There is probably some foundation for the belief, often held in these
days, that the production of high poetry is becoming more difficult,
partly because the environment of modern civilisation lends itself
less and less to artistic treatment, as mechanism supersedes human
effort, and partly through the operation of other causes. It has been
plausibly argued that most things worth saying have been said already;
that even the words best fitted for poetic expression have been worn
out, have been weakened by familiar usage or soiled by misuse, and
that the resources of language for adequate presentation of ideas and
feelings are running very low. Nevertheless, we all look forward
hopefully to the coming of the original genius who is to strike a
fresh note and inaugurate a new era, as pious Mohammedans expect
another Imam. Yet his coming may not be in our time, and meanwhile the
poetic lamp is burning dimly; it is just kept alight by the assiduous
trimming of the disciples of the great men who have passed or are
passing away, by the minor poets who strike a few musical chords that
catch the ear, but who are not recalled by the audience when they have
played their part and left the stage. The stars that shone in the
bright constellation of Victorian poets have been setting one by one,
until two only remain of those who were the pride of the generation
to which they belong, for whom we may predict that they will hold a
permanent place in English literature. It is now nearly sixty years
since Mr. Meredith's first poems were published. Mr. Swinburne is
about ten years his junior, both in age and in authorship; one may
perhaps assume that the work upon which their reputations will rest is
finished for both of them. Mr. Meredith's poetry has very recently
been the subject of a very complete and sympathetic study by Mr.
George Trevelyan. In this article we shall make an attempt to
delineate, briefly of necessity and therefore inadequately, the
characteristic qualities of form and thought, the technical methods
and intellectual temperament which distinguish the younger poet, who
may be destined to be the last survivor of an illustrious company.
If we accept the theory that art, like nature, follows the principle
of continuous development, that its existing state is closely linked
with its past, it is not easy to affiliate Mr. Swinburne to any direct
literary predecessors. Undoubtedly we may assign to him poetical
kinship with Shelley; he has the same love for classical myths and
allegories, for the embodiment of nature in the beautiful figures of
the antique. Light and shade, a quiet landscape, a tumultuous storm,
stir him with the same sensuous emotion. He has Shelley's passion for
the sea; he is fond of invoking the old divinities who presided over
the fears, hopes, and desires of mankind. He has also Shelley's
rebellious temper, the unflinching revolt against dogmatic authority
and fundamental beliefs which rightly shocked our grandfathers in
'Queen Mab' and a few other poems; he is even less disposed than
Shelley to the hypocrisy which does unwilling homage to virtue. On the
other hand, Mr. Swinburne's pantheism has not Shelley's metaphysical
note; the conception of an indwelling spirit guiding and moulding the
phenomenal world has dropped out; there is no pure idealism of this
sort in Mr. Swinburne's verse.
It may be said, truly, that some of Mr. Swinburne's poetry shows the
influence of the later French Romanticists, of the reaction toward
mediaevalism which is represented in England by Scott, and which
culminated in France with Victor Hugo, for whom the English poet's
admiration is unmeasured. That movement, however, had almost ceased on
our side of the Channel at the time when it had reached, or was just
passing, its climax in France. And, indeed, by 1835 the style and
sentiment of English poetry was undergoing a remarkable change. Its
magnificent efflorescence, which the first quarter of the nineteenth
century had seen in full bloom, had faded away. It had sprung up in an
era of great wars and revolution, amid the struggles of nations to
shake off the incubus of despotisms, to free themselves from the yoke
of foreigners. The cause of political liberty inspired the noblest
verse of Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron:
Yet Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying,
Streams like a thunderstorm against the wind--'
But in England this ardent spirit had evaporated during the years of
industrial prosperity and mechanical progress which came in with a
long peace after twenty years of fighting; and during the next
generation a milder tone prevailed. For an interval we had only
second-rate artists in verse. The fiery enthusiasts, the despisers of
respectability, were succeeded by poets who were decently emotional,
pensive in thought, tame or affected in style, domestic in theme, with
feeble echoes of the true romantic note in Mrs. Hemans and others.
Next, in the fulness of time, came Tennyson and Browning, to raise
the level of English poetry by their deeper views of life, their
elevation of thought, and their incomparably greater imaginative
power. Tennyson's composition is pellucid and exquisitely refined.
