At this, Swinburne told Dr. Bird and his sister many years afterwards:
I wanted to leap out of the box I was in and break his neck, and then to rush out of the theatre, flying as if lightning were at my heels. When I was a child, before I could understand things, I read Othello, and though I did not know what was the guilt of Desdemona, could not guess at the adultery, yet I distinctly knew that whatever “the cause” might be it applied to something she had done.
So far as I know he kept the vow implicitly, to such a degree that when, about 1876, he wrote the song, “Love laid his sleepless head,” for a performance of (I think) A Winter’s Tale, and had accepted, under great pressure, an invitation for the first night, at the last moment he insisted on my taking his place. He always asserted that no living actors were adequate to the representation of Victor Hugo’s tragedies, and deprecated the presentation of those plays.
Swinburne was now occupied with a scheme which had begun to take shape at Oxford and which was not finally abandoned till much later. This was the composition of a cycle of nineteen or twenty prose stories, to be issued as the Triameron, in rivalry with Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre. He had been much impressed by the Nouvelles françoises en prose du XIIIe siècle, which Morris and he had read in college, but a stronger influence now was that of the Italian Novellino. The only one of these tales which Swinburne printed was Dead Love, which he sent to ‘‘Once a Week” in 1862 and published in book-form in 18G4. But several others were written and three still exist in MS. Moreover, about the year 1861, he wrote a Chronicle of Queen Fredegond, which remains unpublished; though much longer, this also is probably intended for the Triameron; it is in part paraphrased from the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours. The library of his uncle, the Earl of Ashburnham, contained a copy of the 1561 edition of this rare book, and there, it is probable, Swinburne gained his remarkable intimacy with the Frankish kings of France. He once told me that the mediæval and early French sections of his uncle’s famous collection had been a source of unfailing enjoyment to him.
There can be little doubt that this was one of the happiest times in Algernon’s life. His health had not begun to fail him in the least degree. He had no anxiety for the future, nothing to exasperate him in the present. Very small part of his year was spent consecutively in London, from which he was for ever breaking away to the related families in the Isle of Wight, to the Trevelyans and the Scotts in Northumberland, or to Lord Ashburnham at Battle. At each of these places he could ride or climb or swim to his heart’s content, throwing off all the dust of books in the brilliant exultation of movement. That ecstasy of physical well-being, that April of the blood, could but decline and fade. Some twenty years afterwards Swinburne described his dazzling adolescence in temperate numbers:
The morning song beneath the stars that fled
With twilight through the moonless mountain air,
While Youth with burning lips and wreathless hair
Sang towards the sun that was to crown his head,
Rising; the hopes that triumphed and fell dead;
The sweet swift eyes and songs of hours that were; —
These may’st thou not give back for ever; these
As at the sea’s heart all her wrecks lie waste,
Lie deeper than the sea;
But flowers thou may’st, and winds, and hours of ease,
And all its April to the world thou may’st
Give back, and half my April back to me.
With 1862, and the approach of his twenty-sixth year, he began to envisage life more seriously. An insatiable reader, he had by this time acquainted himself with the principal masterpieces of literature, and with hundreds of neglected works from many of which he extracted an intenser pleasure than they had ever given to a reader before. Now for five years he had been self-apprenticed to the great masters of writing, and although the total failure of his own solitary publication seems to have left him philosophically indifferent, he was becoming more and more ambitious to excel. His verses at this time were corrected, torn up, rewritten from memory with divers modifications, revised again and put away. Nothing could be less like the confident smoothness of composition which he gained later on than the labour with which he filed his early works. No one will ever know how many times, between 1858 and 1865, Chastelard was destroyed and recast, polished and thrust aside in despair.
