It is no more than fair to confess at the outset that my knowledge of Swinburne's work until recently was of the scantiest. The patent faults of his style were of a kind to warn me away, and it might be equally true that I was not sufficiently open to his peculiar excellences. Gladly, therefore, I accepted the occasion offered by the new edition of his Collected Poems[5] to enlarge my acquaintance with one of the much-bruited names of the age. Nor did it seem right to trust to a hasty impression. The six volumes of his poems, together with the plays and critical essays, have lain on my table for several months, the companions of many a long day of leisure and the relish thrown in between other readings of pleasure and necessity. Yet even now I must admit something alien to me in the man and his work; I am not sure that I always distinguish between what is spoken with the lips only and what springs from the poet's heart. Possibly the lack of biographical information is the partial cause of this uncertainty, for by a curious anomaly Swinburne, one of the most egotistical writers of the century, has shown a fine reticence in keeping the details of his life from the public. He was, we know, born in London, in 1837, of an ancient and noble family, his father, as befitted one whose son was to sing of the sea so lustily, being an admiral in the navy. His early years were passed either at his grandfather's estate in Northumbria or at the home of his parents in the Isle of Wight. From Eton he went, after an interval of two years, to Balliol College, Oxford, leaving in 1860 without a degree. The story runs that he knew more Greek than his examiners, but failed to show a proper knowledge of Scripture. If the tale is true, he made up well in after years for the deficiency, for few of our poets have been more steeped in the language of the Bible. In London he came under the influence of many of the currents moving below the surface; the spell of that master of souls, Rossetti, touched him, and the dominance of the ardent Mazzini. Since 1879 he has lived at "The Pines," on the edge of Wimbledon Common, with Mr. Watts-Dunton, in what appears to be an ideal atmosphere of sympathetic friendship. Mr. Douglas's recent indiscretion on Theodore Watts-Dunton tells nothing of the life in this scholarly retreat, but it does contain many photogravures of the works of art, the handicraft of Rossetti largely, which adorn the dwelling with beautiful memories.

Such is the meagre outline of Swinburne's life, nor do the few other events recorded or the authentic anecdotes help us much to a more intimate knowledge of the man. Yet he has the ambiguous gift of awakening curiosity. Probably the first question most people ask on laying down his Poems and Ballads (that pÉchÉ de jeunesse, as he afterwards called it) is to know how much of the book is "true." Mr. Swinburne has expressed a becoming contempt for "the scornful or mournful censors who insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted or achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursions of absolute fancy." One does not like to be classed among the scornful or mournful, and yet I should feel much easier in my appreciation of the Poems and Ballads if I knew how far they were based on the actual experience of the author. The reader of Swinburne feels constantly as if his feet were swept from the earth and he were carried into a misty mid-region where blind currents of air beat hither and thither; he longs for some anchor to reality. In the later books this sensation becomes almost painful, and it is because the earlier publications, the Atalanta and the first Poems and Ballads, contain more of definable human emotion, whatever their relation to fact may be, that they are likely to remain the most popular and significant of Swinburne's works.

The publication of Atalanta at the age of twenty-eight made him famous, Poems and Ballads the next year made him almost infamous. The alarm aroused in England by Dolores and Faustine still vibrates in our ears as we repeat the wonderful rhythms. The impression is deepened by the remarkable unity of feeling that runs through these voluble songs—the feeling of infinite satiety. The satiety of the flesh hangs like a fatal web about the Laus Veneris; the satiety of disappointment clings "with sullen savour of poisonous pain" to The Triumph of Time; satiety speaks in the Hymn to Proserpine, with its regret for the passing of the old heathen gods; it seeks relief in the unnatural passion of Anactoria—

turns to the abominations of cruelty in Faustine; sings enchantingly of rest in The Garden of Proserpine—

