'Like a storm-god of the northern foams
Strong, wrought of rock that breasts and breaks the sea,'
in whom we recognise Carlyle. They are the powers of darkness, doomed
to fall and to vanish before the light; yet their genius commands
respect and even sympathy.
'With all our hearts we praise you whom ye hate,
High souls that hate us; for our hopes are higher,
* * * * *
Honour not hate we give you, love not fear,
Last prophets of past kind, who fill the dome
Of great dead Gods with wrath and wail, nor hear
Time's word and man's: "Go honoured hence, go home,
Night's childless children; here your hour is done;
Pass with the stars, and leave us with the sun."'
The concise energy of these lines, their slow metrical movement,
invest them with singular weight and dignity. The poet is confronting
two representatives, in principle, of Force and Authority, whose
prototypes in bygone times would undoubtedly have sent him to the
scaffold or to the stake; nor is it improbable that both Carlyle and
Newman, though in all other opinions they differed widely, would have
agreed that a revolutionary firebrand and a pestilent infidel
deserved some such fate. The poet might console himself with the
reflection that they must have abhorred each other's principles quite
as much as they detested his own.
In his later verse Mr. Swinburne still continues to wield his flaming
sword against priests and despots, against intellectual and political
servility. What may be termed the historical plea, the excuse for
ideas and institutions that they are the relics of evil days long
past, is no palliation for them to his mind; he would stamp them out
and utterly destroy them. In this respect his temperament has
unconsciously a strong tincture of the intolerance which he denounces;
he would sweep away Christianity as Christianity swept away
polytheism. Toward its Founder, as the type of human love and purity,
he is uniformly reverential; there is nothing in that supreme figure
that jars with that Religion of Humanity, which 'The Altar of
Righteousness' proclaims with high dithyrambic enthusiasm:
'Christ the man lives yet, remembered of man as dreams that leave
Light on eyes that wake and know not if memory bids them grieve.
* * * * *
Far above all wars and gospels, all ebb and flow of time,
Lives the soul that speaks in silence, and makes mute the earth
sublime.'
But of theology reigning by force and terror he is the implacable
enemy; and his intemperate violence leaves a stain on the bright
radiance of his poetry. It amounts to an artistic fault, undiminished
even in the later years which should have brought the philosophic
mind. Moreover, it has materially lessened the influence which so fine
a poetic genius should have exercised over the present generation,
among whom polemical ardour and bitterness may be thought to have
perceptibly cooled down, and to have become much less aggressive, in
science, philosophy, and literature, than among the preceding
generation. An age of tacit indifference, content with rationalistic
explanations, with the slow working of disillusion, dislikes and
discountenances outrageous scorn poured upon things that are
traditionally sacred; and to the English character extremes are always
distressing.
Mr. Swinburne's dramatic work, at any rate, takes us out of the strife
and turmoil of theologic war; we are on firm historic ground, dealing
with authentic events and persons. The plays of _Chastelard_,
_Bothwell_, and _Mary Stuart_ form a trilogy in which the most
romantic and eventful period of Scottish history is presented; they
constitute the epic-drama of Scotland, to adopt a definition applied
by Victor Hugo to the tragedy of _Bothwell_. It is impossible, in this
article, to find space for an adequate criticism of these remarkable
productions. Every leading poet of the nineteenth century has made
excursions into the dramatic field. We doubt whether any of them has
come out of the adventure much better than Mr. Swinburne. All of them
have given us, each in his own way, fine poetry, and, if we except
Byron, they have shown that the masters of lyrical music can strike
with power the high chords of blank verse. None of them have produced
plays that took any hold of a theatrical audience; in most cases they
were not intended for the stage.
The play of _Chastelard_ is too deeply saturated with amorous essences
throughout to be forcibly dramatic. The hero is in a high love-fever
from first to last, the passionate strain becomes monotonous, and
though he dies to save the Queen's honour, our minds are not purged
with much pity for him. In the long historical drama of _Bothwell_,
which has twenty-one scenes in its two acts, we have spirited
portraits of the fierce nobles who surrounded Mary Stuart during her
brief and distracted reign. The love passages are pauses in a course
of violent action, the assassination of Rizzio, the murder of Darnley
are not overcoloured melodramatically, and the scenes in and about the
Kirk of Field are darkened with the shadow of Darnley's imminent fate.
But Darnley's dream, presaging his coming doom, inevitably recalls the
dream of Clarence, and cannot but suffer from the reminiscence. We
might have something to say on the metrical construction of
Swinburne's blank verse, for he shares with Tennyson, though in a
minor degree, the distinction of having enlarged its scope and varied
its measure. But the subject would demand careful comparative
examination and analysis of different styles, such as is to be read,
with profit to all students of the art poetic, in Mr. J. B. Mayor's
_Chapters on English Metres_.
It will be understood that this article attempts no more than to
review the salient characteristics of Mr. Swinburne's poetry, to
indicate in some degree their connexion and development. It cannot but
fall far short, obviously, of being a comprehensive survey of his
contributions to English literature. We have made no reference, for
lack of space, to his treatment of chivalrous romance in _Tristram of
Lyonesse_, which Mr. Swinburne has rightly called 'the deathless
legend,' though, since its fascination has made it a subject for three
other contemporary poets, a comparison of their diverse manners of
handling the story would be interesting. It is with regret that we
have been compelled, also, to refrain from any adequate notice of Mr.