It was at this time that Swinburne entered upon the solitary romance of his life, and suffered a crushing disappointment. He was presented to great friends of Ruskin and of Burne-Jones, the pathologist Dr. (afterwards Sir) John Simon and his wife Jane, whom Ruskin called “his dear P.R.S.,” or Pre-Raphaelite sister. They extended a very charming hospitality to a small but distinguished circle, and Swinburne became intimate with the family. Here he met with a young kinswoman of the host and hostess, a graceful and vivacious girl who made a violent impression on the young poet’s heart, and who seemed, or so he thought, to encourage his advances. She gave him roses, she played and sang to him, and he conceived from her gracious ways an encouragement which she was far from seriously intending. He declared his passion, suddenly, and no doubt in a manner which seemed to her preposterous and violent. More from nervousness, probably, then from ill-will, she broke out laughing in his face. He was deeply chagrined, and, in a way which those who knew him will easily imagine for themselves, he showed his displeasure, and they parted on the worst of terms.
In a very wretched frame of mind, Swinburne went up to Northumberland, and there wrote “The Triumph of Time,” which is the most profound and the most touching of all his personal poems. Speaking to me of this incident, in 1876, he assured me that the stanzas of this wonderful lyric represented with the exactest fidelity the emotions which passed through his mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but the infinite pity and the pain. The appeal to the sea in “The Triumph of Time,” as to “the great sweet Mother and lover of men,” was extremely natural on the lips of one who loved the sea as it was never loved before even by an Englishman:
I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships,
Change as the winds change, veer in the tide;
My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips,
I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside;
Sleep, and not know if she be, if she were,
Filled full with life to the eyes and hair,
As a rose is fulfilled to the roseleaf tips
With splendid summer and perfume and pride.
The whole poem deserves close study as a revelation of the poet’s innermost feelings, which he exposes with an equal frankness in no other section of his work.
I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,
Fill the days of my daily breath
With fugitive things not good to treasure,
Do as the world doth, say as it saith; But if we had loved each other — O sweet.
Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet,
The heart of my heart, beating harder for pleasure
To feel you tread it to dust and death —
Ah, had I not taken my life up and given
All that life gives and the years let go,
The wine and the honey, the balm and leaven,
The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?
Come life, come death, not a word be said;
Should I lose you living, and vex you dead?
I shall never tell you on earth; and in heaven,
If I cry to you then, will you hear or know?
This episode was the only one of its kind in Swinburne’s experience, and it was with a certain fidelity that he carried down to the grave his memory of the one girl whom he ever asked to share “the wine and leaven of lovely life” with him.
The painful realities of life were once more brought home to the enthusiastic young visionary by an event which has often been described. On the 23rd of May 1860, D. G. Rossetti had married Lizzie Siddell, between whom and Algernon Swinbur
ne a boy-and-girl friendship immediately sprang up. They were alike in personal appearance, with the same abundant red-gold hair; they were equally inexperienced, restless, and wayward, with the same playfulness, the same absurdities. Rossetti was much entertained by their innocent intimacy, occasionally having to call them both to order, as he might a pair of charming angora cats romping too boisterously together. When the Rossettis settled in 14 Chatham Place, Swinburne was an almost incessant visitor, and the three commonly went out of an evening to eat at a restaurant. On the 10th of February 1862 they dined at the Sablonière Hotel in Leicester Square, and Rossetti saw his wife home, and went out again. When he returned, she was dead, or dying, having taken an overdose of laudanum. At the inquest Swinburne was a chief witness, but no newspaper reported his evidence, which dwelt upon the devoted affection existing between husband and wife. The following account, however, is part of a statement, still unpublished, which was found among Swinburne’s papers after his death:
I had come to know and to regard with little less than a brother’s affection the noble lady whom he had recently married. On the evening of her terrible death we had all dined together at a “restaurant” which Rossetti had been accustomed to frequent. Next morning, on coming by appointment to sit for my portrait, I heard that she had died in the night, under circumstances which afterwards made necessary my appearance and evidence at the inquest held on her remains. The anguish of her widower, when next we met, under the roof of the mother with whom he had sought refuge, I cannot remember, at more than twenty years’ distance, without some recrudescence of emotion. With sobs and broken speech... he appealed to my friendship, in the name of her regard for me — such regard he assured me, as she had felt for no other of his friends — to cleave to him in this time of sorrow, to come and keep house with him as soon as a residence could be found.
