Had some old Pagan slept a thousand years,
To wake to-day, and stretching to the stars
Gaunt arms of longing, called on Venus, Mars,
June and Jove, Apollo and his peers;
And heard, for answer, echoing from the spheres,
“Thy gods are gone: the gods of old are dead.
It is by Christ thou shalt be comforted,
The pitying God who wipes away all tears.”
Such answer had there come, deaf ears, in scorn
Had turned the Pagan, and deaf ears turn we
To other voices, on this April morn,
Since he who sang the sunrise and the sea
Shall sing no more. Deaf are we and forlorn,
The gods are dead, and dead is Poetry.
_April 10, 1909._
I
Swinburne was furious.
I had lunched with him and Watts-Dunton at The Pines, and after I
had smoked a cigarette with the latter, the author of _Atalanta in
Calydon_ had invited me upstairs to his sanctum, that he might show
me the latest acquisition to his library--a big parchment-bound book
tied with ribbons--the Kelmscott reprint of one of Caxton’s books. He
waxed enthusiastic, I remember, over the Rape of Danae. Then he took
up the proofs of an article on John Day which he was contributing to
the _Nineteenth Century_ that he might read some passages from it.
To verify a quotation, he walked to his shelves in search of a book,
talking volubly meanwhile, and turning, as was his custom, to look
directly at the person whom he was addressing. Unlike Watts-Dunton,
whose library was a witness to the catholicity of the owner’s
interests and of his tastes, Swinburne’s library was comparatively
small and select, for he was as exclusive in regard to the books he
admitted to his shelves as he was in regard to the men and women he
admitted to his friendship. Knowing exactly, I suppose, where the
required volume was to be found, his hand went as confidently towards
it--even though his face was turned away from it, and towards me--as
the fingers of a musician go towards the keys of a piano at which
he does not look. For once Swinburne’s instincts played him false.
Taking down the book without glancing at it, and still pouring out a
torrent of words, he opened it, his eyes on my face, and shaking the
forefinger of his right hand at me, said:
“Here it is! Listen!” and dropped his eyes upon the page.
To my astonishment his face suddenly crimsoned, the eyes that might
once have been bright blue, but were now faded, and, in fading,
seemed to have caught and retained something of the colour of the
great seas and of the grassy fields upon which they have so often
and so lovingly lingered, glowed with green fire like that we see in
the eyes of an angry cat, and he flung the book away from him in a
tornado of wrath. He had taken down the wrong volume, an anthology,
and opened at a page on which was printed a poem by the particular
writer who, like the wearer of a red coat intruding thoughtlessly
upon the domain of an angry bull, happened at that particular moment
to be the subject of a poet’s capricious wrath--for on occasion I
have heard Swinburne speak with kindly, if contemptuous toleration,
of a writer whose damnation in this world and the next he seemed at
another time ardently to desire.
“Of all my imitators,” he shrilled, literally quivering with the
tempestuousness of his passion, “this fellow (mentioning a poet
whose name I suppress) is the most intolerable. I claim--and you,
I know, will admit the justice of the claim--that perhaps the most
distinctive characteristic of my work in poetry is that I have taken
old and hackneyed metres, and have tried to transform them from a
mere jingle, and a mere jig-jig, into music. This pestilent ape
has vulgarised what I have done by servile imitations of my manner
and of my methods; but, what I had transformed into music, he has
transformed back into the vilest and most jigging of jingles.”
When a poet of Swinburne’s eminence thus turns the searchlight of
criticism upon himself, and seeks to lay bare, in a few pregnant
sentences, what he considers the secret of his art and of his
success, one must necessarily be interested and even fascinated. On
this occasion, however, I was more concerned about the singular state
of nervous excitability into which my host had worked himself than
curious to draw him out by further discussion.
Sir James Barrie says somewhere that “Temper is a weapon which we
handle by the blade,” a tragic instance of the truth of which I had
in mind at that moment. A certain distinguished writer, now dead,
who like Swinburne was a good hater, and scarcely less excitable
than he, had made, or imagined that he had made (the vagaries of
the artistic temperament are many), a deadly enemy of a fellow
craftsman and critic. Every adverse review of his work, or unfriendly
reference to himself, which appeared in the public Press, he insisted
on attributing, directly or indirectly, to the malignity of this
supposed enemy. A not ungenerous man at heart, in spite of--possibly
because of--his blaze of a temper and quickness to take offence,
the distinguished writer in question had shown much interest in a
struggling young author of his own nationality, and had not only
assisted him financially, but had been at great pains to find a
publisher for the lad’s first book, and had importuned his friends
on the Press to review the work favourably and at length. The first
notice to appear was adverse in the extreme, and the distinguished
writer instantly declared that he saw in it the hand of his enemy,
who had sought to stab at him by damning the work of a young fellow
known to be his friend and protégé.
Flinging the paper containing the review upon the ground, he stamped
upon it, and about the room, working himself up finally into so
furious a passion that it brought on a seizure from which he never
entirely recovered, and that practically ended his career.
“Temper is a weapon which we handle by the blade.”
This story I had only recently heard, and had good reason for
believing. Seeing my host literally trembling and quivering in every
limb with the intensity of the excitement, and of the anger into
which he had worked himself, my one anxiety was to distract the
attention of this representative of the proverbially irritable race
of geniuses from the disturbing subject, and to soothe him back to
his normal calm. Unfortunately for me, his deafness made my task
difficult, but I chanced to hit upon a topic in which he was keenly
interested, and, little by little, he quieted down, until I could see
that he had talked himself out and was ready for the afternoon nap in
which it was his custom to indulge.
Remembering that incident, and others like it within my knowledge, I
ask myself how it is possible to judge men and women of genius--men
and women to whose great brains the live blood rushes at a thought or
at a word; whose passions are like a laid fuse, ready to take fire
and to explode the mine at a touch--by the same standard which we
apply to the cold-blooded, sluggish-brained, lethargic and perhaps
more fortunate mortals to whom impulse is unknown, upon whom passion
has no sway, and who rarely commit themselves to any expression or to
any action, noble or mean, wise or indiscreet, without first of all
carefully weighing the results and counting up the costs.
“It is apparently too often a congenial task,” says George Eliot in
her _Essay on Heine_, “to write severe words about the transgressions
of men of genius; especially when the censor has the advantage of
being himself a man of no genius, so that those transgressions seem
to him quite gratuitous; he, forsooth, never lacerated anyone by
his wit or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse allusion; and his
indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the temptation that
lies in transcendent power.”