Now the acquiescence of weariness may have its inner compensations, even its sacred joys; but satiety with its torturing impotence and its hungering for forbidden fruit, is perhaps the most immoral word in the language; its unashamed display causes a kind of physical revulsion in any wholesome mind. My own feeling is that Swinburne, when he wrote these poems, had little knowledge or experience of the world, but, as sometimes happens with unbalanced natures, had sucked poison from his classical reading until his brain was in a kind of ferment. While in this state he fell under the spell of Baudelaire's deliberate perversion of the passions, with results which threw the innocent Philistines of England into a fine bewilderment of horror. That the poet's own heart was sound at core, and that his satiety was of the imagination and not of the body, would seem evident from the abruptness with which he passed, under a more wholesome stimulus, to a very different mood. Unfortunately, his maturer productions are lacking in the quality of human emotion which, however derived, pulsates in every line of the Poems and Ballads. There is a certain contagion in such a song as Dolores. Taking all things into consideration, and with all one's repulsion for its substance, that poem is still the most effective of Swinburne's works, a magnificent lyric of blended emotion and music. It is a personification of the mood which produced the whole book, a cry of the tormented heart to our Lady of Satiety. It is filled with regret for a past of riotous pleasure; it pants with the lust of blood; it is gorgeous and heavily scented, and the rhythm of it is the swaying of bodies drunken with voluptuousness:

No doubt you will find here in germ all that was to mar the poet's later work. The rhythm lacks resistance; there is no definite vision evoked out of the rapid flux of images; the thought has no sure control over the words. Dolores is almost in the same breath the queen of languors and raptures; she is pallid and rosy, and a hostile criticism might find in the stanzas a succession of contradictions. Compare the poem with the few lines in Jenny where Rossetti has expressed the same idea of man's inveterate lust:

and the difference is immediately apparent between that concentration of mind which sums up a thought in a single definite image and the fluctuating, impalpable vision of a poet carried away by the intoxication of words. All that is true, and yet, somehow, out of this poem of Dolores there does arise in the end a very real and memorable mood—real after the fashion of a mood excited by music rather than by painting or sculpture.

The Poems and Ballads are splendid but malsain; they are impressive and they have the strength, ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly or indirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body. The change on passing to the Songs Before Sunrise (published in 1871) is extraordinary. During the five years that elapsed between these volumes the two master passions of Swinburne's life laid hold on him with devastating effect—the passion of Liberty and the passion of the Sea. Henceforth the influence of Mazzini and Victor Hugo was to dominate him like an obsession. Now, heaven forbid that one should say or think anything in despite of Liberty! The mere name conjures up recollections of glory and pride, and in it the hopes of the future are involved. And yet the very magnitude of its content renders it peculiarly liable to misuse. To this man it means one thing, and to another another, and many might cry out in the end, as Brutus did over virtue: "Thou art a naked word, and I followed thee as though thou hadst been a substance!" Certainly nothing is more dangerous for a poet than to fall into the habit of mouthing those great words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, and the like, abstracted of very definite events and very precise imagery. To Swinburne the sound of liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind of frothing mania. It is true that one or two of the poems on this theme are lifted up with a superb and genuine lyric enthusiasm. The Eve of Revolution, for instance, with which the Songs Before Sunrise open, rings with the stirring noise of trumpets:

But even here the reverberation of the words begins to conceal their meaning, and such abstractions as "the roar of the hours" lead into the worst of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longer hymns to liberty are nearly unreadable—at least if any one can endure to the end of A Song of Italy, it is not I. And as one goes through these rhapsodies that came out year after year, one begins to feel that Swinburne's notion of liberty, when it is not empty of meaning, is something even worse. Too often it is Kipling's gross idolatry of England uttered in a kind of hysterical falsetto. It was not pretty at a time of estrangement between England and France to speak of "French hounds whose necks are aching Still from the chain they crave"; and one needed not to sympathise with the Boers in the South African war to feel something like disgust at Swinburne's abuse:

Probably the poet thought he was giving voice to a righteous and Miltonic indignation. The best criticism of such a sonnet is to turn to Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints."

I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne's driving up late to a dinner and entering into a violent altercation with the cabman, to the vast amusement of the waiting guests within the house. That incorrigible wag and hanger-on of genius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the party and acted as chorus to the dialogue outside. "The poet's got the best of it, as usual," drawls the chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel in Cockspur Street, and never goes anywhere except in hansoms, which, whatever the distance, he invariably remunerates with one shilling. Consequently, when, as to-day, it's a case of two miles beyond the radius, there's the devil's own row; but in the matter of imprecation the poet is more than a match for cabby, who, after five minutes of it, gallops off as though he had been rated by Beelzebub himself." Really, 'tis a bit of gossip which may be taken as a comment on not a few of Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty.