Swinburne's prose writings, for in regard to the poetry of his own
period the dissertations and judgments of one who combines high
imaginative faculty with scientific mastery of the metrical art must
have special value. Of the ordinary untrained criticism, the 'chorus
of indolent reviewers,' to use Tennyson's phrase, he is, we think, too
impatient. From a passage in his Dedicatory Epistle we gather that
some of the tribe have ventured so far as to insinuate that poetry
ought not to become a mere musical exercise. Mr. Swinburne's rejoinder
is that
'except to such ears as should always be closed against poetry,
there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient fulness
and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of
thought, to abide the analysis of any other than the purblind
scrutiny of prepossession or the squint-eyed inspection of
malignity.'
Apart from the wrathful form, the substance of what is here said
merits consideration, for undoubtedly the most musical of our poets,
from Shakespeare and Milton to Coleridge and Shelley, are those whose
verse has embodied the richest thought and has been instinct with the
deeper emotions. We must muster up courage to remark, nevertheless,
that while in Mr. Swinburne's finest poems the musical setting
accompanies and illuminates the thought or feeling, in some others the
underlying idea is too unsubstantial; its real presence is only
visible to the eye of implicit faith. Toward his fellow poets, his
equals and contemporaries, Mr. Swinburne's attitude is that of
generous enthusiasm, not excluding outspoken, yet courteous,
indication of defects, as may be seen in the essay[37] on Matthew
Arnold's _New Poems_, which is full of important observations on
poetry in general, beside some well-deserved strictures on Arnold's
shortcomings, in criticism as well as in verse. For Victor Hugo he has
nothing but panegyric. His articles on Byron and Coleridge are
luminous appreciations of the very diverse excellences belonging to
two illustrious predecessors; while in his _Notes on the Text of
Shelley_, high-soaring and incomparable, an unlucky emendation of a
line in 'The Skylark--the insertion of a superfluous word
conjecturally--by an editor whose work he commends on the whole,
provokes him to sheer exasperation:
'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 damnable corruption.'
'Fas est et ab hoste doceri.' Mr. Swinburne has borrowed the style of
sacerdotal anathema from his mortal enemies, and pronounces it no less
inexorably. But these Notes were written nigh forty years ago, so we
may hope that by this time he has cast out, or at least subdued by
diligent exorcism, that same hyperbolic fiend which entered in and
rent him at certain seasons of his youth.
Mr. Swinburne has, indeed, the defects of his qualities. He is an
ardent friend and an unflinching adversary, but we have seen that in
prose no less than in poetry, in polemics as in politics, his style is
liable to become overheated and thunderous. He has no patience with
mediocrity in art; he disdains the _via media_ in thought and action.
In these respects he stands alone among the Victorian poets, most of
whom anticipate with misgivings the evaporation of faith in the
supernatural, while they acknowledge that for themselves such faith
has little meaning, and are inclined to melancholy musing over the
'doubtful doom of human kind' which haunted the imagination of
Tennyson. And his attitude is still further apart from the
intellectual tendencies discernible at the present moment in pure
literature, which is now less concerned, we think, with these
questions than when Mr. Arnold wrote _Literature and Dogma_, and seems
more disposed to leave theology in the hands of the physical
scientists and the professional metaphysicians. However this may be,
it is to be seriously regretted that Mr. Swinburne's peremptory,
unscrupulous manner of dealing with religious forms and beliefs which
the world, perhaps, would not unwillingly let die, though by painless
extinction rather than by violence, has alienated reverent minds from
him, and has tarnished the brilliancy of his strenuous verse. The
sensuous frenzy of his juvenile poems is still remembered against him;
it betrayed a lack of moral dignity, of what the Greek poets, whom he
so much admired, meant by the word [Greek: aidos]. But we very
willingly acknowledge that of these excesses hardly a trace is to be
found in the very numerous pieces that fill the later volumes of his
collected poetry.
From these causes it has resulted that Mr. Swinburne does not, in our
opinion, now hold the position or command the influence which would
otherwise be accorded to one who may be reckoned the chief lyrical
poet of the second half of the nineteenth century; for after the
publication, in 1855, of _Maud_, Tennyson had passed his lyrical
climax, and Mr. Swinburne's superiority, as a lyrist, over all other
writers of that period is incontestable. His neo-paganism, moreover,
jars upon the realistic modernity of a generation for whom primitive
symbolism is obsolete as a form of expression, and whose prevailing
thought is too profoundly rationalistic to be attracted by a pagan
paradise. All this is to be regretted, since Mr. Swinburne undoubtedly
has the pagan virtues. His aspirations are concentrated on ideals that
ennoble the present life, on justice, inflexible courage, patriotism,
the unsophisticated intelligence; he loves liberty and he hates
oppression in all their shapes. He is throughout an optimist, who
believes and predicts that a clearer and brighter prospect is before
humanity. To Mr. Swinburne, in short, may be applied the words with
which Matthew Arnold summed up his essay upon Heine: 'He is not an
adequate interpreter of the modern world; he is a brilliant soldier in
the liberation war of humanity.' And future generations may remember
him as the poet who passed on to them the message of his spiritual
forefather, Shelley:
'O man, hold thee on in courage of soul
Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way;
And the billows of clouds that round thee roll
Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,
When heaven and hell shall leave thee free
To the universe of destiny.'