[Sidenote:_22 Apr. '09_]
On Good Friday night I was out in the High Street, at the cross-roads,
where the warp and the woof of the traffic assault each other under a
great glare of lamps. The shops were closed and black, except where a
tobacconist kept the tobacconist's bright and everlasting vigil; but above
the shops occasional rare windows were illuminated, giving
hints--dressing-tables, pictures, gas-globes--of intimate private lives. I
don't know why such hints should always seem to me pathetic, saddening;
but they do. And beneath them, through the dark defile of shutters,
motor-omnibuses roared and swayed and curved, too big for the street, and
dwarfing it. And automobiles threaded between them, and bicycles dared the
spaces that were left. From afar off there came a flying light, like a
shot out of a gun, and it grew into a man perched on a shuddering
contrivance that might have been invented by H.G. Wells, and swept
perilously into the contending currents, and by miracles emerged
untouched, and was gone, driven by the desire of the immortal soul within
the man. This strange thing happened again and again. The pavements were
crowded with hurrying or loitering souls, and the omnibuses and autos were
full of them: hundreds passed before the vision every moment. And they
were all preoccupied; they nearly all bore the weary, egotistic melancholy
that spreads like an infection at the close of a fête day in London; the
lights of a motor-omnibus would show the rapt faces of sixteen souls at
once in their glass cage, driving the vehicle on by their desires. The
policeman and the loafers in the ring of fire made by the public-houses at
the cross-roads--even these were grave with the universal affliction of
life, and grim with the relentless universal egotism. Lovers walked as
though there were no heaven and no earth, but only themselves in space.
Nobody but me seemed to guess that the road to Delhi could be as naught to
this road, with its dark, fleeing shapes, its shifting beams, its black
brick precipices, and its thousand pale, flitting faces of a gloomy and
decadent race. As says the Indian proverb, I met ten thousand men on the
Putney High Street, and they were all my brothers. But I alone was aware
of it. As I stood watching autobus after autobus swing round in a fearful
semi-circle to begin a new journey, I gazed myself into a mystic
comprehension of the significance of what I saw. A few yards beyond where
the autobuses turned was a certain house with lighted upper windows, and
in that house the greatest lyric versifier that England ever had, and one
of the great poets of the whole world and of all the ages, was dying: a
name immortal. But nobody looked; nobody seemed to care; I doubt if any
one thought of it. This enormous negligence appeared to me to be fine, to
be magnificently human.
* * * * *
The next day all the shops were open, and hundreds of fatigued assistants
were pouring out their exhaustless patience on thousands of urgent and
bright women; and flags waved on high, and the gutters were banked with
yellow and white flowers, and the air was brisk and the roadways were
clean. The very vital spirit of energy seemed to have scattered the breath
of life generously, so that all were intoxicated by it in the gay
sunshine. He was dead then. The waving posters said it. When Tennyson died
I felt less hurt; for I had serious charges to bring against Tennyson,
which impaired my affection for him. But I was more shocked. When Tennyson
died, everybody knew it, and imaginatively realized it. Everybody was
touched. I was saddened then as much by the contagion of a general grief
as by a sorrow of my own. But there was no general grief on Saturday.
Swinburne had written for fifty years, and never once moved the nation,
save inimically, when "Poems and Ballads" came near to being burnt
publicly by the hangman. (By "the nation," I mean newspaper readers. The
real nation, busy with the problem of eating, dying, and being born all in
one room, has never heard of either Tennyson or Swinburne or George R.
Sims.) There are poems of Tennyson, of Wordsworth, even of the speciously
recondite Browning, that have entered into the general consciousness. But
nothing of Swinburne's! Swinburne had no moral ideas to impart. Swinburne
never publicly yearned to meet his Pilot face to face. He never galloped
on one of Lord George Sanger's horses from Aix to Ghent. He was interested
only in ideal manifestations of beauty and force. Except when he grieved
the judicious by the expression of political crudities, he never connected
art with any form of morals that the British public could understand. He
sang. He sang supremely. And it wasn't enough for the British public. The
consequence was that his fame spread out as far as under-graduates, and
the tiny mob of under-graduates was the largest mob that ever worried
itself about Swinburne. Their shouts showed the high-water mark of his
popularity. When one of them wrote in a facetious ecstasy over "Dolores,"
_But you came, O you procuratores_
_And ran us all in!_
that moment was the crown of Swinburne's career as a popular author. With
its incomparable finger on the public pulse the _Daily Mail_, on the day
when it announced Swinburne's death, devoted one of its placards to the
performances of a lady and a dog on a wrecked liner, and another to the
antics of a lunatic with a revolver. The _Daily Mail_ knew what it was
about. Do not imagine that I am trying to be sardonic about the English
race and its organs. Not at all. The English race is all right, though
ageing now. The English race has committed no crime in demanding from its
poets something that Swinburne could not give. I am merely trying to make
clear the exceeding strangeness of the apparition of a poet like Swinburne
in a place like England.
Last year I was walking down Putney Hill, and I saw Swinburne for the
first and last time. I could see nothing but his face and head. I did not
notice those ridiculously short trousers that Putney people invariably
mention when mentioning Swinburne. Never have I seen a man's life more
clearly written in his eyes and mouth and forehead. The face of a man who
had lived with fine, austere, passionate thoughts of his own! By the
heavens, it was a noble sight. I have not seen a nobler. Now, I knew by
hearsay every crease in his trousers, but nobody had told me that his face
was a vision that would never fade from my memory. And nobody, I found
afterwards by inquiry, had "noticed anything particular" about his face. I
don't mind, either for Swinburne or for Putney. I reflect that if Putney
ignored Swinburne, he ignored Putney. And I reflect that there is great
stuff in Putney for a poet, and marvel that Swinburne never perceived it
and used it. He must have been born English, and in the nineteenth
century, by accident. He was misprized while living. That is nothing. What
does annoy me is that critics who know better are pandering to the
national hypocrisy after his death. In a dozen columns he has been sped
into the unknown as "a great Victorian"! Miserable dishonesty! Nobody was
ever less Victorian than Swinburne. And then when these critics have to
skate over the "Poems and Ballads" episode--thin, cracking ice!--how they
repeat delicately the word "sensuous," "sensuous." Out with it, tailorish
and craven minds, and say "sensual"! For sensual the book is. It is fine
in sensuality, and no talking will ever get you away from that. Villiers
de l'Isle-Adam once wrote an essay on "Le Sadisme anglais," and supported
it with a translation of a large part of "Anactoria." And even Paris was
startled. A rare trick for a supreme genius to play on the country of his
birth, enshrining in the topmost heights of its literature a lovely poem
that cannot be discussed!... Well, Swinburne has got the better of us
there. He has simply knocked to pieces the theory that great art is
inseparable from the Ten Commandments. His greatest poem was written in
honour of a poet whom any English Vigilance Society would have crucified.
"Sane" critics will naturally observe, in their quiet manner, that
"Anactoria" and similar feats were "so unnecessary." Would it were true!