The year 1857 saw a considerable ripening of Swinburne’s intellectual powers. He hesitated now no longer, but took up the attitude towards life in which he was to persist. His wonderful old grandfather at Capheaton encouraged him to adopt extreme views in politics, telling the lad how, in years long past, he had “repeatedly” made himself “liable to be impeached and executed for high treason” by the outspoken republicanism of his sentiments. The enthusiasm so engendered took a somewhat ludicrous shape in Algernon’s private behaviour, for Mr. Lyulph Stanley (now Lord Sheffield), who entered Balliol College a little later than he, remembers that the poet had a portrait of Mazzini hanging in the place of honour in his sitting-room, and that he declaimed verses before it, with gestures of adoring supplication.
In all this advanced republicanism, if his grandfather encouraged him, he was still more actively abetted by John Nichol, who was a pronounced disciple of Mazzini and loathed Napoleon III. Professor A. V. Dicey writes: “As regards Louis Napoleon we were all agreed. I see little reason to think that we were wrong in our general estimate of the Emperor; but there is something amusing, as I look back upon them, in the youthful vehemence of our denunciations.” There was no support of Napoleon III. in the “Old Mortality,” but Swinburne outdid all the rest in his fantastic violence. Professor Holland writes me: “I well recollect his dancing round the table, screaming abuse, and, I think, advocating the assassination of the Emperor.”
Some of the verses that he intoned before the portrait may doubtless be identified with the Ode to Mazzini, found incomplete after Swinburne’s death, and printed in 1909 by Mr. T. J. Wise. By internal evidence, this irregular Pindaric can be dated with confidence in the spring of 1857. It shows the influence of Shelley, but already there is a personal note of Swinburne in it, and some felicitous passages, such as:
The winds, that fold around
Her soft enchanted ground
Their wings of music, sadden into song; The holy stars await
Some dawn of glimmering fate
In silence — but the time of pain is long,
But here no comfort stills
This sorrow that o’erclouds the purple hills.
About the same time, doubtless through the help of Hatch, Swinburne appeared in print for the first time, contributing an article on Congreve to a popular dictionary. This, still more than the Ode to Mazzini, is stiff and rather dry; it gives no sort of promise of its author’s coming affluence of phrase.
At the outset of the Long Vacation of 1857, William Morris, who had been in London for some months, reappeared in Oxford in connection with an ambitious artistic scheme. He visited the Brotherhood at Pembroke College, and Hatch presented Swinburne to him at Birkbeck Hill’s rooms on the 1st of November. The artistic scheme was the decoration of the bays of the Debating Room of the Union, which D. G. Rossetti had persuaded the architect, Benjamin Woodward, to entrust to himself and his friends. These included Burne-Jones and William Morris, who formed a triple alliance. It appears to have been Hatch who introduced Swinburne to Rossetti and Burne-Jones while they were at work in the Union. The result was so happy that Burne-Jones exclaimed, “We have hitherto been three, and now there are four of us.” No one whom Swinburne had ever met seemed to him so wonderful as Rossetti, and he enjoyed his “cordial kindness and exuberant generosity” from the first. But the difference in their ages, and a certain magnificence of manner on the part of Rossetti, kept Swinburne for the present at a respectful but increasingly adoring distance. His real intimacy with Rossetti did not begin until after he left Oxford. With Morris, to whose conversation Swinburne owed the opening of new fields of intellectual pleasure, and particularly an introduction to the romance of mediæval France, he was from the first on the footing of a devoted younger brother. He told Mr. S. C. Cockerell that when Morris read to him, in 1857, his just-written “The Haystack in the Floods,” the poignancy and splendour of the ending caused him an anguish which was more than his nerves were able to bear.
