credit, and not unjustly, for having discovered that Congreve prefixed
verses to the first edition of a little rare book called _Reliquae
Gethinianae_, which were never reprinted until I restored them, and that
these were entirely different from those he prefixed to the third
edition of the same book in 1703, the latter alone having been always
since reprinted among Congreve's verses. Both poems are conceived in a
Donne-like spirit of hyperbole. Grace, Lady Gethin, about whom I have
found out more since my _Life of Congreve_ was published, was a young
Irish lady, Miss Norton, who married an Irish baronet, Sir Richard
Gethin, and died at the age of twenty-one in 1697. She secured a wide
reputation for learning and piety, and she was actually buried in
Westminster Abbey. Her essays--with mortuary folding-plates, again in
the spirit of Donne--were posthumously published and produced a
favourable sensation. But to my great confusion Leslie Stephen, who had
(marvellously) studied Lady Gethin, pointed out to me, when he read my
biography, that she was a fraud, conscious or unconscious. Her so-called
works were cribbed out of several seventeenth-century writers of
morality, but particularly out of Bacon. She had copied them into her
commonplace book, doubtless without guile. My dear friend and master
grimly remarked, "I wonder neither you nor Congreve spotted 'reading
makes a full man'!" But he never said a word in print about our
negligence, which deepens my remorse. I suspect that Congreve, like
myself, did not read the _Reliquiae_ very carefully, but it is strange
that no other of Lady Gethin's numerous contemporary admirers discovered
the mare's-nest.
In 1888 I was not able to describe Congreve's ode on the Taking of Namur
in its original form, but since then I have secured a copy of the first
edition of 1695. The title is _A Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer'd to the
King, On His Taking Namure. By Mr. Congreve._ There are many differences
of text, showing that the poet subjected the poem to careful revision.
In this first form, the King, afterwards spoken of as "William," is
described and addressed as "Nassaw"; perhaps the poet was advised that
His Majesty did not care to be incessantly reminded of his Dutch origin.
Here is a cancelled passage, describing the horrors of the attack:
Cataracts of Fire Precipitate are driv'n
On their Adventurous Heads, as Ruin rain'd from Heaven...
Echoes each scalding step resound,
And horrid Flames, bellowing to be unbound,
Tumble with hollow rage in Cavern'd Ground.
Perhaps Congreve thought this was too boisterous. In the Namur ode there
are curious reminiscences of the battle of the angels in Paradise Lost.
There was no half-title to this folio, let collectors take notice.
The complete neglect which has overtaken the minor writings of Congreve
is regrettable. His odes and pastorals are deformed by a too-conscious
rhetoric, and his imagery is apt to be what is called "artificial," that
is to say, no longer in fashion. But they bear evidence of high
cultivation and an elevated sense of style. When Dr. Johnson said that
_The Mourning Muse of Alexis_ (1695) was "a despicable effusion" he fell
into the sin of over-statement. I admit that this agony of regret for
the death of good Queen Mary II may not have been very sincere, and that
the imagery is often vapid. Yet the poem is an interesting and a skilful
exercise in a species of art which has its place in the evolution of our
literature. It is not so good as Marvell would have made it earlier or
as Collins later. But in 1695 I know not who could have done it better
except Dryden, and even he, if more vigorous, was not commonly so
melodious. That Congreve could not write a tolerable song I frankly
admit. To book-collectors, however, the separate minor publications of
our poet seem to offer a field which is still unharvested. With Mr.
Wise's new discovery, and with the posthumous _Letter to Viscount
Cobham_, there are some nine or ten separate publications, besides the
four (or five, with _The Judgment of Paris_ of 1701) quarto plays. When
to these we add the controversial pamphlets and _Squire Trelooby_, in
its two forms of 1704 and 1734, we have quite an interesting little body
of first editions for the bibliophile to expend his energy in
collecting.
Lovers of pleasure will think small beer of these desultory annotations.
But in the case of a great dramatist like Congreve, whose career is very
imperfectly known to us, I hold that all information is welcome, even
though the separate details of it seem to be trivial. I present these
glimmerings in the hope that they may not be useless to the future
editor and biographer, whoever he may be, whose lamp will throw my taper
into the shade.