Not less noble in significance is that other word, the sea, which Swinburne now uses with endless reiteration. In his reverence for the weltering ocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom, he does of course only follow the best traditions of English poetry from Beowulf to The Seven Seas of Kipling, who is again in this his imitator. Nor is it the world of water alone that dominates his imagination, but with it the winds and the panorama of the sky ever rolling above. Already in the Poems and Ballads there is a hint of the sympathy between the poet and this realm of water and air. One of the finest passages in The Triumph of Time is that which begins:

But for the most part the atmosphere of those poems was too sultry for the salt spray of ocean, and it is only with the Songs Before Sunrise, with the obsession of the idea of liberty, that we are carried to the wide sea "that makes immortal motion to and fro," and to the "shrill, fierce climes of inconsolable air." Thenceforth the reader is like some wave-tossed mariner who should take refuge in the cave of Æolus; at least he is forced to admire the genius that presides over the gusty concourse:

The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might seem. There is a picture of Swinburne in the Recollections of the late Henry Treffry Dunn which almost personifies him as the storm-king:

The scattered poems in his later books that rise above the Poems and Ballads with a kind of grandiose suggestiveness are for the most part filled with echoes of wind and water. That haunting picture of crumbling desolation, A Forsaken Garden, lies "at the sea-down's edge between windward and lee." One of the few poems that seem to contain the cry of a real experience, At a Month's End, combines this aspect of nature admirably with human emotion:

And the sensation left from a reading of Tristram of Lyonesse is of a vast phantasmagoria, in which the beating of waves and the noise of winds, the light of dawns breaking on the water, and the floating web of stars, are jumbled together in splendid but inextricable confusion. So the coming of love upon Iseult, as she sails over the sea with Tristram, takes this magnificent comparison:

Further on the long confession of her passion at Tintagel, while Tristram has gone over-sea to that other Iseult, will be broken by those thundering couplets:

But even to allude to all the passages of this kind in the poem—the swimming of Tristram, his rowing, and the other scenes—would fill an essay. In the end it must be confessed that this monotony of tone grows fatiguing. The rhythmic grace of the metre is like a bubble blown into the air, floating before our eyes with gorgeous iridescence—but when it touches earth, it bursts. There lies the fatal weakness of all this frenzy over liberty and this hymeneal chanting of sky and ocean; it has no basis in the homely facts of the heart. Read the account of Tristram and Iseult in the wilderness bower; it is all very beautiful, but you wonder why it leaves you so cold. There is not a single detail to fix an image of the place in the mind, not a word to denote that we are dealing with the passion of individual human beings. Then turn to the same episode in the old poem of Gottfried von Strassburg; read the scene where the forsaken King Mark, through a window of their forest grotto, beholds the lovers lying asleep with the sword of Tristram stretched between them:

It is good to walk with head lifted to the stars, but it is good also to have the feet well planted on earth. If another example of Swinburne's abstraction from human interest were desired, one might take that rhapsody of the wind-beaten waters and "land that is lonelier than ruin," called By the North Sea. The picture of desolate and barren waste is one of the most powerful creations in his later works (it was published in 1880), yet there is still something wanting to stamp the impression into the mind. You turn from it, perhaps, to Browning's similar description in Childe Roland and the reason is at once clear. You come upon the line: "One stiff, blind horse, his every bone a-stare," and pause. There is in Swinburne's poem no single touch which arrests the attention in this way, concentrating the effect, as it were, to a burning point, and bringing out the symbolic relation to human life. Yet I cannot pass from this subject without noticing what may appear a paradoxical phase of Swinburne's character. Only when he lowers his gaze from the furies and ecstasies of man's ambition to the instinctive ways of little children does his art become purely human. It would be easy to select a full dozen of the poems dealing with child-life and the tender love inspired by a child that touch the heart with their pure and chastened beauty. I should feel that an essential element of his art were left unremarked if I failed to quote some such examples as these two roundels on First Footsteps and a A Baby's Death:

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Despite the artificiality of the French form and a kind of revolving dizziness of movement, one catches in these child-lyrics a simplicity of feeling not unlike Longfellow's cry, "O little feet! that such long years." Swinburne himself might not relish the comparison, which is none the less just.