He was more at his ease at once with Dixon and Burne-Jones, although he was not invited to take part in the Oxford and Cambridge Review, in which they fledged their fancies. But in December 1857, when the periodical called Undergraduate Papers was started into brief life as the organ of the “Old Mortality,” under the Editorship of Nichol, Swinburne was a contributor, together with Luke, Birkbeck Hill and Dicey. Swinburne’s “crudities,” as he afterwards called them, were four in number, and the themes of them were highly characteristic. They included an essay on Marlowe and Webster; a long canto of Pre-Raphaelite triplets called Queen Iseult; a “boyish bit of burlesque,” being a mock-review of poems of a supposed Ernest Wheldrake, a “spasmodist,” — this was a trick which he afterwards repeated, more than once attempting in 1862 to entrap the too wary editor of the Spectator; and a perfectly amazing blast of scorn (in prose) against the Emperor of the French and his horde of servile priests, called “Church Imperialism.” There was not very much positive merit or even promise in these productions, which were only remarkable, as the work of a youth of nearly twenty-one, as showing the bent of his mind in several directions. Queen Iseult, Swinburne’s earliest narrative poem, is notable for its purity of diction, for the effect on it of William Morris’s still unpublished verse, and for its independence of all the recognised poetical fashions of that day, when Maud, Men and Women and Aurora Leigh were the poetical works pre-eminently before the public; but it has no inherent value. Undergraduate Papers had to cease with its third number (March-
April 1858), because the Editor’s leisure was absorbed by Degree work, but he boasted, with an honest pride, that “we paid the contributors at the usual rate,” as long as the periodical lasted.
Swinburne had not found his true voice at the end of 1857. He found it, however, in the beginning of 1858. The subject given for the Newdigate Prize Poem for March of that year was “The Discovery of the North-West Passage,” and Swinburne competed. He was not known in later years to make the slightest reference to the fact that he had entered the lists on this occasion and had been vanquished. He had every reason to suppose that his unlucky Newdigate had disappeared, but his father had secreted the original MS. and it was discovered at the death of Miss Isabel Swinburne. Lord Bryce recollects that the Old Mortality were indignant that the prize was awarded, not to Algernon, but to a Mr. Francis Law Latham, of Brazenose College, whose name has never been heard of since, at all events in connection with the Muses. It seems extraordinary that the examiners should not have perceived the merits of Swinburne’s poem, which lift it far above the general level of praiseworthy prize-compositions, but it is possible that a pedantic objection was made to it. The subject as publicly announced was “The Discovery of the North-West Passage,” but Swinburne deals exclusively with the fate of Franklin and his companions. That the whole expedition was lost was by that time universally accepted, although it was not until the return of M’Clintock in October 1859 that full particulars of Franklin’s death were made known.
The force and dignity of Swinburne’s verses on this theme of universal public discussion are worthy of high praise. He rose to the level of his theme in a poem which will always be worthy of a place in his collected writings. In “The Death of Sir John Franklin” there is, on the one hand, an absence of juvenile affectation and oddity, and on the other the presence of unusual purity of diction, elevation of thought and melody of versification. Hardly a feeble phrase reveals the undergraduate, not a single crudity the Pre-Raphaelite. Here was discovered, if the Oxford examiners had but had the wit to perceive it, a new element in English poetry. Nothing in the verse of the age had prepared them for such numbers as these:
What praise shall England give these men her friends?
For while the bays and the large channels flow
In the broad sea between the iron ends
Of the pois’d world where no safe sail may be,
And for white miles the hard ice never blends
With the chill wast
ing edges of dull sea, —
And while to praise her green and girdled land
Shall be the same as to praise Liberty, —
So long the record of these men shall stand,
Because they chose not life but rather death,
Each side being weighed with a most equal hand, —
Because the gift they had of English breath
They did give back to England for her sake,
Like those dead seamen of Elizabeth,
And those that wrought with Nelson or with Blake,
To do great England service their lives long, —
High honour shall they have.
The Arctic scenery, to which Swinburne never had occasion to revert, provides some striking passages:
For the laborious time went hard with these
Among the thousand colours and gaunt shapes
Of the strong ice cloven with breach of seas,
Where the waste sullen shadow of steep capes
Narrows across the cloudy-coloured brine,
And by strong jets the anger’d foam escapes,
And a sad touch of sun scores the sea-line
Right at the middle motion of the noon,
And then fades sharply back, and the cliffs shine
Fierce with keen snows against a kindled moon,
In the hard purple of the bitter sky.