THE FIRST DRAFT OF SWINBURNE'S ANACTORIA
No modern poet offers a more interesting field for critical examination
in his MSS. than Swinburne does, and in perhaps no other can the
movement of mind, under changes of mood, be so accurately followed. His
prose MSS. have a somewhat heavy uniformity, from which little is to be
gathered, but the aspect of his written verse is so diverse as to be
almost bewildering in its changes of form, not merely from one group of
years to another, but even in the effusions of a single day. After long
consideration, and a study of a multitude of MSS. written between 1857
and 1909, I have come to the conclusion that the critical value of
Swinburne's drafts depends very much upon the spirit in which he
happened to compose his poems. There were evidently three methods in his
use. Some time ago there turned up a large number of dramatic and
lyrical exercises, written by Swinburne as an undergraduate. These have
greatly modified our conception of his early work, and they reveal in
the apparently idle youth an amazing persistence in self-apprenticeship
to the craft of verse. I hope to find leisure on a future occasion to
describe these interesting and voluminous papers: in the meantime I only
mention them here, in order to point out that they are written, with
curious uniformity, and with very few corrections, in a hard, angular
handwriting which Swinburne presently abandoned, but which resembles the
formal script in which his later Putney poems appear to be composed.
I say "appear to be," because I am convinced, and my conviction is
supported by the evidence of those who lived with him, that he adopted
in later life the practice of composing and practically finishing his
poems in his head before he put anything down on paper. He used to be
heard walking up and down his room at The Pines, and then pausing
awhile, evidently to write down what he had polished in his head. This
accounts for the "clean" look of most of his later MSS., which appear to
be first drafts, and yet have few corrections. What we now discover from
the undergraduate MSS. of which I have spoken above is that, apparently,
he adopted in early youth the plan to which he was to revert in old age.
But of this plan there might be two varieties; Swinburne might work up
his stanzas to perfection in his brain before writing anything, or he
might be inspired with such a flow of language that the finished poem
would slip smoothly from his brain. Doubtless there was something of
both these in his practice, but I incline to think the former by far the
most frequent. From neither can we obtain much impression of the
mechanism of his invention.
But there was a third method, of which I am about to describe a
peculiarly interesting example, which the poet adopted in the hey-dey of
his poetical career. Soon after he left Oxford, perhaps in 1860, his
handwriting changed its character; it became less boyish, but more
crabbed and careless. I think that the weakness of his wrist may have
been the cause of this alteration. It is particularly marked in the
period from 1862 to 1870. His later writing was emphatic in its stiff
inelegance, but usually legible; the script of his middle period was, at
its best, lax and straggling, at its worst almost indecipherable. But it
varied extravagantly, so much so that it is often difficult to believe
that the same pen, and still more that the same hour, could have
produced such violently diverse exhibitions. It has gradually dawned
upon me, while helping Mr. Wise to disentangle an accumulation of rough
copies and fragments, that the cause of this diversity lay in the degree
of excitement which Swinburne put into the act of composition. He was
always paroxysmal, always the victim of excruciating intellectual
excitement which descended upon him like the beak of the Promethean
vulture. To discover the points at which, in a particular composition,
this fury of inspiration fell upon him, is to get a little closer to the
secret of Swinburne's astonishing virtuosity, and is my excuse for the
following observations.
So many of Swinburne's MSS. have been preserved, principally in the
newspaper bundles which he so oddly carried with him, without ever
examining, through all his peregrinations from Oxford to Putney, that it
is particularly vexatious that those which we could least afford to
spare, those of his blossoming period from 1861 to 1868, are very
exiguously represented. No scrap of _The Queen Mother_ has turned up,
nor of the published form of _Rosamond_ (an undergraduate sketch of this
play remains). The original MS. of _Chastelard_ exists only in a few
fragments, the MS. sold in New York in 1913 being a clean copy for the
press. According to the evidence of George Meredith, the first draft of
_Laus Veneris_ was written in red ink; the existing version, though
containing corrections and cancelled passages, is written in black ink,
and shows no sign of the frenzy of composition; it is evidently a
transcript. Of _Poems and Ballads_ no general MS. exists, but portions
of the "copy" sent to the printers are in various collections. Most of
these are transcripts, and show no sign of emotion or excitement.
