate vigilance or
direction of the brain?
Of the poems contained in this new volume, the title-poem, _A Channel
Passage_, is perhaps the finest. It is the record of a memory, fifty
years old, and it is filled with a passionate ecstasy in the
recollection of
Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal
joy,
Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's
heart in a boy.
It may be that Swinburne has praised the sea more eloquently, or sung
of it more melodiously, but not in the whole of his works is there a
poem fuller of personal rapture in the communion of body and soul with
the very soul of the sea in storm. _The Lake of Gaube_ is remarkable for
an exultant and very definite and direct rendering of the sensation of a
dive through deep water. There are other sea-poems in the two brief and
concentrated poems in honour of Nelson; the most delicate of the poems
of flowers in _A Rosary_; the most passionate and memorable of the
political poems in _Russia: an Ode_; the Elizabethan prologues. These
poems, so varied in subject and manner, are the work of many years; to
those who love Swinburne most as a lyric poet they will come with
special delight, for they represent, in almost absolute equality, almost
every side of his dazzling and unique lyric genius.
The final volume of the greatest lyrical poet since Shelley contains
three books, each published at an interval of ten years: the _Midsummer
Holiday_ of 1884, the _Astrophel_ of 1894, and the _Channel Passage_ of
1904. Choice among them is as difficult as it is unnecessary. They are
alike in their ecstatic singing of the sea, of great poets and great
men, of England and liberty, and of children. One contains the finest
poems about the sea from on shore, another the finest poem about the sea
from at sea, and the other the finest poem about the earth from the
heart of the woods. Even in Swinburne's work the series of nine ballades
in long lines which bears the name of _A Midsummer Holiday_ stands out
as a masterpiece of its kind, and of a unique kind. A form of French
verse, which up to then had been used, since the time when Villon used
it as no man has used it before or since, and almost exclusively in
iambic measures, is suddenly transported from the hothouse into the open
air, is stretched and moulded beyond all known limits, and becomes, it
may almost be said, a new lyric form. After _A Midsummer Holiday_ no one
can contend any longer that the ballade is a structure necessarily any
more artificial than the sonnet. But then in the hands of Swinburne an
acrostic would cease to be artificial.
In this last volume the technique which is seen apparently perfected in
the _Poems and Ballads_ of 1866 has reached a point from which that
relative perfection looks easy and almost accidental. Something is lost,
no doubt, and much has changed. But to compare the metrical qualities of
_Dolores_ or even of _The Triumph of Time_ with the metrical qualities
of _On the Verge_ is almost like comparing the art of Thomas Moore with
the art of Coleridge. In Swinburne's development as a poet the metrical
development is significant of every change through which the poet has
passed. Subtlety and nobility, the appeal of ever homelier and loftier
things, are seen more and more clearly in his work, as the metrical
qualities of it become purified and intensified, with always more of
subtlety and distinction, an energy at last tamed to the needs and paces
of every kind of beauty.
II
'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you,' says Swinburne in his
dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote for
antiquity: nor need you be assured that when I write plays it is with a
view to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black
Friars.' In another part of the same epistle, he says: 'My first if not
my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly
unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the
pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had
left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my
first book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, bore
evidence of that ambition in every line.' And indeed we need not turn
four pages to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so close
as this:
We are so more than poor,
The dear'st of all our spoil would profit you
Less than mere losing; so most more than weak
It were but shame for one to smite us, who
Could but weep louder.
A Shakespearean trick is copied in such lines as:
All other women's praise
Makes part of my blame, and things of least account
In them are all my praises.
And there is a jester who talks in a metre that might have come
straight out of Beaumont and Fletcher, as here:
I am considering of that apple still;
It hangs in the mouth yet sorely; I would fain know too
Why nettles are not good to eat raw. Come, children,
Come, my sweet scraps; come, painted pieces; come.
Touches of the early Browning come into this Elizabethan work, come and
go there, as in these lines:
What are you made God's friend for but to have
His hand over your head to keep it well
And warm the rainy weather through, when snow
Spoils half the world's work?
And does one not hear Beddoes in the grim line, spoken of the earth:
Naked as brown feet of unburied men?
An influence still more closely contemporary seems to be felt in _Fair
Rosamond_, the influence of that extraordinarily individual blank verse
which William Morris had made his first and last experiment in, two
years earlier, in _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_.