There can be no question that the rejection of the poem on which he had expended so much enthusiastic labour was an element in the repulsion which Swinburne conceived for Oxford, and for the languor with which he now regarded his further career in the University.
In the course of the summer of this year in Northumberland, Algernon was much observed. At Wallington were then living the geologist, Sir Walter C. Trevelyan (1797-1879) and his wife, Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, the latter a friend and patron of Rossetti, and a great admirer of Ruskin, who frequently stayed at Wallington. As neighbours of the Capheaton household, the Trevelyans made Algernon’s acquaintance, and he became accustomed more and more often to tear round to Wallington on his pony that he might pour out his confidences to Lady Trevelyan. Here he made the acquaintance of Ruskin, who thought him extremely exhilarating, and of William Bell Scott, then a middle-aged drawing-master working at Newcastle, who, seeing Swinburne capering on horseback, drew Ruskin’s attention to the marvellous resemblance he bore to Uccello’s portrait of Galeazzo Malatesta, with his aureole of fiery hair and his pale arrogant face, in the “Battle of Sant’ Egidio” picture in the National Gallery.
For the next eight years, until Lady Trevelyan’s death, her friendship was an inestimable benefit to Algernon Swinburne. She was the first person outside the circle of his own family who took the trouble to study and had the wit to appreciate him. Sir George Otto Trevelyan (of Wallington), who is the son of the first cousin of Sir Walter Trevelyan (of Nettlecombe) and the present possessor of Wallington, has been so kind as to give me some particulars of his kinswoman. He says: “Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, was a woman of singular and unique charm; quiet and quaint in manner, nobly emotional, ingrainedly artistic, very wise and sensitive, with an everflowing spring of the most delicious humour. No friend of hers, man or woman, could ever have enough of her company; and those friends were many, and included the first people of the day in every province of distinction. She was Algernon Swinburne’s good angel; and he regarded her with ‘filial’ feelings. It was a very real and permanent misfortune for him that Pauline Trevelyan died in middle life in the summer of 1866; and sad it was for me too, since she was a second mother to me who was so rich in that blessing already. Widely, and almost absurdly different as we two young men were, Pauline Trevelyan was catholic enough to be in sympathy with both of us.”
The early companionship of the youthful poet and the future historian ought, it may be said, to have been rich in benefit to both. But unfortunately Algernon Swinburne and George Otto Trevelyan had not a taste, not a pursuit, in common. The books and the men that Swinburne loved and admired are such as have been already mentioned in these pages; Trevelyan, on the other hand, was “never tired of reading and talking about Thackeray and Tristram Shandy, and Albert Smith’s and Theodore Hook’s novels, to all of which the poet was indifferent. The same difference divided them in the classic literature which they both loved as enthusiastic undergraduates. Swinburne was entirely devoted to Æschylus and Catullus; Trevelyan with an equal exclusiveness to Aristophanes and Juvenal. “No author existed for me,” Sir George O. Trevelyan writes me, “who was not a favourite with Macaulay, and though that gave me a large field of choice, it must be allowed that Macaulay’s reading did not lie along the same lines as that of Gabriel Rossetti’s circle. Moreover, I was always eager to be after the blackcock and partridges, although I shot much less well than Algernon Swinburne wrote poetry. There was no liking or disliking between us; but the plain fact is that we were not to each other’s purpose.” The two lads, although the one spent his long vacations from Oxford at Capheaton, and the other his from Cambridge two miles off at Wallington, never walked or conversed together, and Trevelyan, being fifteen months junior, regarded the extraordinary lad who could write French ballades, and who seemed to know all about King Arthur’s court, “with awe and some apprehension.” It would be an error, however, to suppose that if Swinburne did not happen to shoot partridges, he was inert or lackadaisical. On the contrary, at this time, and for the next two or three years, Swinburne’s activity and hardihood, in riding and swimming and climbing, were the wonder and the alarm of those who were responsible for his well-being, and it was a very anxious business to be in charge of Master Algernon. “That lad is a flame of fire,” one of his grandfather’s visitors exclaimed as he flashed, hatless, past the windows.
