Mr. Swinburne has by this time impressed upon the general public a
tolerably vivid image of his literary personality. His line is a
definite one; his note is familiar, and we know what to expect from him.
He was at pains, indeed, a year ago to quicken the apprehension of
American readers by an effusion directed more or less explicitly to
themselves. This piece of literature was brief, but it was very
remarkable. Mr. Emerson had had occasion to speak of Mr. Swinburne with
qualified admiration and this circumstance, coming to Mr. Swinburne's
ears, had prompted him to uncork on the spot the vials of his wrath. He
addressed to a newspaper a letter of which it is but a colourless
account to say that it embodied the very hysterics of gross
vituperation.
Mr. Swinburne has some extremely just remarks about Byron's
unamenableness to quotation, his having to be taken in the gross. This
is almost equally true of our author himself; he must be judged by all
he has done, and we must allow, in our judgment, the weight he would
obviously claim for it to his elaborate tribute to the genius of Mr.
Emerson. His tone has two distinct notes--the note of measureless praise
and the note of furious denunciation. Each is in need of a correction,
but we confess that, with all its faults, we prefer the former. That Mr.
Swinburne has a kindness for his more restrictive strain is, however,
very obvious. He is over-ready to sound it, and he is not particular
about his pretext.
Some people, he says, for instance, affirm that a writer may have a very
effective style, yet have nothing of value to express with it. Mr.
Swinburne demands that they prove their assertion. "This flattering
unction the very foolishest of malignants will hardly, in this case
(that of Mr. D. G. Rossetti), be able to lay upon the corrosive sore
which he calls his soul; the ulcer of ill-will must rot unrelieved by
the rancid ointment of such fiction." In Mr. W. M. Rossetti's edition of
Shelley there is in a certain line, an interpolation of the word
"autumn." "For the conception of this atrocity the editor is not
responsible; for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial
fire would be insufficient expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and
desperate head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of
Shelley with this most damnable corruption."
The essays before us are upon Victor Hugo, D. G. Rossetti, William
Morris, Matthew Arnold as a poet, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and John
Ford. To these are added two papers upon pictures--the drawings of the
old masters at Florence and the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1868. Mr.
Swinburne, in writing of poets, cannot fail to say a great many
felicitous things. His own insight into the poetic mystery is so deep,
his perception in matters of language so refined, his power of
appreciation so large and active, his imagination, especially, so
sympathetic and flexible, that we constantly feel him to be one who has
a valid right to judge and pass sentence. The variety of his sympathies
in poetry is especially remarkable, and is in itself a pledge of
criticism of a liberal kind. Victor Hugo is his divinity--a divinity
whom indeed, to our sense, he effectually conceals and obliterates in
the suffocating fumes of his rhetoric. On the other hand, one of the
best papers in the volume is a disquisition on the poetry of Mr. Matthew
Arnold, of which his relish seems hardly less intense and for whom he
states the case with no less prodigious a redundancy of phrase.
Matthew Arnold's canons of style, we should have said, are a positive
negation of those of Mr. Swinburne's, and it is to the credit of the
latter's breadth of taste that he should have entered into an
intellectual temperament which is so little his own. The other articles
contain similar examples of his vivacity and energy of perception, and
offer a number of happy judgments and suggestive observations. His
estimate of Byron as a poet (not in the least as a man--on this point
his utterances are consummately futile) is singularly discriminating;
his measurement of Shelley's lyric force is eloquently adequate; his
closing words upon John Ford are worth quoting as a specimen of strong
apprehension and solid statement. Mr. Swinburne is by no means always
solid, and this passage represents him at his best:--
"No poet is less forgettable than Ford; none fastens (as it were) the
fangs of his genius and his will more deeply in your memory. You cannot
shake hands with him and pass him by; you cannot fall in with him and
out again at pleasure; if he touch you once he takes you, and what he
takes he keeps his hold of; his work becomes a part of your thought and
parcel of your spiritual furniture for ever; he signs himself upon you
as with a seal of deliberate and decisive power. His force is never the
force of accident; the casual divinity of beauty which falls, as though
direct from heaven, upon stray lines and phrases of some poets, fails
never by any such heavenly chance on his; his strength of impulse is
matched by his strength of will; he never works more by instinct than by
resolution; he knows what he would have and what he will do, and gains
his end and does his work with full conscience of purpose and insistence
of design. By the might of a great will seconded by the force of a
great hand he won the place he holds against all odds of rivalry in a
race of rival giants."
On the other hand, Mr. Swinburne is constantly liable on this same line
to lapse into flagrant levity and perversity of taste; as in saying that
he cannot consider Wordsworth "as mere poet" equal to Coleridge as mere
poet; in speaking of Alfred de Musset as "the female page or attendant
dwarf" of Byron, and his poems as "decoctions of watered Byronism"; or
in alluding jauntily and _en passant_ to Gautier's _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_ as "the most perfect and exquisite book of modern times."