So many influences, then, are seen at work on the form at least of these
two plays, published at the age of twenty-three. _Fair Rosamond_,
though it has beautiful lines here and there, and shows some
anticipation of that luxurious heat and subtle rendering of physical
sensation which was to be so evident in the _Poems and Ballads_, is
altogether a less mature piece of work, less satisfactory in every way,
than the longer and more regular drama of _The Queen-Mother_. Swinburne
speaks of the two pieces without distinction, and finds all that there
is in them of promise or of merit 'in the language and the style of such
better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches
of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches
is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations
and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best
speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour of
language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'power
to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive'
which Swinburne finds largely lacking in them. A newspaper critic,
reviewing the book in 1861, said: 'We should have conceived it hardly
possible to make the crimes of Catherine de' Medici dull, however they
were presented. Swinburne, however, has done so.' It seems to me, on the
contrary, that the whole action, undramatic as it is in the strict sense
of the theatre, is breathlessly interesting. The two great speeches of
the play, the one beginning 'That God that made high things,' and the
one beginning 'I would fain see rain,' are indeed more splendid in
execution than significant as drama, but they have their dramatic
significance, none the less. There is a Shakespearean echo, but is there
not also a preparation of the finest Swinburnian harmonies, in such
lines as these?
I should be mad,
I talk as one filled through with wine; thou God,
Whose thunder is confusion of the hills,
And with wrath sown abolishes the fields,
I pray thee if thy hand would ruin us,
Make witness of it even this night that is
The last for many cradles, and the grave
Of many reverend seats; even at this turn,
This edge of season, this keen joint of time,
Finish and spare not.
The verse is harder, tighter, more closely packed with figurative
meaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less fluid,
less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own in
reference to the verse of _Atalanta in Calydon_). He is ready to be
harsh when harshness is required, abrupt for some sharp effect; he holds
out against the enervating allurements of alliteration; he can stop when
he has said the essential thing.
In the first book of most poets there is something which will be found
in no other book; some virginity of youth, lost with the first
intercourse with print. In _The Queen-Mother_ and _Rosamond_ Swinburne
is certainly not yet himself, he has not yet settled down within his own
limits. But what happy strayings beyond those limits! What foreign
fruits and flowers, brought back from far countries! In these two plays
there is no evidence, certainly, of a playwright; but there is no
evidence that their writer could never become one. And there is evidence
already of a poet of original genius and immense accomplishment, a poet
with an incomparable gift of speech. That this technical quality, at
least, the sound of these new harmonies in English verse, awakened no
ears to attention, would be more surprising if one did not remember
that two years earlier the first and best of William Morris's books was
saluted as 'a Manchester mystery, not a real vision,' and that two years
later the best though not the first of George Meredith's books of verse,
_Modern Love_, was noticed only to be hooted at. Rossetti waited, and
was wise.
The plays of Swinburne, full as they are of splendid poetry, and even of
splendid dramatic poetry, suffer from a lack of that 'continual slight
novelty' which great drama, more than any other poetical form, requires.
There is, in the writing, a monotony of excellence, which becomes an
actual burden upon the reader. Here is a poet who touches nothing that
he does not transform, who can, as in _Mary Stuart_, fill scores of
pages with talk of lawyers, conspirators, and statesmen, versifying
history as closely as Shakespeare versified it, and leaving in the
result less prose deposit than Shakespeare left. It is perhaps because
in this play he has done a more difficult thing than in any other that
the writer has come to prefer this to any other of his plays; as men in
general prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A similar
satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties,
leads him to say of the modern play, _The Sisters_, that it is the only
modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural
dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse
between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or
made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse.' This
may be as true as that, in the astounding experiment of _Locrine_, none
of 'the life of human character or the life-likeness of dramatic
dialogue has suffered from the bondage of rhyme or has been sacrificed
to the exigences of metre.' But when all is said, when an unparalleled
skill in language, versification, and everything that is verbal in form,
has been admitted, and with unqualified admiration; when, in addition,
one has admitted, with not less admiration, noble qualities of
substance, superb qualities of poetic imagination, there still remains
the question: is either substance or form consistently dramatic? and the
further question: can work professedly dramatic which is not
consistently dramatic in substance and form be accepted as wholly
satisfactory from any other point of view?