Swinburne is said to have been present when Rossetti thrust the sole manuscript of his poems into his wife’s coffin, and it was to his marvellous memory that Morris, Meredith, and Burne-Jones principally trusted for the reconstruction of those lost lyrics. In the presence of his “little Northumbrian friend” Rossetti found comfort and distraction, and the comrades became more inseparable than ever. During some months of 1862, while the scheme of a general household for the painter-poets was being developed, Swinburne moved into lodgings in the house of a music teacher, 77 Newman Street, Oxford Street, and here he was active and happy for some months, until Rossetti was ready to receive him at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, a Queen Anne mansion commonly called Tudor House, of which he had become the tenant. Definite rooms were set apart for Swinburne, and for William Michael Rossetti and Meredith, who were sub-tenants. Swinburne, who paid more than the others, had a sitting-room of his own on the ground floor. What made Tudor House particularly delightful was the large garden at the back. It may not be generally known that Tudor House was part of the mansion occupied by Queen Katherine Parr after the death of Henry VIII., and that it was here that the Lord High Admiral Seymour visited and paid his court to her. This was Swinburne’s London home for nearly two years.
The poet had hitherto been entirely an amateur in literature, that is to say, he had never sold a manuscript or written an article at the discretion of an editor. This is worth observing, as an oddity in the career of one of the most professional of all great men of letters. He was beginning to fret under his inability to address a wider public than the circle of congenial Pre-Raphaelite friends. An interesting evidence of this has lately come to hand in a letter (dated from 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars, January 4, 1862) written by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Mr. (afterwards Sir) Theodore Martin. In this letter Rossetti says:
Now here comes a petition. A young friend of mine — 23 [sic] years of age — Algernon Swinburne, son of Admiral Swinburne — is a poet not promising in the common sense only, but certainly destined to be one of the two or three leaders who are to succeed Tennyson and the Brownings, and not one of whom has certainly yet cropped up among Tannhausers and such like. At present he has his way to make, and plenty of unpublished poems and tales — all truly admirable — à placer; — remuneration as well as fame being of importance to him. Our friend Whitly Stokes joins with me in the highest hope of his genius. Now were I to send you some of his MSS., and you thought as we do of them, would it be possible to you, without tasking your kindness with too much trouble, to give him an introduction to Frazer or some other vehicle of publicity? Could you let me know?
There is no evidence that Martin saw his way to taking any action in the matter. But, at last, in Swinburne’s twenty-sixth year, the door of publicity opened before him, or at least gaped at him for a little while. Apparently through Monckton Milnes, Swinburne formed the acquaintance of Richard Holt Hutton, who had lately become part-editor and part-proprietor of the Spectator, a newspaper which now began to take the foremost place in England as an organ of intellectual activity. Hutton, like everybody else, was dazzled by the young poet’s knowledge, and by the firmness of his taste; he invited him to write, in prose and verse, for his paper. Accordingly, seven lyrics appeared with Swinburne’s signature between April and September 1802, and among these were “Faustine,”
“A song in time of Revolution,” and “The Sundew,” highly characteristic specimens of his early maturity. It is less easy to speak of the prose contributions, because they were anonymous. Were it not for passages in private letters, it would be dangerous to assert, what, however, those familiar with Swinburne’s early style could hardly question, that the series of five long articles on Les Misérables of Victor Hugo, and that on Les Fleurs du Mal of Baudelaire are his. There are several others which I am privately certain are also Swinburne’s, but I deprecate mere conjecture, and will not name them.
