Here’s an eye Able to tempt a great man — to serve God; A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble. Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble, A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo ‘em To suffer wet damnation to run through ‘em. Here’s a cheek keeps her color let the wind go whistle; Spout, rain, we fear thee not: be hot or cold, All’s one with us; and is not he absurd, Whose fortunes are upon their faces set That fear no other God but wind and wet?
Hippolito. Brother, y’ave spoke that right; Is this the face that living shone so bright?
Vindice. The very same. And now methinks I could e’en chide myself For doting on her beauty, though her death Shall be revenged after no common action. Does the silk-worm expend her yellow labors For thee? for thee does she undo herself? Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute? Why does yon fellow falsify highways And put his life between the judge’s lips, To refine such a thing, keeps horse and men To beat their valors for her? Surely we’re all mad people, and they Whom we think are, are not: we mistake those: ’Tis we are mad in sense, they but in clothes.
Hippolito. ‘Faith, and in clothes too we, give us our due.
Vindice. Does every proud and self-affecting dame Camphire her face for this? and grieve her Maker In sinful baths of milk — when many an infant starves, For her superfluous outside, — all for this?
This is not, I take it, one of the poet’s irregular though not unmusical lines; the five short unemphatic syllables, rapidly run together in one slurring note of scorn, being not more than equivalent in metrical weight to three such as would take their places if the verse were thus altered — and impaired:
For the poor price of one bewitching minute.
Perhaps we might venture here to read— “and only they.” In the next line, “whom” for “who” is probably the poet’s own license or oversight.
What follows is no whit less noble: but as much may be said of the whole part — and indeed of the whole play. Violent and extravagant as the mere action or circumstance may be or may appear, there is a trenchant straightforwardness of appeal in the simple and spontaneous magnificence of the language, a depth of insuppressible sincerity in the fervent and and restless vibration of the thought, by which the hand and the brain and the heart of the workman are equally recognizable. But the crowning example of Cyril Tourneur’s unique and incomparable genius is of course to be found in the scene which would assuredly be remembered, though every other line of the poet’s writing were forgotten, by the influence of its passionate inspiration on the more tender but not less noble sympathies of Charles Lamb. Even the splendid exuberance of eulogy which attributes to the verse of Tourneur a more fiery quality, a more thrilling and piercing note of sublime and agonizing indignation, than that which animates and inflames the address of Hamlet to a mother less impudent in infamy than Vindice’s cannot be considered excessive by any capable reader who will candidly and carefully compare the two scenes which suggested this comparison. To attempt the praise or the description of anything that has been praised or described by Lamb would usually be the veriest fatuity of presumption; and yet it is impossible to write of a poet whose greatness was first revealed to his countrymen by the greatest gritic of dramatic poetry who ever lived and wrote, and not to echo his words of righteous judgement and inspired applause with more or less feebleness of reiteration. The startling and magical power of single verses, ineffaceable and ineradicable from the memory on which they have once impressed themselves, the consciousness in which they have once struck root, which distinguishes and denotes the peculiar style of Cyril Tourneur’s tragic poetry, rises to its highest tidemark in this part of the play. Every other line, one might almost say, is an instance of it; and yet not a single lineis undramatic, or deficient in the strictest and plainest dramatic propriety. It may be objected that men and women possessed by the excitement of emotions so desparate and so dreadful do not express them with such passionate precision of utterance: but, to borrow the saying of a later and bearer of the name which Cyril sometimes spelled as Turner, “don’t they wish they could?” or rather, ought they not to wish it? What is said by the speakers is exactly what they might be expected to think, to feel, and to express with less incisive power and less impressive accuracy of ardent epigram or of strenuous appeal.
It is, to say the least, singular to find in the most famous scene of a play, so often reprinted and re-edited a word which certainly requires explanation passed over without remark from any one of the successive editors. When Gratiana, threatened by the daggers of her sons, exclaims:
Are you so barbarous to set iron nipples Upon the breast that gave you suck?
Vindice retorts, in reply to her appeal:
That breast Is turned to quarled poison.
This last epithet is surely unusual enough to call for some attempt at interpretation. But none whatever has hitherto been offered. In the seventh line following from this one there is another textual difficulty. The edition now before me, Eld’s of 1608, reads literally thus:
Vind. Ah ist possible, Thou onely, you powers on hie, That women should dissemble when they die.
Lamb was content to read,
Ah, is it possible, you powers on high,
and so forth. Perhaps the two obviously corrupt words in italics may contain a clew to the right reading, and this may be it:
Ah! Is’t possible, you heavenly powers on high, That women should dissemble when they die?
Or may not this be yet another instance of the Jew-Puritan abhorrence of the word God as an obscene or blasphemous term when uttered outside the synagogue or the conventicle? If so, we might read — and believe that the poet wrote —
Is’t possible, thou only God on high,
and assume that the licenser struck out the indecent monosyllable and left the mutilated text for actors and printers to patch or pad at their discretion.