Browning is rugged and often obscure; he cares more for the force than
for the form of expression. The great problems of religion and
politics are seriously and cautiously handled. Browning analyses them
with caustic irony, while Tennyson, after making vain attempts to
solve them, finds consolation in the 'Higher Pantheism.' They are soon
joined by Matthew Arnold and Clough, who represent the melancholy
resignation of sensitive minds that have discarded the creeds, for
whom the miraculous history of Christianity is an illusion that has
faded into the common light of day. Meredith, poet and novelist, falls
back upon communion with Nature; he preaches the doctrine of duty, of
working while the light lasts; he is a high moralist who accepts
stoically the conclusion that nothing beyond terrestrial existence is
knowable.
Thus Mr. Swinburne's elder contemporaries and precursors in poetry
were all in different modes and fashions optimists; at any rate in
their earlier writings. They stood outside the Churches; dogmatic
beliefs they tacitly put away; they were in sympathy with the
Christian ideal apart from its supernatural element; they professed a
vague trust in an unseen Power, chequered here and there by
intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the
central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry
we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of
love, often passionate, never erotic, no tearing aside of drapery, not
a line to scare modesty. In Tennyson's most impassioned lyrics the
principal figure is the broken-hearted lover, jilted by Cousin Amy,
or caught in the garden with Maud--with intentions strictly honourable
in both cases. The treatment of love by Browning and Meredith is
chiefly psychological; they are usually concerned with the tragic
situations that it can involve, though the comic aspect of sexual
infatuation occasionally provokes cynicism. In politics all these
poets are no friends to democracy or seething radicalism; they adore
liberty, yet they are votaries of law and order; they have a hatred of
misrule, and generally a cheerful confidence in the world's evolution
toward better things. On social ethics the poets of the mid-Victorian
period wrote with philosophic sobriety; they maintained a strict moral
standard. In their wildest emotional flights they abstained from
irreverence or indecorum. They undoubtedly represented the prevailing
cast of thought, the taste and tendencies of the society to which they
belonged; the growing scepticism, the influence on established ideas
of advancing science and philosophy. Literature had been showing
distinct signs of sympathy with these novelties, but in the early
'sixties an open revolt was generally discountenanced.
Mr. Swinburne's first publications were two historic plays, of which
something will be said hereafter. In 1864 he turned suddenly from
modern history to ancient legend for his dramatic subject, when he
aroused immediate attention by _Atalanta in Calydon_, which reproduced
the structure and metrical arrangement of a Greek tragedy. The
dialogue has the purity of tone, the clear-cut concision that belong
to its Hellenic model. At the beginning we have a joyous chant full of
sound and colour, gradually changing into the elegiac strain of
foreboding, the dread of pitiless divinities, the lamentation for the
hero's unmerited fate. The exquisite modulations of the verse, the
splendid choral antiphonies captivated all who were susceptible to the
enchantment of poetry. The delicate adaptation of the English language
to quantitative harmonies in high resonant lyrics showed extraordinary
skill in the difficult enterprise of communicating the charm and
cadences of the antique masterpieces. It is a heroic drama, severe in
style and character as the _Antigone_ of Sophocles. Then in 1865 came
_Chastelard_, conceived and partly written, as Mr. Swinburne has told
us, when he was yet at Oxford, a play in which he turns from the Greek
tragedians to rejoin the historical dramatists. The turn is abrupt,
for no character could have been more alien to the Greek notions of
heroism than that of the love-sick knight who joyfully throws away his
life for an hour in his lady's chamber, tears up the warrant
reprieving him from execution, and accepts death to save Queen Mary's
fragile reputation. But although the keynote of Mr. Swinburne's coming
poetry is struck in _Chastelard_--the overpowering enthralment of
Love, a joy to live and die for--
'The mistress and mother of pleasure,
The one thing as certain as death'--
yet it gave the British public no fair warning of what followed almost
immediately.