In some verses, apparently addressed to W. B. Scott, written twenty years afterwards, but hitherto only circulated privately, Swinburne describes his sensations in Northumberland at this time:
Whenever in August holiday times
I rode or swam through a rapture of rhymes,
Over heather or crag, and by scaur and by stream,
Clothed with delight by the might of a dream,
With the sweet sharp wind blown hard through my hair,
On eyes enkindled and head made bare;...
Or loosened a song to seal for me
A kiss on the clamorous mouth of the sea.
Ruskin had been so much struck with the young poet that when he next visited Oxford, and stayed with his and Sir Walter Trevelyan’s intimate friend, Dr. (afterwards Sir) Henry Acland, Swinburne was asked to the house. But probably this was not his earliest introduction to the active and enlightened doctor, who was then reader in anatomy at Christ Church and Radcliffe Librarian, for Acland was already interested in the Pre-Raphaelites, and particularly in Morris and Burne-Jones. He was just about this time appointed regius professor of medicine, and he was full of philanthropic activities and stirring projects. He was very hospitable, and Swinburne used to describe his house as full of bores, who stood about in groups and made fatuously aesthetic remarks. Acland, who was the soul of urbanity, was never conscious of the shortcomings of his hospitality. But there was a kind of solemnity about him that made the Pre-Raphaelites, and particularly Swinburne, forget their manners. Burne-Jones wickedly said that “Acland’s pulse was only really quickened when osteologists were by, who compared their bones with his till the conversation rattled.”
Swinburne was particularly annoyed because Acland, in his boundless sympathy, wished to share “the orgies and dare-devilries” of their little group, and on one occasion they all fled to London for the night, to avoid having tea in a meadow with Acland and his children. They behaved very badly, and like shy and naughty little boys, to excellent Dr. Acland, whom they privately called, I do not know why, “the Rose of Brazil”; but the biographer has to admit, with a blush, that Swinburne behaved the worst of all. On one occasion, when Dr. Acland was so kind as to read aloud a paper on sewage, there was a scene over whic
h the Muse of History must draw a veil.
In August 1857 Swinburne went to Glasgow to visit Nichol in his home, and the two friends presently started for a trip to Skye and the central Hebrides. They climbed the peak of Blaaven with success, and “with no great danger.” The weather was glorious, and Swinburne, who was in towering spirits, “desecrated and insulted” the islands with vain puns, saying, “We ran a Muck once or twice, and were like to have made a Mull of the affair, but on the whole it was a Rum go!” To the end of his life he was apt to shock the dignity of the solemn by such playfulness, which, in the midst of the general intensity of his demeanour, gave a very human relief to his conversation. Nichol returned the visit by staying with the Swinburnes in the Isle of Wight the following Christmas, and it was at this time that Swinburne called, “with a college friend of his” (doubtless Nichol), on Tennyson at Farringford, who asked him to dinner, and “thought him a very modest and intelligent young fellow.” Tennyson read Maud to him, and appreciated the delicacy Swinburne showed in that “he did not press upon me any verses of his own.” In later years, Swinburne mentioned that, on this occasion, Tennyson “expressed a special devotion for Virgil.”
A certain impression was made on the young poet by his attending the lectures of Matthew Arnold, who was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857. But these lectures had the effect at first of disappointing the ardent lover of Victor Hugo and Landor, who found their moderation cold. This impression was heightened by the issue of Merope, which, indeed, the truest admirers of Arnold have agreed to regard as a failure. Swinburne admitted afterwards that the perfection of Arnold’s prose was not acceptable to him at first, but he had already cultivated a passion for his lyrical poetry. With his astounding faculty for acquiring the best at the earliest moment, Swinburne had secured a copy of Empedocles on Etna while he was still at Eton. “Early as this was” (1852), “it was not my first knowledge of the poet; the ‘Reveller,’ the ‘Merman,’
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 354