It is not often safe to attempt to sum up a large body of work in a phrase, yet with Swinburne we shall scarcely go astray if we seek such a characterisation in the one word motion. Both the beauty and the fault of his extraordinary rhythms are exposed in that term, and certainly his first claim to originality lies in his rhythmical innovations. There had been nothing in English comparable to the steady swell, like the waves of a subsiding sea, in the lines of Atalanta and the Poems and Ballads. They brought a new sensuous pleasure into our poetry. But with time this cadenced movement developed into a kind of giddy race which too often left the reader belated and breathless. Little tricks of composition, such as a repeated cÆsura after the seventh syllable of the pentameter, were employed to heighten the speed. Moreover, the longer lines in many of the poems are not organic, but consist of two or more short lines huddled together, the effect being to eliminate the natural resting-places afforded by the sense. And occasionally his metre is merely wanton. He uses one verse, for example, which with its combination of gliding motion and internal jingles is uncommonly irritating:

a page of this sets the nerves all a-jangle.

And if Swinburne is one of the obscurest of English poets, it is due in large part to this same element of motion. A poem may move swiftly and still be perfectly easy to follow, so long as the thought is simple and concrete; witness the works of Longfellow. Or, on the other hand, the thought may be tortuous and still invite reflection, so long as the metre forces a continual pause in the reading; witness Browning. Now, no one will accuse Swinburne of overloading his pages with thought; it is not there the obscurity lies. The difficulty is with the number and the peculiarly vague quality of his metaphors. Let me illustrate what I mean by this vagueness. I open one of the volumes at random and my eye rests on this line in A Channel Passage:

If one were reading the poem and tried to evoke this image before his mind, he would certainly need to pause for a moment. Or I open to Walter Savage Landor and find this passage marked:

The sentiment is simple enough, and it might be sufficient to feel the force of this in a general way, were it not that the metaphorical expression almost compels one to pause and form an image of the whole before proceeding. Such an image is, no doubt, possible; but the mingling of abstract and concrete terms makes the act of visualisation slow and painful. At the same time the rhythm is swift and continuous, so that any pause in the reading demands a deliberate effort of the will. The result is a form of obscurity which in many of the poems is almost prohibitive for an indolent man—and are not the best readers always a little indolent? And there is another habit—trick, one might say—which increases this vagueness of metaphor in a curious manner. Constantly he uses a word in its ordinary, direct sense and then repeats it as an abstract personification. I find an example to hand in the stanzas written At a Dog's Grave:

It is only a mannerism such as another, but it recurs with sufficient frequency to have an appreciable effect on the mind.

Indeed, if this vagueness of imagery were only an occasional appearance, the difficulty would be slight. As a matter of fact, no inconsiderable portion of Swinburne's work is made up of a stream of half-visualised abstractions that crowd upon one another with the motion of clouds driven below the moon. He is more like Walt Whitman in this respect than any other poet in the language. Whitman is concrete and human and very earthly, but, with this difference, there is in both writers the same thronging procession of images which flit by without allowing the reader to concentrate his attention upon a single impression; they are both poets of vast and confused motion. Swinburne is notable for his want of humour, yet he is keen enough to see how close this flux of high-sounding words lies to the absurd. In the present collected edition of his poems he has included The Heptalogia, or Seven against Sense, a series of parodies which does not spare his own mannerisms. Some scandalised Philistines, I doubt, might even need to be told that Nephelidia was a parody:

Pretty much all the traits of Swinburne's style are there—the long breathless lines with their flowing dactyls or anapÆsts, the unabashed alliteration, the stream of half-visualised images, the trick of following an epithet with its own abstract substantive, the sense of motion, and above all the accumulation of words. Of this last trait of verbosity I have said nothing, for the reason that it is too notorious to need mentioning. It may not, however, be superfluous to point out a little more precisely the special form his tautology assumes. He is never more graphic and nearer to nature than when he describes the ecstasy of swimming at sea. He is himself passionately fond of the exercise, and once at least was almost drowned in the Channel. Let us take, then, a stanza from A Swimmer's Dream:

Pass the fault of beginning with the abstraction "strength"—the first two lines are graphic and reproduce a real sensation; the second two lines are an explanatory repetition; the last four dissolve both image and emotion into a flood of words. It is the common procedure in the later poems; it renders the regular dramas (with the exception of the earlier Chastelard) almost intolerably tedious.