Into the midst of a well-regulated, self-respecting modern society,
much moved by Tennyson's 'Idylls,' and altogether sympathetic with the
misfortunes of the blameless king--justly appreciative of the domestic
affection so tenderly portrayed by Coventry Patmore's 'Angel in the
House'--Mr. Swinburne charged impetuously with his _Poems and
Ballads_, waving the banner of revolt against conventional reticence,
kicking over screens and rending drapery--a reckless votary of
Astarte, chanting the 'Laus Veneris' and the worship of 'Dolores, Our
Lady of Pain.' From the calm and bright aspect of paganism he is
turning toward its darker side, to the mystic rites and symbolism
which cloaked the fierce primitive impulses of the natural man. The
burden of these first poems is chiefly the bitter sweetness of love,
the sighs and transports of those who writhe in the embrace of the
dread goddess, known by many names in all lands, or the glory of man's
brief springtide, when the veins are hot, soon to be cooled and
covered by frost and fallen leaves. In the clear ringing stanzas of
the 'Triumph of Time,' who sweeps away the brief summer of lovers'
delight, bringing them to autumnal regrets 'for days that are over and
dreams that are done,' and lastly to wintry oblivion, we have almost a
surfeit of voluptuous melancholy. In this, as in other poems, the sea,
changeful in mood, alternately fair and fierce, a bright smiling
surface covering a thousand graves, fascinating and treacherous, is
the mythical Aphrodite, the fatal woman, merciless to men. All this is
set out in lyrics which amaze the reader by their exuberance of
language, profusion of metaphor, and classic allusion; in rhymes that
strike on the ear like the clashing of cymbals. It is as if Atys and
his wild Maenads were flying through the quiet English woodlands. The
long-drawn, undulating lines, in a quieter strain, of the 'Hymn to
Proserpine' and of 'Hesperia,' with their subtle music, lay the reader
under their charm; but too many of these poems are tainted by a
flavour of morbidity, and the average Englishman is not easily thrown
by the most potent spells into a state of amorous delirium.
It is not surprising, therefore, that this first volume of poems,
saturated with intoxicating Hedonism, had, as Mr. Swinburne wrote in
the Dedicatory Preface appended to the full collection of his works,
'as quaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard
or read of.' The eruption of neo-paganism was sudden and unexpectedly
violent--the rumblings of scientific and philosophic scepticism had
given no warning of a volcanic explosion in this direction. The
current literature of 1865 was much more prudish and less outspoken
than it is at the present day; the gentlemanly licentiousness of
Byron's time had been completely suppressed; the moral tone of the
middle class was still outwardly Puritanic. English folk were by no
means prepared to rebuild the altars of the primitive deities who
presided over man's unquenchable desire, or to be otherwise than
somewhat aghast at the invocations of Astarte or Ashtaroth, or the cry
to Our Lady of Pain, the 'noble and nude and antique.' The result was
that the first edition of the _Poems and Ballads_ was withdrawn,
though they were reissued in the same year, when Mr. Swinburne
published a reply to his critics. Nevertheless, although the graver
and, we may say, the higher judges of what was admissible to a
nineteenth-century poet were entirely against him, it cannot be denied
that the impulsive youth of that generation felt the enchantment of
Mr. Swinburne's intoxicating love-potions--were sorely tempted to dash
down Tennyson on the drawing-room table, and to join the wild dance
round the shrine of Aphrodite Pandemia.
In the _Poems and Ballads_ Mr. Swinburne keeps on some terms, so to
speak, with theology. In the poem entitled 'A Litany' the Lord God
discourses with Biblical sternness to His people, who tremble before
Him, and threatens them with 'the inevitable Hell,' while the people
implore mercy--a strange excursion into the Semitic desert out of the
flowery field of paganism. And another poem is a pathetic rendering of
the story of St. Dorothy, a Christian martyr. It is true that he
looks back with aesthetic regret to the triumph of Christianity over
the picturesque polytheism, and that perhaps the finest poem in this
volume is the 'Hymn to Proserpine,' where a votary of the ancient
divinities confesses sorrowfully that a new and austere faith has
triumphed, but predicts that its kingdom will not last, will decline
and fall like the empire of the elder gods--
'All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and
be past;
Ye are gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you
at last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes
of things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you
for kings.'
