Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow,
Far too far off for thought or any prayer.
What ails us with thee, who art wind and air?
What ails us gazing when all seen is hollow?
Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire,
Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire,
Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find.
Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies,
The low light fails us in elusive skies,
Still the foiled earnest ear is deaf, and blind
Are still the eluded eyes.
In such a stanza as this, as in that which celebrates Sappho, and in the marvellous passage where the poet compares himself with Orestes, we have solemn English poetry produced with the highest possible distinction. Swinburne modestly wrote (in this very year, 1867): “There are in the English language three elegiac poems so great that they eclipse and efface all the elegiac poetry we know, all of Italian, all of Greek.” He meant Lycidas and Adonais and Thyrsis, but we make them four, and include “Ave atque Vale.” The further history of this latter is curious; Baudelaire came to life again, and Swinburne was on the point of tearing up his elegy. However, Baudelaire died some months later, and, after a delay of eleven years, “Ave atque Vale” was at length included in the volume of 1878.
Joseph Knight had by this time introduced the poet to Mr. John Morley (now Viscount Morley of Blackburn), who had just achieved a distinguished success with his first book, Edmund Burke, and who was then editing the Fortnightly Review. Swinburne was very anxious to find some channel through which to pour the convictions and expose the erudition which he had formed in the intense intellectual labour of the last eight years. He had long fretted at his inability to discover an editor for his critical prose. Morley opened the pages of his review to this brilliant and audacious admirer of all beautiful things, and Swinburne’s articles in the Fortnightly became a very remarkable element in current literature. It is not too much to say that in them he invented a new class of writing, new at least in England, since there had been in France since 1850 a romantic criticism of high importance. Swinburne owed little or nothing to Sainte-Beuve, whom he never appreciated, but he was strongly affected by the pictorial manner of Gautier, and he had an elder brother after his own heart in Paul de Saint-Victor. Like the studies of the latter, Swinburne’s early monographs are impetuous and inflamed impressions of literature which has either filled the critic with transports of admiration, or, on rarer occasions, with equally violent transports of anger and scorn. For the first time in English literature, an attempt was here made to produce a concrete and almost plastic conception of the work of an author, not minutely analysed or coldly condensed, but presented as if by an inspired neophyte, proclaiming a religion in an ecstasy. Such, in 1867, were the “William Morris” and the “Matthew Arnold” of Swinburne, and the sensation they caused was reverberant. To all young æstheticians of that and the next few years, the advent of the Fortnightly Review with a critical article by Swinburne in it was looked forward to as to a great event.
In the summer he was “in the honourable agonies of portrait-sitting — to Watts.” This was the picture now in the National Portrait Gallery. The gratified model wrote (May 23, 1867):
Of course it is a great honour for me to be asked to sit to him, now especially that he accepts no commissions and paints portraits only for three reasons, — friendship, beauty and celebrity; having the “world” at his feet begging to be painted. But it takes time and trouble, and he won’t let me crop my hair, whose curls the British public (unlike Titian’s) reviles aloud in the streets. Il faut souffrir pour être— ‘peint, but the portrait is a superb picture already, in spite of the model, and up to the Venetian standard, by the admission of other artists, — a more than fair test.
He spent an unusually long time in London this year, with more than the customary ill effect upon his health. Several recurrences of his nervous malady should have warned him of the danger, but he continued to live at highest pressure, in a round of intellectual fervour relieved only by ‘‘racketing.” At length, on the 13th of July 1S67, when at breakfast with a large party at Lord Houghton’s town-house, Swinburne was attacked by a seizure much more violent than he had ever suffered from before. Admiral Swinburne was telegraphed to, and came up to town, bringing with him the family physician, Dr. Alison; they found Algernon already conscious, under the care of a specialist whom Lord Houghton had called in. He was removed at once to his chambers, and next day had recovered enough to be taken down to Holmwood. The prospect seemed dark, but the poet revived as soon as he got home. A fortnight later he was quite well again. The Admiral wrote to Lord Houghton (July 28), “Algernon has fallen willingly into regular hours and habits, as he always does when he is with us. He is tractable and willing to do everything that is required of him. It cannot be expected, and therefore is not insisted upon, that his mental faculties should lie fallow, but we do all we can to keep them tranquil. We feel him to be safe while he is here.”
A fortnight later still (Aug. 13), Swinburne writes, in fully-regained high spirits: “My last attack was, they say, of a really dangerous kind, and I am prescribed a torpor of mind and body for months.” The remainder of this letter shows no trace of mental “torpor.”