Several first drafts of _Poems and Ballads_, however, have been
preserved, and of these the most remarkable that I have examined is that
of _Anactoria_, of which I will now give some account.
Swinburne's first drafts offer none of the attractions which collectors
of autographs commonly desiderate. They are never signed and rarely
headed. That of the long poem afterwards called _Anactoria_ has neither
a title nor the Greek epigraph from Sappho. It is written, or rather
wildly scribbled, on both sides of six sheets of blue foolscap, the
water-mark of one of which is 1863, doubtless the date of the
composition of the poem. These sheets were thrown away, and came into
our hands in a great disorder of papers, mostly worthless, which left
The Pines after Watts-Dunton's death. As we turned them over, in the
welter of manuscript, my eye caught the line
Lilies, and languor of the Lesbian air,
and I realized what lay before us. Scattered through the bundle, five
sheets were identified, but unfortunately one sheet was missing. By a
happy chance, this also turned up in another parcel three years later,
and the first draft is now, I believe, complete, although one passage in
the published poem, as I shall presently show, is absent.
The text begins high up on the first sheet, and offers no peculiarity in
the opening eight lines, which, with the slight exception of "Sting"
instead of "Blind" in line 2, are identical with the published version
of 1866. The handwriting is the usual script of Swinburne in the 60's,
crabbed, but plain and calm. Suddenly, with line 7, a sort of frenzy
takes the poet's pen, and at the side of the paper, in lines that slope
more and more rapidly downwards, and in such a stumbling and trembling
hand that they are with great difficulty to be spelt out, are
interpolated the lines:
Severed the bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves,
And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves.
I feel thy blood against my blood; my pain
Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.
Then, in very small clear script, opposite this outburst, is written, by
itself, like a solo on a flute:
Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower,
Breast kindle breast and either burn one hour.
To this immediately follows:
In her high place in Paphos,
which is the opening of line 64 in the published version. But the first
draft stops here, leaving that half-line uncancelled, and proceeds
quietly, in a large hand,
Saw love, a burning flame from crown to feet,
and so on for six lines which are now to be found in the middle of the
poem. Thereupon follows a breathless interlude of six couplets,
scribbled with extreme violence and so curiously interwoven that the
only way to explain their relation is to quote them:
I would my love could slay thee; I am satiated
With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead,
Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake
Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache;
Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill,
Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill;
I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat,
And no mouth but some serpent's found thee sweet.
I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,
Intense device, and superflux of pain,
Relapse and reluctation of the breath,
Dumb tunes and shuddering semitones of death.
If this passage be compared with the published text, it will be observed
that firstly, there are, with the single alteration of "kill" for
"slay," no verbal modifications whatever: and that secondly the couplets
are shifted about like counters in a game, or as if they were solid
objects which might be put here, there, or anywhere in a liquid setting.
The first draft of _A Song of Italy_, now in the possession of Mr. Thos.
J. Wise, presents the same characteristics, though in a less degree.
We are still on the opening sheet of the draft of _Anactoria_, and it
now presents to us, quietly and conscientiously written in the middle of
the page:
For I beheld in sleep the light that is
In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss
Of body and soul that mix with eager tears,
And laughter stinging thro' the eyes and ears,
a sort of _tessera_ evidently left there to be fitted in whenever a
favourable blank presented itself; we find it, without the smallest
change of language, fixed in the middle of the poem. It is noticeable
that the fragment "In her high place in Paphos" is now utilized.
A storm of excitement presently ruffles the poet, and he turns the sheet
in such agitation that he holds it upside-down. Without leading up to it
in any way, he starts a passage
_She came and touched me, saying_ "Who doth thee wrong,
Sappho?"
which closes abruptly with lines which may be cited because they contain
several of the very rare instances in which the draft slightly differs
verbally from the text of 1866:
Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead?
_"Be of good cheer, wilt thou forget?" she_ said:
_"For_ she that flies shall follow for thy sake,
_For_ she shall give thee gifts that _will_ not take,
Shall kiss that _will_ not kiss thee" (yea, kiss me)
"When _I would_ not, etc."
We presently come across the only Couplet in the whole poem which was
cancelled in the first draft, and yet reappears in the published text.