The 'Hymn to Proserpine' is a fine conception of the champion of a
lost cause standing unmoved among the ruins of his Pantheon. But the
quiet dignity of his attitude is marred by the lines in which the
votary of fair forms turns with loathing from the new faith which has
conquered by the blood and agony of saints and martyrs. The violent
invective is like a red streak across the canvas of a picturesque and
highly imaginative composition. Yet if he had been reminded that
Lucretius, standing in the midst of paganism, sternly denounced the
evils and cruelties of religion, Mr. Swinburne would probably have
replied that the Roman poet, could he have been born again fourteen or
fifteen centuries later in his native country, would have found these
evils enormously increased, and that the sacrifice of Iphigenia in
Aulis was as nothing to the hecatombs of the Inquisition.
His intense imagination summons up a bright and luxurious vision of
the pre-Christian civilisation in Greece and Rome, as yet little
affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in
contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old
nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts,
by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal
with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed
animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well to
follow the example, in this respect, of these great masters of his own
art; since his early defects and excesses are mainly due to his having
missed their lesson by disregarding the limitations which they
scrupulously observed.
When he reissued the _Poems and Ballads_, Mr. Swinburne took occasion,
as we have said, to reply, in a pamphlet, to the strictures and strong
protests which they had aroused. He was at some trouble to discover
the passages or phrases 'that had drawn down such sudden thunder from
the serene heavens of public virtue': he was comically puzzled to
comprehend why the reviewers were scandalised. He trampled with
sarcasm and scorn upon canting critics, and retorted that the prurient
prudery of their own minds suggested the impurities which they found
in works of pure art. There is nothing, he insists, lovelier, as there
is nothing more famous in later Hellenic art, than the statue of
Hermaphroditus, yet his translation of a sculptured poem into written
verse has given offence! One might reply that a subject which is
irreproachable, on the score of purity, in cold marble, may take a
very different colour when it is dilated upon in burning verse.
The controversy had its humorous side; but we have no intention of
stirring up again the smoke and fire of battles fought long ago. Mr.
Swinburne held his ground defiantly, and the appearance of _Songs and
Ballads_, published in 1871, showed no signs of contrition, or of
concession to inveterate prejudices. In the course of the intervening
five years the empire of Napoleon III. had fallen with a mighty
crash; Italy had been united under one Italian dynasty; Garibaldi had
become famous, and the Papal States had been absorbed into the Italian
kingdom. This volume, which was dedicated to Joseph Mazzini, shows the
ardent enthusiasm for the triumph of liberty, intellectual and
political, which runs through all Mr. Swinburne's poetry. The 'Song of
the Standard,' the 'Halt before Rome,' the 'Marching Song,' the
'Insurrection of Candia,' are poems that reflect current events; and
the 'Litany of Nations' is the national anthem of peoples striving for
freedom. But his verse rises to its highest pitch of exultation in the
glorification of emancipation of Man. The final line of the 'Hymn to
Man' is
'Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things';
and in one stanza of 'Hertha' is condensed all the wild declamation
against deities and despots that pervades his poetry at this stage,
with his joy in the deification of humanity:
'A creed is a rod,
And a crown is of night;
But this thing is God,
To be man with thy might,
To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life
As the light.'
There are no love-lyrics in this volume. He now stands forth as the
uncompromising enemy of established religions, a fierce assailant of
tyrannies, spiritual or temporal, an iconoclast who denounces churches
and tabernacles, priests and kings, the Roman Pope and the Jewish
Jehovah; one for whom the Papacy is, as it was to Hobbes, the Kingdom
of Darkness, its record blotted with tears and stained with blood, the
'grey spouse of Satan,' as he styled her in a later poem, sitting by a
fire that is fed with the bones of her victims. From this time
forward he declares open war upon theology, and even upon Theism; he
is the mortal foe of bigots and tyrants; his praise is for Giordano
Bruno, for Pelagius the British monk, born by the northern sea; for
Voltaire, for all who have fought and suffered in the cause of
intellectual emancipation. The prevailing religious beliefs seem to
him relics of mediaeval superstition, sophistry, and metaphysic--he
contrasts them with the bright and free nature worship of the old
world; he is a bitter enemy of the lofty spiritualism, the mighty
world-religion, before which the fair humanities of the _juventus
mundi_ had faded away. His delight is in the virile qualities of the
earlier civilisations, the patriotism, the heroic temper, the ardour
for civic liberties, the Hellenic delight in noble form and in
physical beauty. He is fretted by the restraint which Christian
authority imposes upon the unruly affections of sinful men; he scorns
the terrors of judgment to come, the prostration of the multitude
before the threat of eternal punishment, and the promise of celestial
recompense for terrestrial misery. Death is the 'sleep eternal in an
eternal night'; and the one thing as certain as death is pleasure. He
is the prophet of Hedonism; he is for giving the passions a loose
rein, for drinking the wine of rapture to the lees before we lie
'Deep in dim death, beneath the grass
Where no thought stings.'