And what is the impression of the man himself that remains after living with his works for several months? The frankness with which he parodies his own eccentricities might seem to indicate a becoming modesty, and yet that is scarcely the word that rises first to the lips. Indeed, when I read in the very opening of the Dedicatory Epistle that precedes the present edition of his poems such a statement as that "he finds nothing that he could wish to cancel, to alter, or to unsay, in any page he has ever laid before his reader," I was prepared for a character quite the contrary of modest, and as I turned page after page, there became fixed in my mind a feeling that I should hesitate to call personal repulsion—a feeling of annoyance at least, for which no explanation was present. Only when I reached Atalanta in Calydon, in the fourth volume, did the reason of this become evident. That poem, exquisite in many ways, is filled with talk of time and gods, of love and hate, of life and death, of all high-sounding words that lend gravity to poetry, and yet in the end it is itself light and not grave. The very needless reiteration of these words, their bandying from verse to verse, deprives them of impressiveness. No, a true poet who respects the sacredness of noble ideas, who cherishes some awe for the mysteries, does not buffet them about as a shuttlecock; he uses them sparingly and only when the thought rises of necessity to those heights. There is a lack of emotional breeding, almost an indecency, in Swinburne's easy familiarity with these great things of the spirit.

And this judgment is confirmed by turning to his prose. I trust it is not prejudice, but after a while the vociferous and endless praise of Victor Hugo in his essays had a curious effect upon me. I began to ask: Is the critic really thinking of Hugo alone, or is half of this frenzied adulation meant for his own artistic methods? "Malignity and meanness, platitude and perversity, decrepitude of cankered intelligence and desperation of universal rancor," he exclaims against Sainte-Beuve; and over the other critics of his idol he cries out, "The lazy malignity of envious dullness is as false and fatuous as it is common and easy." Can one avoid the surmise that he has more than Hugo to avenge in such tirades? It is the same with every one who is opposed to his own notions of art. Of Walt Whitman it is: "The dirty, clumsy paws of a harper whose plectrum is a muckrake." Of a French classicist: "It is the business of a Nisard to pass judgment and to bray." And of those who intimate (he is ostensibly defending Rossetti) that beauty and power of expression can accord with emptiness or sterility of matter: "This flattering unction the very foolishest of malignants will hardly in this case be able to lay upon the corrosive sore which he calls his soul." Sometimes, I admit, this manner of invective rises to a sublimity of fury that sounds like nothing so much as a combination of Carlyle and Shelley. For example: "The affection was never so serious as to make it possible for the most malignant imbecile to compare or to confound him [Jowett] with such morally and spiritually typical and unmistakable apes of the Dead Sea as Mark Pattison, or such renascent blossoms of the Italian renascence as the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers who is now in Aretino's bosom." It's not criticism; it's not fair to Mark Pattison or to John Addington Symonds, but it is sublime. It is a storm of wind only, but it leaves a devastated track.

Enough has been said to indicate the trait of character that prevails through these pages of eulogy and vituperation. It is not nice to apply so crass a word as conceit to one who undoubtedly belongs to the immortals of our pantheon, yet the expression forces itself upon me. Listen to another of his outbursts, this time against Matthew Arnold: "His inveterate and invincible Philistinism, his full community of spirit and faith, in certain things of import, with the vulgarest English mind!" Does not the quality begin to define itself more exactly? There is a phrase they use in France, Épater le bourgeois, of those artistic souls who contrast themselves by a kind of ineffable contempt with commonplace humanity, and who take pleasure in tweaking the nose, so to speak, of the amiable plebeian. Have a care, gentlemen! The Philistine has a curious trick of revenging himself in the long run. For my own part, when it comes to a breach between the poetical and the prosaic, I take my place submissively with the latter. There is at least a humble safety in retaining one's pleasure in certain things of import with the vulgarest English mind, and if it were obligatory to choose between them (as, happily, it is not) I would surrender the wind-swept rhapsodies of Swinburne for the homely conversation of Whittier.

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