Swinburne was an absurd character. He was a bird of showy strut and
plumage. One could not but admire his glorious feathers; but, as soon as
he began to moult--and he had already moulted excessively by the time
Watts-Dunton took him under his roof--one saw how very little body
there was underneath. Mr. Gosse in his biography compared Swinburne to a
coloured and exotic bird--a "scarlet and azure macaw," to, be
precise--and the comparison remains in one's imagination. Watts-Dunton,
finding the poor creature moulted and "off its feed," carried it down to
Putney, resolved to domesticate it. He watched over it as a farmer's
wife watches over a sick hen. He taught it to eat out of his hand. He
taught it to speak--to repeat things after him, even "God Save the
Queen." Some people say that he ruined the bird by these methods. Others
maintain that, on the contrary, but for him the bird would have died of
a disease akin to the staggers. They say, moreover, that the tameness
and docility of the bird, while he was looking after it, have been
greatly exaggerated, and they deny that it was entirely bald of its old
gay feathers.
There you have a brief statement of the great Swinburne question, which,
it seems likely, will last as long as the name of Swinburne is
remembered. It is not a question of any importance; but that will not
prevent us from arguing it hotly. The world takes a malicious joy in
jibing at men of genius and their associates, and a generous joy in
defending them from jibes. Further, the discussion that interests the
greatest number of people is discussion that has come down to a
personal level. Ten people will be bored by an argument as to the nature
of Swinburne's genius for one who will be bored by an argument as to the
nature of Swinburne's submissiveness to Watts-Dunton. Was Watts-Dunton,
in a phrase deprecated by the editors of a recent book of letters, a
"kind of amiable Svengali"? Did he allow Swinburne to have a will of his
own? Did Swinburne, in going to Putney, go to the Devil? Or did not
Watts-Dunton rather play the part of the good Samaritan? Unfortunately,
all those who have hitherto attempted to describe the relations of the
two men have succeeded only in making them both appear ridiculous. Mr.
Gosse, a man of letters with a sting, has done it cleverly. The others,
like the editors to whom I have referred, have done it inadvertently.
They write too solemnly. If Swinburne had lost a trouser-button, they
would not have felt it inappropriate, one feels, for the Archbishop of
Canterbury to hurry to the scene and go down on his knees on the floor
to look for it.... Well, no doubt, Swinburne was an absurd character.
And so was Watts-Dunton. And so, perhaps, is the Archbishop of
Canterbury.
Most of us have, at one time or another, fallen under the spell of
Swinburne owing to the genius with which he turned into music the
enthusiasm of the heretic. He fluttered through the sooty and Sabbatic
air of the Victorian era, uttering melodious cries of protest against
everything in morals, politics, and religion for which Queen Victoria
seemed to stand. He was like a rebellious boy who takes more pleasure in
breaking the Sabbath than in the voice of nightingales. He was one of
the few Englishmen of genius who have understood the French zest for
shocking the bourgeois. He had little of his own to express, but he
discovered the heretic's gospel in Gautier, and Baudelaire and set it
forth in English in music that he might have learned from the Sirens
who sang to Ulysses. He revelled in blasphemous and licentious fancies
that would have made Byron's hair stand on end. Nowadays, much of the
blasphemy and licentiousness seems flat and unprofitable as Government
beer. But in those days it seemed heady as wine and beautiful as a
mediaeval tale. There was always in Swinburne more of pose than of
passion. That is why we have to some extent grown tired of him. But in
the atmosphere of Victorianism his pose was original and astonishing. He
was anti-Christ in a world that had annexed Christ rather than served
him. Nowadays, there is such an abundance of anti-Christs that the part
seems hardly worth playing by a man of first-rate ability. Consequently,
we have to remember the circumstances in which they were written in
order to appreciate to the full many of Swinburne's poems and even some
of the amusing outbursts of heresy in his letters. Still, even to-day,
one cannot but enjoy the gusto with which he praised
Trelawney--Shelley's and Byron's Trelawney--"the most splendid old man I
have seen since Landor and my own grandfather":--
Of the excellence of his principles I will say but this: that I did
think, by the grace of Saban (unto whom, and not unto me, be the
glory and thanksgiving. Amen: Selah), I was a good atheist and a
good republican; but in the company of this magnificent old rebel,
a lifelong incarnation of the divine right of insurrection, I felt
myself, by comparison, a Theist and a Royalist.
In another letter he writes in the same gay, under-graduatish strain of
marriage:--
When I hear that a personal friend has fallen into matrimonial
courses, I feel the same sorrow as if I had heard of his lapsing
into theism--a holy sorrow, unmixed with anger; for who am I to
judge him? I think at such a sight, as the preacher--was it not
Baxter?--at the sight of a thief or murderer led to the gallows:
"There, but for the grace of----, goes A.C.S.," and drop a tear
over fallen man.
There was, it is only fair to say, a great deal in Swinburne's
insurrectionism that was noble, or, at least, in tune with nobleness.
But it is impossible to persuade oneself that he was ever among the
genuine poets of liberty. He loved insurrectionism for its own sake. He
revelled in it in the spirit of a rhetorician rather than of a martyr.
He was a glorious humbug, a sort of inverted Pecksniff. Even his
republicanism cannot have gone very deep if it is true, as certain of
his editors declare, that having been born within the precincts of
Belgravia "was an event not entirely displeasing to a man of his
aristocratic leanings." Swinburne, it seems, was easily pleased. One of
his proudest boasts was that he and Victor Hugo bore a close resemblance
to each other in one respect: both of them were almost dead when they
were born, "certainly not expected to live an hour." There was also one
great difference between them. Swinburne never grew up.
His letters, some of which Messrs. Hake and Compton Rickett have given
us, are interesting and amusing, but they do not increase one's opinion
of Swinburne's mind. He reveals himself as a sensitive critic in his
remarks on the proofs of Rossetti's poems, in his comments on Morris,
and in his references to Tennyson's dramas. But, as a rule, his
intemperance of praise and blame makes his judgments appear mere
eccentricities of the blood. He could not praise Falstaff, for instance,
without speaking of "the ever dear and honoured presence of Falstaff,"
and applauding the "sweet, sound, ripe toothsome, wholesome kernel" of
Falstaff's character as well as humour. He even defied the opinion of
his idol, Victor Hugo, and contended that Falstaff was not really a
coward. All the world will agree that Swinburne was right in glorifying
Falstaff. He glorified him, however, on the wrong plane. He mixed his
planes in the same way in his paean over Captain Webb's feat in swimming
the English Channel. "I consider it," he said, "as the greatest glory
that has befallen England since the publication of Shelley's greatest
poem, whatever that may have been." This is shouting, not speech. But
then, as I have said, Swinburne never grew up. He never learned to
speak. He was ever a shouter. The question that has so far not been
settled is: Did Watts-Dunton put his hand over Swinburne's mouth and
forcibly stop him from shouting? As we know, he certainly stopped him
from swearing before ladies, except in French. But, as for shouting,
Swinburne had already exhausted himself when he went to the Pines.
Meanwhile, questions of this sort have begun to absorb us to such a
degree that we are apt to forget that Swinburne after all _was_ a man of
genius--a man with an entrancing gift of melody--spiritually an echo,
perhaps, but aesthetically a discoverer, a new creature, the most
amazing ecstatician of our time.