Nevertheless, as the years go on, the note of regret and despair
quiets down, the restless spirit of the poet is subdued to the calmer
influences of nature; the charm of scenery, the association of places
with memories more frequently bring softer inspirations. In his
earlier poems his imaginative power found full scope in rendering the
impressions of natural beauty, the glory of elemental strife; as in
the 'Songs of the Four Seasons,' where the approach of a storm from
the sea is likened to a descent of the Norse pirates on to the
peaceful coast, and the metaphor produces a spirited picture:
'As men's cheeks faded
On shores invaded
When shorewards waded
The lords of fight;
When churl and craven
Saw hard on haven
The wide-winged raven
At mainmast height;
When monks affrighted
To windward sighted
The birds full-flighted
Of swift sea-kings;
So earth turns paler
When Storm the sailor
Steers in with a roar in the race of his wings.'
But more frequently the outlook on sea and land induces reverie, vague
yearnings, retrospective sadness, and, like all true artists, he
transposes into the landscape his own personal emotions, what he sees,
feels, and remembers. In the poem of 'Hesperia' the view of the sunset
over the sea stirs tender memories; the 'deep-tide wind blowing in
with the water' seems to be wafting his absent love back to him, and
his heart floats out toward her 'as the refluent seaweed moves in the
languid exuberant stream.' In such pieces the fierce amorous obsession
has been shaken off; he is no longer vexed by Shakespeare's[32]
hyperbolic fiend, his mood is comparatively gentle and pathetic, as in
the beautiful verses of 'A Forsaken Garden,' where his consummate
faculty of metrical expression, wherein sense and sound are matched
and inseparable, reaches, perhaps, its highest watermark:
'Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song;
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.'
In the series of landscape sketches grouped under the title of _A
Midsummer Holiday_, published nearly twenty years after the _Poems and
Ballads_, the treatment of his subject has become more impersonal. The
impression or idea is still coloured by transmission through the
spectator's mind. Mr. Swinburne has himself observed, very truly, that
'mere descriptive poetry of the prepense and formal kind is
exceptionally liable to incur and to deserve the charge of dulness:
it is unnecessary to emphasise or obtrude the personal note, the
presence or emotion of a spectator, but it is necessary to make it
felt and keep it perceptible if the poem is to have life in it or
even a right to live.'[33]
This is the right doctrine, and we may add that it is applicable as a
criticism to some of his earlier descriptive pieces, where the intense
personal feeling is somewhat too intense and disproportionate; so that
a reader gifted with less keenness of sensibility is disconcerted by
insistence on effusive moods with which he cannot be expected to be in
full sympathy. Mr. Swinburne might reply that for such dullards he
does not write; but the finest wines are too heady for a morning's
draught. In his more mature poems he appears to have deliberately held
back what may be termed the subjective emotion; the landscapes are no
longer peopled by figures or memories of the past; the thoughts which
they suggest are such as find response in all minds that are in accord
with the deeper and more subtle relations of human life to its
environment. He himself has indeed told us[34] that to many of his
studies of English land and sea no intimacy of years and no
association with the past has given any colour of emotion, that only
so much of the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring
these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive
that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the
spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or
woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the
sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The _Midsummer Holiday_ group
has two pictures of sweet homeliness--'The Mill Garden' and 'On a
Country Road'--the harvest of a quiet eye (in Wordsworth's phrase),
such as a rambling artist might jot down in his travelling sketch
book, of value the more remarkable because they are not in Mr.
