Swinburne, says Mr. Gosse, "was not quite like a human being." That is
chiefly what is the matter with his poetry. He did not write quite like
a human being. He wrote like a musical instrument. There are few poets
whose work is less expressive of personal passions. He was much given to
ecstasies, but it is remarkable that most of these were echoes of other
people's ecstasies. He sought after rapture both in politics and poetry,
and he took as his masters Mazzini in the one and Victor Hugo in the
other. He has been described as one who, while conversing, even in his
later years, kept "bobbing all the while like a cork on the sea of his
enthusiasms." And, in a great deal of his rapture, there is much of the
levity as well as the "bobbing" quality of the cork. He who sang the
hymns of the Republic in his youth, ended his life as
rhetorician-in-chief of the Jingoes against the Irish and the Boers. Nor
does one feel that there was any philosophic basis for the change in his
attitude as there was for a similar change in the attitude of Burke and
Wordsworth in their later years. He was influenced more by persons than
by principles. One does not find any real vision of a Republic in his
work as one finds it in the work of Shelley. He had little of the
saintliness of spirit which marks the true Republican and which turns
politics into music in _The Masque of Anarchy_. His was not one of those
tortured souls, like Francis Adams's, which desire the pulling-down of
the pillars of the old, bad world more than love or fame. There is no
utterance of the spirit in such lines as:--
Let our flag run out straight in the wind!
The old red shall be floated again
When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned,
When the names that are twenty are ten;
When the devil's riddle is mastered
And the galley-bench creaks with a Pope,
We shall see Buonaparte the bastard
Kick heels with his throat in a rope.
It is possible for those who agree with the sentiments to derive a
certain satisfaction from verse of this sort as from a vehement leading
article. But there is nothing here beyond the rhetoric of the hot fit.
There is nothing to call back the hot fit in anybody older than a boy.
Even when Swinburne was writing out of his personal experience, he
contrived somehow to empty his verse of personality and to put
sentimentalism and rhetoric in its place. We have an instance of this in
the story of the love-affair recorded by Mr. Gosse. Swinburne, at the
age of twenty-five, fell in love with a kinswoman of Sir John Simon, the
pathologist. "She gave him roses, she played and sang to him, and he
conceived from her gracious ways an encouragement which she was far from
seriously intending." Swinburne proposed to her, and, possibly from
nervousness, she burst out laughing. He was only human in feeling
bitterly offended, and "they parted on the worst of terms." He went off
to Northumberland to escape from his wretchedness, and there he wrote
_The Triumph of Time_, which Mr. Gosse maintains is "the most profound
and the most touching of all his personal poems." He assured Mr. Gosse,
fourteen years afterwards, that "the stanzas of this wonderful lyric
represented with the exactest fidelity the emotions which passed through
his mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but the
infinite pity and the pain." Beautiful though the poem intermittently
is, however, it seems to me to lack that radiance of personal emotion
which we find in the great love poems. There is much decoration of music
of a kind of which Swinburne and Poe alone possessed the secret, as in
the verse beginning:--
There lived in France a singer of old
By the tideless, dolorous, midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman and none but she.
But is there more than the decoration of music in the verses which
express the poet's last farewell to his passion?
I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,
Fill the days of my daily breath
With fugitive things not good to treasure,
Do as the world doth, say as it saith;
But if we had loved each other--O sweet,
Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet,
The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure,
To feel you tread it to dust and death--
Ah, had I not taken my life up and given
All that life gives and the years let go,
The wine and honey, the balm and leaven,
The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?
Come life, come death, not a word be said;
Should I lose you living, and vex you dead?
I shall never tell you on earth, and in heaven,
If I cry to you then, will you care to know?
Browning, unquestionably, could have expressed Swinburne's passion
better than Swinburne did it himself. He would not have been content
with a sequence of vague phrases that made music. With him each phrase
would have been dramatic and charged with a personal image or a personal
memory.
Swinburne, however, was a great musician in verse and beyond
belittlement in this regard. It would be incongruous to attempt a close
comparison between him and Longfellow, but he was like Longfellow in
having a sense of music out of all proportion to the imaginative content
of his verse. There was never a distinguished poet whose work endures
logical analysis so badly. Mr. Arthur Symons, in a recent essay, refers
scornfully to those who say that "the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's
form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance." But
he produces no evidence on the other side. He merely calls on us to
observe the way in which Swinburne scatters phrases and epithets of
"imaginative subtlety" by the way, while most poets "present us with
their best effects deliberately." It seems to me, on the contrary, that
Swinburne's phrasing is far from subtle. He induces moods of excitement
and sadness by his musical scheme rather than by individual phrases. Who
can resist, for example, the spell of the opening verses of _Before the
Mirror_, the poem of enchantment addressed to Whistler's _Little White
Girl?_ One hesitates to quote again lines so well known. But it is as
good an example as one can find of the pleasure-giving qualities of
Swinburne's music, apart from his phrases and images:--
White rose in red rose-garden
Is not so white;
Snowdrops that plead for pardon
And pine from fright,
Because the hard East blows
Over their maiden rows,
Grow not as thy face grows from pale to bright.
Behind the veil, forbidden,
Shut up from sight,
Love, is there sorrow hidden,
Is there delight?