There are among poets, as there are among prose writers, some whose peculiar power finds vent only in a broad and rushing stream of speech or song, triumphant by the general force and fulness of its volume, in which we no more think of looking for single lines or phrases that may be detached from the context and quoted for their separate effect than of selecting for peculiar admiration some special wave or individual ripple from the multitudinous magnificence of the torrent or the tide. There are others whose power is shown mainly in single strokes or flashes as of lightning or of swords. There are few indeed outside the pale of the very greatest who can display at will their natural genius in the keenest concentration or the fullest effusion of its powers. But among these fewer than few stands the author of “The Revenger’s Tragedy.” The great scene of the temptation and the triumph of Castiza would alone be enough to give evidence, not adequate merely but ample, that such praise as this is no hyperbole of sympathetic enthusiasm, but simply the accurate expression of an indisputable fact. No lyrist, no satirist, could have excelled in fiery flow of rhetoric the copious and impetuous eloquence of the lines, at once luxurious and sardonic, cynical and seductive, in which Vindice pours forth the arguments and rolls out the promises of a professional pleader on behalf of aspiring self-interest and sensual self-indulgence: no dramatist that ever lived could have put more vital emotion into fewer words, more passionate reality into more perfect utterance, than Tourneur in the dialogue that follows them:
Mother. Troth, he says true.
Castiza. False: I defy you both: I have endured you with an ear of fire: Your tongues have struck hot irons on my face. Mother, come from that poisonous woman there.
Mother. Where?
Castiza. Do you not see her? she’s too inward then.
I could not count the lines which on reperusal of this great tragic poem I find apt for illustrative quotation, or suggestive of a tributary comment: but enough has already been cited to prove beyond all chance of cavil from any student worthy of the name that the place of Cyril Tourneur is not among minor poets, nor his genius of su
ch a temper as naturally to attract the sympathy or arouse the enthusiasm of their admirers; that among the comrades or the disciples who to us may appear but as retainers or satellites of Shakespeare his rank is high and his credentials to that rank are clear. That an edition more carefully revised and annotated, with a text reduced to something more of coherence and intelligible arrangement, than has yet been vouchsafed to us, would suffice to place his name among theirs of whose eminence the very humblest of their educated countrymen are ashamed to seem ignorant, it would probably be presumptuous to assert. But if the noblest ardor of moral emotion, the most fervent passion of eager and indignant sympathy with all that is best and abhorrence of all that is worst in women or in men — if the most absolute and imperial command of all resources and conquest of all difficulties inherent in the most effective and the most various instrument ever yet devised for the poetry of the tragic drama — if the keenest insight and the sublimest impulse that can guide the perception and animate the expression of a poet whose line of work is naturally confined to the limits of moral or ethical tragedy — if all these qualities may be admitted to confer a right to remembrance and a claim to regard, there can be no fear and no danger of forgetfulness for the name of Cyril Tourneur.
The Biography
Swinburne, 1865
THE LIFE OF ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE by Edmund Gosse
CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD-ETON (1837-1853)
CHAPTER II
OXFORD (1853-1859)
CHAPTER III
EARLY LIFE IN LONDON (1859-1865)
CHAPTER IV
ATALANTA IN CALYDON. CHASTELARD
CHAPTER V
POEMS AND BALLADS (1866)
CHAPTER VI.
SONGS OF THE REPUBLIC (1867-1870)
CHAPTER VII
THE MIDDLE YEARS (1870-1879)
CHAPTER VIII
PUTNEY (1879-1909)
CHAPTER IX
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Sir Edmund William Gosse (1849-1928) was a poet, author and critic, as well as a close friend of Swinburne. In 1917 Gosse published the following book, which was the first detailed biographical study of the life of Swinburne.
PREFACE
THE only memoir of the life of Algernon Charles Swinburne which has hitherto been published is the sketch which I contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography in 1912. This was the result of some years of investigation, and it is the skeleton on which the present biography is built up. But since that article was issued, a great deal of new material has passed through my hands, and I have had the advantage of consulting many fresh sources of information. Important correspondence has been entrusted to me, and early friends have kindly consented to revise my pages. My narrative is therefore not merely much fuller than it would have been in 1912, but in various respects more accurate.
Only those who have never adventured on the biography of an elder contemporary, and especially of one who lived in great retirement, will under-estimate the difficulty of obtaining exact particulars. Events which occurred seventy, or even sixty, years ago are remembered by few, and the recollections of these few are seldom consistent.
The unaided memory of old companions is apt to play strange vagaries, and in matters which are comparatively unimportant may differ in a degree distracting to the biographer. An additional difficulty is added in the present case, for Swinburne himself was an autobiographical Will o’ the Wisp. He was not disinclined to give information about his life, but his recollections need the closest inspection. In the midst of a statement of considerable importance and value, he is apt to introduce, by a slip of memory, some remark which makes the whole narrative seem apocryphal; and the biographer must always be prosaically guarding the poet against his own romance. After the checking and rechecking of eight years, however, I believe that I have surmounted the main difficulties of the task.