The considerable monograph devoted to Les Misérables is the earliest example of Swinburne’s mature prose which we possess. The knowledge of its existence was not recovered until 1914, when a reference in one of the poet’s early letters set me on the track of it. He was careful to make not the slightest reference to it in later years, doubtless because the tone of it seemed cool and even carping to him when once he had resigned himself to the attitude of regarding Victor Hugo as a deity, immune from censure. But few readers will be found to deny that this utterance of his youth is more sane as criticism than much of what he afterwards published in reiterated reverberations of mere praise. The absence of character in the first of these Spectator articles will be noted. The young reviewer moves stiffly, and it is not until his pen has warmed to the use of prose that it learns to express its master’s will. But the later pages of this study are among the best which Swinburne ever wrote, inspired with enthusiasm, and not yet spoiled by bombastic fulness and riot of antithesis.
These articles, as they appeared, he sent to Victor Hugo, who acknowledged them with much graciousness, with so much, indeed, that the critic was shocked at his own excess of boldness. Algernon wrote to Milnes, with whom he often corresponded in French: “Si j’eusse su qu’il (V. H.) deviat les lire, j’aurais craint de lui avoir déplu en m’attaquant aux philosophes; j’ai aussi un peu nargué en passant la vertu publique, et la démocratie vertueuse.” The majestic bonhomie of “le maître qu’on a toujours vénéré” completed the subjugation of Swinburne, and never again had he the audacity to treat Victor Hugo as an ordinary mortal.
The unsigned study of Baudelaire which occupied so inordinate a space in the Spectator for September 1862 is a critical work of still higher importance. It marks Swinburne’s earliest excursion into the analysis of modern French poetry. It required high intellectual courage to champion in an English periodical the merits of any new volume of French verse, not to speak of such a volume as Les Fleurs du Mal. England had not yet emerged from its long attack of Podsnappery, and there was hardly a critic of authority who ventured to advance the claims of French poetry. Victor Hugo’s fame was that of a dramatist and a novelist, Lamartine’s that of a politician; to the average cultivated E
nglishman Vigny was absolutely unknown, and the British notion of French lyric was bounded by the fame of Béranger and Musset, whose sentimentality Swinburne hated.
It is not certain by what means he met with the poems of Baudelaire, which had been issued in June 1857, and withdrawn from circulation, after a violent controversy and a prosecution, in August of the same year. The original edition of Les Fleurs du Mal had at once become an exceedingly rare book, and I think that Swinburne had not seen a copy of it. If he had, he could scarcely have avoided mentioning some of the suppressed pieces, Les Epaves, in particular “Les Femmes Damnées.” A small second edition, with Les Épaves omitted, was issued in Paris in 1861, and I feel no doubt that this is the form in which Swinburne first read Baudelaire, as it is certainly that in which he reviewed him for startled subscribers to the Spectator. He did not know the edition of 1857 until 1864, when W. M. Rossetti procured a copy, which he gave him.
The facts regarding the relations of these two great poets, who were in some aspects of their genius closely allied to one another, have hitherto been extremely obscure. The discovery of some papers in a desk, in 1912, enables me to record what little there is to tell. Swinburne, when his article appeared in the Spectator, sent it, with a letter, to Baudelaire. Of this letter and missive Baudelaire, for a whole year, from indolence or failing health, made no acknowledgment whatever. Swinburne expressed surprise to Whistler, who rallied the French poet on his discourtesy. Baudelaire expressed, in reply, “tout mon repentir de mon oubli et de mon apparent ingratitude,” but still could not shake off his apathy far enough to write to his English admirer. At last, on the 10th of October 1863, he managed to write a long and most interesting letter to Swinburne, which he entrusted to a French friend who was visiting London; this the friend neglected to deliver, and it was lately found, unopened, in a drawer in Paris. It is a great pity that this communication from the noble poet for whom he entertained, and continued to entertain, so exalted an esteem, never reached him, since the words which Baudelaire uses in it were calculated to give Swinburne acute pleasure. The author of Les Fleurs du Mal told his unknown English reviewer, “Je n’aurais jamais cru qu’un littérateur anglais pût si bien pénétrer la beauté française, les intentions françaises et la prosodie française.”
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 357