Is joy thy dower or grief,
White rose of weary leaf,
Late rose whose life is brief, whose loves are light?
The snowdrop image in the first verse is, charming as is the sound of
the lines, nonsense. The picture of the snowdrops pleading for pardon
and pining from fright would have been impossible to a poet with the
realizing genius of the great writers. Swinburne's sense of rhythm,
however, was divorced in large measure from his sense of reality. He was
a poet without the poet's gift of sight. William Morris complained that
Swinburne's poems did not make pictures. Swinburne had not the necessary
sense of the lovely form of the things around him. His attitude to
Nature was lacking, as Mr. Gosse suggests, in that realism which gives
coherence to poetry. To quote Mr. Gosse's own words:--
Swinburne did not live, like Wordsworth, in a perpetual communion
with Nature, but exceptional, and even rare, moments of
concentrated observation wakened in him an ecstasy which he was
careful to brood upon, to revive, and perhaps, at last, to
exaggerate. As a rule, he saw little of the world around him, but
what he did see was presented to him in a blaze of limelight.
Nearly all his poems are a little too long, a little tedious, for the
simple reason that the muzziness of vision in them, limelight and all,
is bewildering to the intelligence. There are few of his poems which
close in splendour equal to the splendour of their opening verses. _The
Garden of Proserpine_ is one of the few that keep the good wine for the
last. Here, however, as in the rest of his poems, we find beautiful
passages rather than beauty informing the whole poem. Swinburne's poems
have no spinal cord. One feels this even in that most beautiful of his
lyrics, the first chorus in _Atalanta in Calydon._ But how many poets
are there who could have sustained for long the miracle of "When the
hounds of spring are on winter traces," and the verse that follows? Mrs.
Disney Leith tells us in a charming book of recollections and letters
that the first time Swinburne recited this poem to her was on horseback,
and one wonders whether he had the ecstasy of the gallop and the music
of racing horses in his blood when he wrote the poem. His poems are
essentially expressions of ecstasy. His capacity for ecstasy was the
most genuine thing about him. A thunderstorm gave him "a more vivid
pleasure than music or wine." His pleasure in thunder, in the gallop of
horses, in the sea, was, however, one fancies, largely an intoxication
of music. It is like one's own enjoyment of his poems. This, too, is
simply an intoxication of music.
The first series of _Poems and Ballads_, it must be admitted, owed its
success for many years to other things besides the music. It broke in
upon the bourgeois moralities of nineteenth-century England like a
defiance. It expressed in gorgeous wordiness the mood of every
green-sick youth of imagination who sees that beauty is being banished
from the world in the name of goodness. One has only to look at the grey
and yellow and purple brick houses built during the reign of Victoria to
see that the green-sick youth had a good right to protest. A world that
makes goodness the enemy of beauty and freedom is a blasphemous denial
of both goodness and beauty, and young men will turn from it in disgust
to the praise of Venus or any other god or goddess that welcomes beauty
at the altar. The first volume of _Poems and Ballads_ was a challenge to
the lie of tall-hatted religion. There is much truth in Mr. Gosse's
saying that "the poet is not a lotus-eater who has never known the
Gospel, but an evangelist turned inside out." He had been brought up
Puritanically by his mother, who kept all fiction from him in his
childhood, but grounded him with the happiest results in the Bible and
Shakespeare. "This acquaintance with the text of the Bible," says Mr.
Gosse, "he retained to the end of his life, and he was accustomed to be
emphatic about the advantage he had received from the beauty of its
language." His early poems, however, were not a protest against the
atmosphere of his home, but against the atmosphere of what can only be
described by the worn-out word "respectability." Mrs. Disney Leith
declares that she never met a character more "reverent-minded." And,
certainly, the irreverence of his most pagan poems is largely an
irreverence of gesture. He delighted in shocking his contemporaries, and
planned shocking them still further with a volume called _Lesbia
Brandon_, which he never published; but at heart he never freed himself
from the Hebrew awe in presence of good and evil. His _Aholibah_ is a
poem that is as moral in one sense as it is lascivious in another. As
Mr. Gosse says, "his imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum,
between the North and the South, between Paganism and Puritanism,
between resignation to the insticts and an ascetic repudiation of their
authority." It is the conflict between the two moods that is the most
interesting feature in Swinburne's verse, apart from its purely artistic
qualities. Some writers find Swinburne as great a magician as ever in
those poems in which he is free from the obsession of the flesh. But I
doubt if Swinburne ever rose to the same great heights in his later work
as in the two first series of _Poems and Ballads._ Those who praise him
as a thinker quote _Hertha_ as a masterpiece of philosophy in music, and
it was Swinburne's own favourite among his poems. But I confess I find
it a too long sermon. Swinburne's philosophy and religion were as vague
as his vision of the world about him. "I might call myself, if I
wished," he wrote in 1875, "a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake
and Shelley), but assuredly in no sense a Theist."
Mr. Gosse has written Swinburne's life with distinction and
understanding; but it was so eventless a life that the biographer's is
not an easy task. The book contains plenty of entertainment, however. It
is amusing to read of the author of _Anactoria_ as a child going about
with Bowdler's Shakespeare under his arm and, in later years, assisting
Jowett in the preparation of a _Child's Bible._