This is:
Bound with her myrtles, beaten with her rods,
The young men and the maidens and the gods,
now very effectively introduced into the argument, but in the first
draft destroyed with a whirling movement of the pen, so that it looks as
if a dust-storm involved it. Written with frenzied violence, almost
perpendicularly, the draft then presents a couplet:
Taught the sun ways to travel, woven most fine
The moonbeams, shed the starbeams forth as wine,
for which a place is now found immediately before the "Bound with her
myrtles" couplet. The ecstasy of the poet seems to have suddenly flagged
here, and there follows immediately, in sedate script, with even lines,
the passage
Alas, that neither moon nor sun nor dew
Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through,
Assuage me nor allay me nor appease,
Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease,
Till time wax faint in all his periods,
which now takes its place near the very close of the poem. The actual
closing lines are, in like fashion, appended to the third page of the
draft. They read as follows:
Till fate undo the bondage of the gods,
And lay to slake _the unquenchable desire
Lethean lotus on a lip of fire,_
And _pour_ around and over and under me
_The wake of_ the insuperable sea.
There was evidently on the poet's part no original intention of
utilizing these lines as a conclusion to the poem. I give them here
because they present the solitary instance of important verbal
alteration to be found in the whole text of 1866.
It would baffle the most meticulous investigation to restore the
innumerable false starts, broken lines, and rejected readings which
underlie the text of the Draft. There is no question here of Swinburne's
creating or polishing anything in his mind, the whole work of
composition proceeds on the paper itself, and what is very curious is
the fact that nothing of any merit or technical beauty seems, so far as
it is possible to decipher the cancelled verses, to be lost. As soon as
ever the expression became adequate the line was left, and was never
modified; as long as it was inadequate, it was pitilessly rejected, and
the verse not passed till it satisfied the ear and imagination of the
poet. What is interesting is that this work was carried out with the
pen, and not, as was the practice in Swinburne's later years, with the
mind; and nothing could be more opposed to the popular notion of
Swinburne as the inspired improvisatore than all this evidence of
intense laborious application to his creative task. In fact the more the
original MSS. of Swinburne are examined, the more clearly is he revealed
to us as an artist equally sedulous and sensitive, working by fits and
starts, in gusts of overwhelming emotion, but always sufficiently master
of himself to recognize, with finality, when the exact form of
expression had been reached. Having recognized it, he did not, like
Tennyson, Landor and other poets, fidget any further with it, but left
it verbally permanent.
On the other hand, the draft of _Anactoria_ proves, what we might have
suspected, that if Swinburne completed his verbal text in his first
movement of laboured inspiration, he made no effort then to build up his
poem. It may be observed that _Dolores_ is a rosary of stanza-beads on
an invisible string; in other words, that the string might be broken,
the beads shaken together, and the stanzas arranged in an entirely new
sequence, without any injury to the effect of the poem. In other cases,
and these some of Swinburne's finest lyrics, the same want of
progression is to be noted. But we have not been able to witness the
process before, nor were we prepared to find it working in a poem which
is so elegiacal as _Anactoria_. Yet the evidence of the First Draft is
positive. It is now clear that Swinburne forged his brilliant
Dryden-like couplets as though each one were a stanza, and practically
treated them as bits of mosaic to be fitted, in cooler blood, into a
scheme not present to his mind when his inspiration seized him.
We seem, therefore, to be in the presence of a curious phenomenon.
Whereas in the case of most poets the general outline of the work
precedes the execution of it in detail, Swinburne offers us the paradox
of an execution carried to the utmost finish before the act of evolution
begins. He takes a bag-ful of couplets, all polished to the finest
point, and--on some subsequent occasion--he builds these up into a poem
which has the aspect of inevitable growth. The First Draft of
_Anactoria_, which I have attempted to describe, is totally
unintelligible, a chaos of Rodin-like fragments, unless we accept this
theory of the poet's method.
One point remains to be stated. The published text of _Anactoria_
contains 304 lines. Of these I have found, scattered over the tract of
delirious manuscript, 270. It is curious that not a single verse should
have been added by the poet when he came to distribute and arrange his
cluster of couplets, the solitary accession to the text being the solid
passage of 34 lines in the middle of the poem, beginning
Or say what God above all gods and years
With offering and blood-sacrifice of tears.