Swinburne's usual manner. They give relief to the breadth and grandeur
of the other descriptions of the ocean, the crags, and the storms. For
to Swinburne, as to all the romantic English poets, the ocean stream
which encircles their island is an inexhaustible source of delight and
pride; it is our ever present defence in time of trouble; the fountain
of our country's wealth and honour; it is our traditional battlefield;
the winds and the waves are the breath and the force of our national
being. And through Mr. Swinburne's poetry runs a vein of undiluted
love for his native land. In his poem 'On the South Coast' he looks
out from 'the green, smooth-swelling downs' over the broad blue water,
and his thought is expressed in its final stanza:
Fair and dear is the land's face here, and fair man's work as a
man's may be:
Dear and fair as the sunbright air is here the record that speaks
him free;
Free by birth of a sacred earth, and regent ever of all the sea.'
The 'Autumn Vision' is an ode to the south-west wind, which has so
often filled the sails of the English warships:
'Wind beloved of earth and sky and sea beyond all winds that blow,
Wind whose might in fight was England's on her mightiest warrior
day,
South-west wind, whose breath for her was life, and fire to scourge
her foe,
Steel to smite and death to drive him down an unreturning way,
Well-beloved and welcome, sounding all the clarions of the sky,
Rolling all the marshalled waters toward the charge that storms
the shore.'
Charles Kingsley, like a hardy Norseman, preferred the north-east
gale. To him the south-west wind is
'The ladies' breeze,
Bringing back their lovers
Out of all the seas,'
while Mr. Swinburne hears in the rushing south-western gale
'the sound of wings gigantic,
Wings whose measure is the measure of the measureless Atlantic,'
and, after the storm,
'The grim sea swell, grey, sleepless and sad as a soul estranged.'
'A Swimmer's Dream' gives us the poetry of floating on the slow roll
of the waves, some cloudy November morning.
'Dawn is dim on the dark soft water,
Soft and passionate, dark and sweet.'
'Loch Torridon' preserves the charm of what might be a landlocked
lake, if it were not that the rippling tide flows in by an almost
invisible inlet from the sea. From his earliest to his latest poems
the magic of nature's changing aspects fascinates him; they inspire
him with a kind of ecstasy that finds utterance in the variety of his
verse, which reflects all the lights and shades of earth, sea, and
atmosphere. One may remark, by the way, that in proportion as his
poetic strength matures, the pagan gods and goddesses, who disported
themselves so freely in his juvenile verse, visit him much more
rarely; his imagery draws much less profusely upon the classic
mythology for symbols and figures of divinities whose diaphanous robes
are ill suited to our northern climate and Puritanic traditions, in
the wolds and forests once sacred to Thor and Woden.
* * * * *
It will be admitted by Mr. Swinburne's least indulgent critics that
his poetry displays throughout a marvellous power of execution. He
runs over all the lyrical and elegiac chords with unabated facility;
his metrical variations and musical phrasing bring out and extend the
capacity and fertility of our language as a poetic instrument; he is
master of his materials. No doubt there is some repetition, some
iteration, which becomes slightly wearisome, of his favourite rhymes,
indicating, what has been observed independently of reference to this
particular writer, that the resources of the English language for
terminal assonance, under the stringent conditions required by the
modern rules of versification, are inevitably limited and show signs
of exhaustion.
In a Note on Poetry appended to his latest volume of verses,[35] Mr.
John Davidson has classed rhyme as a kind of disease of poetry. Rhyme,
he says, is probably more than seven hundred years old--in Europe, he
must mean, for it is far older in Asia, whence it originally came--and
since the days of the troubadours and Minnesingers it has corrupted,
in his opinion, the ear of the world. At best it is, he thinks, a
decadent mode, imposing shackles on free poetic expression; and
though in these fetters great poets have done magnificent work, in
their finest rhymed verse he finds a feeling of effort. They have
always been obliged to throw in something that need not have been
said, some words inserted under compulsion, to bring the rhyme about.
Mr. Davidson declares that the true glory of free untrammelled poetry
shines out in the rhythmic periods of blank verse. That there may be
some truth, or at least some convenience, in this theory of the poetic
art, the modern poet may not be concerned to deny; for, as we have
already said, rhymes will not withstand incessant and familiar usage;
they become commonplaces, and the rhymer wanders away from the natural
direction of his thought in search of fresh ones. The most devout
admirers of Browning must admit that his verse is often distorted in
this way--so that a fine stanza sometimes finishes with a jolt and
ends with a tag--and it must be allowed that this necessity of making
both ends meet is bad for the poetic conscience, a temptation to
indefensible laxities. Even Mr. Swinburne, the inventor of exquisite
harmonies, whose work is indisputably sincere, can be occasionally
observed to be diverging from the straight line of his impetuous
flight, hovering and making circuits that lead up skilfully to the
indispensable rhyme. More frequently, perhaps, there is a tendency to
interpose some metaphor, or rather far-fetched allusion, for the sake
of the clear, full, recurrent intonation of echoing words that can
only be marshalled into their places by artistic ingenuity.