In attempting to do so, I have met with extraordinary and almost universal kindness from Swinburne’s representatives and friends. Before all other helpers I must mention my dear and valued friend, the late Lord Redesdale, who never ceased to press me forward on my course with his unfailing interest and sympathy. There was no limit to his friendly solicitude, and he insisted on seeing the book through all its stages. He finished reading the last revise after he was confined to his bed by his fatal illness. Although in the body of the narrative I have made use of the recollections which he collected at my request, I have printed, in an appendix, the letter itself in which Lord Redesdale embodied most of those memories, for it is an excellent and characteristic specimen of his own manner of writing. It is a sorrow to me that this volume, to the publication of which he so indulgently looked forward, can never reach his hands.
The early friends of Swinburne who have helped me are too numerous to be mentioned here, and their aid is acknowledged in the text. I must, however, express my particular thanks to Lord Bryce, who has been good enough to read the Oxford chapter, to which, moreover, he has substantially contributed. Those helpers who died while my book was being slowly prepared must be named here with regret as well as gratitude — Ingram Bywater, R. W. Raper, Edith Sichel, Francis Warre-Cornish, J. L. Strachan-Davidson.
The Marquess of Crewe has generously placed at my disposal the correspondence of Swinburne with his father, Lord Houghton, together with important illustrative matter. Viscount Morley has entrusted to me his file of the poet’s letters, and has been so kind as to read Chapters VI. and VII. in proof. Professor James Fitzmaurice-Kelly has read my proofs and given me many valuable suggestions. But most of all I have to thank Mr. Thomas J. Wise for loyal and active help throughout, for endless loans of MSS. and correspondence, and for free access to his unrivalled collection of Swinburniana. In my fourth Appendix I give fuller testimony to his part in my labours.
So large is the amount of new biographical detail which I found in my possession and was unwilling to ignore, that I was obliged to abandon the idea of adding, in a final chapter, an estimate of Swinburne’s comparative place in literature, and particularly in the history of poetry. Various books with this purpose have been published, among them those of Wratislaw (1900), Woodberry (1906), Mackail (1909), Thomas (1913), Drinkwater (1913), and Welby (1914). More will doubtless be attempted, since the genius of Swinburne will never cease to interest critics, and successive generations of students will be drawn to examine his writings with more and more intelligence and sympathy.
EDMUND GOSSE.
January 1917.
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD-ETON (1837-1853)
IT would be interesting to see what light a man of penetration, who, like the late Sir Francis Galton, had made a scientific study of the principles of heredity, could throw upon the somewhat extraordinary lineage of Algernon Swinburne. The poet himself was inclined to dwell on the notable character of his parentage on both sides, and to claim to be the efflorescence of two tough and redoubtable races. It is, however, clear that whatever their adventures had been neither, the Swinburnes nor the Ashburnhams had produced a poet or a scholar before. They were pure types of the aristocratic class in its moods for producing sportsmen, soldiers, and county magnates. The traveller Henry Swinburne (17431803) was the sole member of either family who had sought distinction with his pen. This detachment from letters must be dwelt upon, because it was an object of constant interest to the poet himself, who took a considerable pride in the supposed chivalry and violence of his forbears. In a letter to Stedman, in 1875, after expatiating on the deeds of his ancestors, he wrote with a certain complacency, “I think you will allow that when this race chose at last to produce a poet, it would have been at least remarkable if he had been content to write nothing but hymns and idylls for clergymen and young ladies to read out in chapels and drawing-rooms.” There had been, indeed, nothing idyllic in the history of the Swinburnes, an ancient Border clan of the county of Northumberland. According to family tradition, whi
ch the poet accepted, “there was a Swinburne peerage, but it has been dormant or forfeit since the thirteenth or fourteenth century.” Less shadowy is a Sir Adam de Swinburne of the reign of Edward II., a man-at-arms whose grandson, or other descendant, lost Swinburne Castle, but became lord of Chollerton and Capheaton. While the Percys lived in semiroyal state at Wrassil, in Yorkshire, the Swinburnes had charge of their vast Northumbrian possessions; from a MS. document of 22 Henry VII., I learn that in that year George Swinburne was master-forester to Henry, fifth Earl of Northumberland (1477-1527). After romantic adventures which the poet loved to recite, the family settled at Capheaton in the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, and has resided there ever since. In 1660 a baronetcy was conferred on John Swinburne “virum, patrimonio censu et morum probitate spectabilem,” and has survived to our day. Three successive baronets married wives of royal descent. During Algernon’s childhood and early manhood, his grandfather, Sir John
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 350