Of this, not a single trace is to be found in the Draft. My first
supposition was that the sheet containing these lines was lost, as might
well be when we consider the accidental and fortuitous way in which the
rest was retrieved. But I have come to the conclusion that this is not
the case. The text in the Draft stops at the line
_The mystery of the cruelty of things_
without any sign that the idea of the impassive harshness of Fate was to
be expanded. The 34 lines which now follow have, moreover, a character
that distinguishes them from the rest of _Anactoria_, with which they
are not quite in keeping. They leave the individual passion of Sappho
entirely out of sight, and they are instinct with an order of
theological ideas which occupied Swinburne in 1864 and 1865, when he was
writing _Atalanta in Calydon_ and the earliest of _Songs before
Sunrise_. They are on a higher philosophical plane than the melodious
ravings of the love-sick poetess, and the more we read them, the more
may we be persuaded that they are an after-thought.
THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET
THE fashion of the moment, whether in literature or in art, whether in
England or in France, favours what is rough, vivid and undisciplined. A
new generation of readers welcomes the lyrical effusions of the cowboy,
the lumberman, the tramp, and even the apache. It accepts Bubu de
Montparnasse as a hero and does not shrink from overhearing the
confidences of a burglar. There is no reason why we should exercise our
sarcasm over these _naivetes_ of taste, while indeed, as social beings,
we are even entitled to rejoice at them, since, in the language of
practical aestheticism, a positive always involves a negative. If this
age dotes on the dirtiness of tramps, it is because every one of us is
obliged to be occupied and clean; and if the apache is the object of our
poetry, it is because, in our extremely settled, confident and
comfortable lives, we miss the excitement of being in personal danger.
But let the delicate social balance of our existence be again disturbed,
let us become practically accustomed to starvation and outrage and
murder, and not another strophe would our poets address to the drunken
navvy or the grimy bathchair-man. If London or Paris were to burn, if
only for a fortnight, literature and art would hurry back to the study
of princesses and to the language of the Golden Age.[1]
No more striking instance of this oscillation is to be found in history
than is afforded by France at the opening of the seventeenth century, in
the creation of what is called the vie de salon. This movement, the most
civilizing, the most refining in the intellectual life of France, was
the direct outcome of the convulsion of the civil wars. It was the
ugliness, the wickedness, the brutality of the reigns of the later
Valois which made the best minds of Paris determine to be gentle,
beautiful and delicate under Louis XIII. Forty years of savage rapine
had laid a severe embargo upon civilization, and no picture of France in
1625 can be complete without a glance at the background of 1575. In that
half-century of administrative disorder, in the bitter and distracted
state of country life, the population had lost confidence in virtue, and
had become rude and dishonest. One of the Venetian ambassadors,
travelling through France, declared of the Frenchmen whom he met, that
"the sight of blood had made them cunning, coarse and wild." If such was
the condition of the countryside, the towns were even worse. There
resulted from the misery after the siege of Paris a universal weariness,
a longing for tolerance in man to man, a yearning for refinement in
private life, for security, for cultivation, for repose of mind and body
and estate.
That Henri IV was a Protestant has led, perhaps, to some injustice being
done to his memory in a Catholic country. But he deserved well of France
in this critical moment. Every necessity of life had become
extravagantly dear, every branch of industry depressed, if not extinct,
when he came to the throne. He set himself to be the guardian of trade,
and of the arts. He rebuilt cities, and a contemporary reported of him
that "no sooner was he master of Paris, than the streets were swarming
with masons." The shrewdness of Henri IV broke down the old
superstition, of which Sully made himself the obstinate spokesman, that
agriculture was the only source of wealth for France. The King persisted
in encouraging the manufactures of silk and linen; in widening the
circle of commercial interests; in teaching Frenchmen to achieve wealth
and honour as architects, painters, sculptors and cabinet-makers. The
prestige of the military nobles grew less and less, that of the
_bourgeoisie_ grew more and more, while between them a new class,
refined, intelligent, a little timid and supple in their professional
adroitness, that _nouvelle aristocratic de robe_, of which M. Lavisse
has spoken, came to the front and gave its tone to the surface of life.