To note, however, the points at which Mr. Swinburne's judgment hits the
mark, or the points at which it misses it, is comparatively superfluous,
inasmuch as both of these cases seem to us essentially accidental. His
book is not at all a book of judgment; it is a book of pure imagination.
His genius is for style simply, and not in the least for thought nor for
real analysis; he goes through the motions of criticism, and makes a
considerable show of logic and philosophy, but with deep appreciation
his writing seems to us to have very little to do.
He is an imaginative commentator, often of a very splendid kind, but he
is never a real interpreter and rarely a trustworthy guide. He is a
writer, and a writer in constant quest of a theme. He has an inordinate
sense of the picturesque, and he finds his theme in those subjects and
those writers which gratify it. When they gratify it highly, he
conceives a boundless relish for them; they give him his chance, and he
turns-on the deluge of his exorbitant homage. His imagination kindles,
he abounds in their own sense, when they give him an inch he takes an
ell, and quite loses sight of the subject in the entertainment he finds
in his own word-spinning. In this respect he is extraordinarily
accomplished: he very narrowly misses having a magnificent style. On the
imaginative side, his style is almost complete, and seems capable of
doing everything that picturesqueness demands. There are few writers of
our day who could have produced this description of a thunderstorm at
sea. Mr. Swinburne gives it to us as the likeness of Victor Hugo's
genius:--
"About midnight, the thundercloud was full overhead, full of incessant
sound and fire, lightening and darkening so rapidly that it seemed to
have life, and a delight in its life. At the same hour, the sky was
clear to the west, and all along the sea-line there sprang and sank as
to music a restless dance or chase of summer lightnings across the lower
sky: a race and riot of lights, beautiful and rapid as a course of
shining Oceanides along the tremulous floor of the sea. Eastward, at the
same moment, the space of clear sky was higher and wider, a splendid
semicircle of too intense purity to be called blue; it was of no colour
nameable by man; and midway in it, between the stars and the sea, hung
the motionless full moon; Artemis watching with serene splendour of
scorn the battle of Titans and the revel of nymphs from her stainless
and Olympian summit of divine indifferent light. Underneath and about
us, the sea was paved with flame; the whole water trembled and hissed
with phosphoric fire; even through the wind and thunder I could hear the
crackling and sputtering of the water-sparks. In the same heaven and in
the same hour there shone at once the three contrasted glories, golden
and fiery and white, of moonlight, and of the double lightning, forked
and sheet; and under all this miraculous heaven lay a flaming floor of
water."
But with this extravagant development of the imagination there is no
commensurate development either of the reason or of the moral sense. One
of these defects is, to our mind, fatal to Mr. Swinburne's style; the
other is fatal to his tone, to his temper, to his critical pretensions.
His style is without measure, without discretion, without sense of what
to take and what to leave; after a few pages, it becomes intolerably
fatiguing. It is always listening to itself--always turning its head
over its shoulders to see its train flowing behind it. The train
shimmers and tumbles in a very gorgeous fashion, but the rustle of its
embroidery is fatally importunate.
Mr. Swinburne is a dozen times too verbose; at least one-half of his
phrases are what the French call phrases in the air. One-half of his
sentence is always a repetition, for mere fancy's sake and nothing more,
of the meaning of the other half--a play upon its words, an echo, a
reflection, a duplication. This trick, of course, makes a writer
formidably prolix. What we have called the absence of the moral sense of
the writer of these essays is, however, their most disagreeable feature.
By this we do not mean that Mr. Swinburne is not didactic, nor edifying,
nor devoted to pleading the cause of virtue. We mean simply that his
moral plummet does not sink at all, and that when he pretends to drop it
he is simply dabbling in the relatively very shallow pool of the
picturesque.
A sense of the picturesque so refined as Mr. Swinburne's will take one a
great way, but it will by no means, in dealing with things whose great
value is in what they tell us of human character, take one all the way.
One breaks down with it (if one treats it as one's sole support) sooner
or later in aesthetics; one breaks down with it very soon indeed in
psychology.
We do not remember in this whole volume a single instance of delicate
moral discrimination--a single case in which the moral note has been
struck, in which the idea betrays the smallest acquaintance with the
conscience. The moral realm for Mr. Swinburne is simply a brilliant
chiaroscuro of costume and posture. This makes all Mr. Swinburne's
magnificent talk about Victor Hugo's great criminals and monstrosities,
about Shelley's Count Cenci, and Browning's Guido Franchesini, and about
dramatic figures generally, quite worthless as anything but amusing
fantasy. As psychology it is, to our sense, extremely puerile; for we do
not mean simply to say that the author does not understand morality--a
charge to which he would be probably quite indifferent; but that he does
not at all understand immorality. Such a passage as his rhapsody upon
Victor Hugo's Josiane ("such a pantheress may be such a poetess," etc.)
means absolutely nothing. It is entertaining as pictorial
writing--though even in this respect as we have said, thanks to excess
and redundancy, it is the picturesque spoiled rather than achieved; but
as an attempt at serious analysis it seems to us, like many of its
companions, simply ghastly--ghastly in its poverty of insight and its
pretension to make mere lurid imagery do duty as thought.