We may so far agree with Mr. Davidson that most of the sublime
passages in English poetry are in blank verse, though it may be
noticed that the four lines which he quotes from _Macbeth_,[36] as
containing the 'topmost note in the stupendous agony of the drama,'
are rhymed. The management of rhyme is a difficult and very delicate
art; it is an instrument that requires a first-class performer, like
Mr. Swinburne, to bring out its potency; to this art the English
lyric, the ode and the song, owe their musical perfection. Mr.
Swinburne, in an essay upon Matthew Arnold's _New Poems_ (1867), has
said, truly, that 'rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in
England'; and that 'to throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a
modern song is a wilful abdication of half the charm and half the
power of verse.' To this general rule he might possibly admit one
exception--Tennyson's short poem beginning with 'Tears, idle tears,'
which is so delicately modulated that the absence of rhyme is not
missed. At any rate it is certain that all popular verse needs this
terminal note; for a ballad in blank verse is inconceivable. On the
other hand, the proper use of rhyme demands a fine ear, which is a
rare gift; for our language has no formal rules of prosody, so that in
maladroit hands rhyme becomes an intolerable jingle. At the present
day, however, there is a tendency to run into excessive elaboration,
largely due to superficial imitation of such masters of the poetic art
as Tennyson, and especially Swinburne, so that we have a copious
outpouring of feeble melodies.
Mr. Swinburne, on the contrary, is never feeble; he combines technical
excellence with the power of vehement, often much too violent,
expression. His character may be defined by the French word 'entier';
he is uncompromising in praise or blame. He insists (to quote his own
words) that 'the worship of beauty, though beauty be itself
transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be
simple and absolute'; nor will he tolerate reserve or veiled
intimations of a poet's inmost thought.
'Nothing,' he has written, 'in verse or out of verse is more
wearisome than the delivery of reluctant doubt, of half-hearted
hope and half-incredulous faith. A man who suffers from the strong
desire either to believe or disbelieve something he cannot, may be
worthy of sympathy, is certainly worthy of pity, until he begins to
speak; and if he tries to speak in verse, he misses the implement
of an artist.'
He is pained by Matthew Arnold's 'occasional habit of harking back and
loitering in mind among the sepulchres.... Nothing which leaves us
depressed is a true work of art.' Yet, it may be answered, the habit
of musing among tombs has inspired good poetry; and when doubt and
dejection, perplexed meditation over insoluble problems, are in the
air, a poet does well to express the dominant feelings of his time;
and a modern Hamlet is no inartistic figure.
In this respect, however, Mr. Swinburne may have found reason to
qualify, latterly, the absoluteness of his poetic principles. He has
been from the first a generous critic of those contemporary poets whom
he recognised as kindred souls. He awards unmeasured praise to Matthew
Arnold, while of his defects and shortcomings he speaks plainly. He
does loyal homage to Browning in a sequence of sonnets, and his
tribute to Tennyson was paid in a lofty 'Threnody,' when that noble
spirit passed away. For Victor Hugo he proclaimed, as all know,
nothing short of unbounded adoration--he is 'the greatest writer whom
the world has seen since Shakespeare'; though it may be doubted
whether in his own country Hugo now stands upon so supreme a pinnacle.
To other eminent men of his time his poetry accords admiration,
chiefly to the champions of free thought and of resistance to
oppression; and, in a poem entitled 'Two Leaders,' he salutes two
antagonists as he might do before crossing swords with them. The
leaders are not named; the first is evidently Newman:
'O great and wise, clear-souled and high of heart,
One the last flower of Catholic love, that grows
Amid bare thorn their only thornless rose,
From the fierce juggling of the priest's loud mart
Yet alien, yet unspotted and apart
From the blind hard foul rout whose shameless shows
Mock the sweet heaven whose secret no man knows
With prayers and curses and the soothsayers' art.'