“My Mother is very urgent with me not to move or make the least change in my habits.” This means that while the Admiral was of opinion that Algernon ought to break with London altogether, and live at home, Lady Jane had yielded to Algernon’s vehement persuasions, and thought that, under promise of complete reform, he might still keep on his lodgings in town. So ended the most serious of all Swinburne’s attacks, and the one which gave the most poignant alarm. It was very curious that, even in this extreme instance, as soon as he came out of his long death-like trance, he felt neither pain nor sickness, although for some days he was feeble and languid.
Swinburne now settled quietly at Holmwood for a period of several months, calm, cheerful, and active. A pleasant and friendly neighbour was Sir Robert Phillimore (1810-1885), the eminent jurist. Ultimately the doctor gave permission for Swinburne to share the lodgings of a friend, on a pledge of being “as regular” there as at home. The “lodgings” were apartments taken by George Powell in a small house in Etretat, in Normandy, where the friends were visited two or three times by Mr. Lindo Myers, who was then living at Havre in connection with the Maritime Exhibition held there in 1867.
On one occasion Mr. Myers spent several days with the friends at Etretat, and Swinburne then showed him some proofs of the poems which Miss Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868) published early in 1868 under the title of Infelicia. Swinburne had recently made the acquaintance in London of this actress, famous for her performance of “Mazeppa.” Swinburne told Mr. Myers that Adah Menken had sent the poems to him from Paris to look over, and that “not only had he done that, but thought he had improved some of the lines considerably.” This settles the absurd legend which was long circulated in Grub Street that Infclicia was really written by Swinburne, from whom, without acknowledgment, is borrowed the quatrain:
Leaves pallid and sombre and ruddy,
Dead fruits of the fugitive years;
Some stained as with wine and made bloody,
And some as with tears.
On the 28th of September, Swinburne returned to England, travelling by the midnight boat from Havre to Southampton, in company with Mr. Lindo Myers, who has given me a very diverting account of the voyage.
Swinburne went back immediately to Holmwood. Then followed a time of serene and wholesome activity, during which Swinburne read the poetry of two dead and three living languages with thirsty zeal, prepared under Mazzini’s guidance for his celebration of the Republic, and sketched out, and even began, the majestic series of political poems which was to engage the best of his attention for the next three years. In the autumn of this year was published A Song of Italy, loudly heralded by Hotten as a
new masterpiece by the author of Poems and Ballads, and rashly issued in a first edition of some 3000 copies. Its reception by the public was disappointing. Readers, who had hoped for a wilder “Faustine” or a more abandoned “Dolores,” refused to buy this verbose manifesto of Italian republicanism; thirty years afterwards the original edition was not yet exhausted. It was made the excuse for an outrageously violent attack in the Saturday Review on Swinburne’s poetry in general, by a Catholic journalist named H. N. Oxenham, who was driven to frenzy by what he called the “fanatical paradox” of the poet’s republicanism.
Even the best admirers of Swinburne were somewhat disconcerted by A Song of Italy, in spite of the magic of the versification and the dignity and rapture of the language. He had chosen a metre used, and perhaps invented, by Landor, a truncated couplet which is appropriate to a short lyric, but which becomes intolerably fatiguing in a work of nearly seventy pages. Moreover, the whole composition was vociferous and yet vague, while a fault, which had been observed before as waylaying Swinburne’s feet, was here found to have completely ensnared him, namely, the temptation to go on and on at the free will of his rhetoric in no particular direction. A Song of Italy, written before Mazzini had undertaken the English bard’s political education, is amorphous and sometimes scarcely intelligible; in point of lucidity it compares unfavourably with the noble pieces — odes, clarion-cries and what not — which Swinburne was presently to roll out in greeting of the republican sunrise. The principal charm of A Song of Italy now resides in its exquisite vignettes of little Tuscan towns that the author had seen four years before during his brief Italian journey, such as this of Siena:
Thou too, O little laurelled town of towers,
Clothed with the flame of flowers,
From windy ramparts girdled with young gold,
From thy sweet hill-side fold
Of wallflowers, and the acacia’s belted bloom
And every blowing plume.
The whole of the long ode or rhapsody might really be condensed into this charge to Italia:
O mystic rose ingrained with blood, impearled
With tears of all the world!
The torpor of their blind brute-ridden trance
Kills England and chills France;
And Spain sobs hard through strangling blood; and snows
Hide the huge eastern woes.
But thou, twin-born with morning, nursed of noon,
And blessed of sun and moon!
What shall avail to assail thee any more,
From sacred shore to shore?
The British public, still dominated, in those Podsnapian days, with an equal respect for kings and scorn for foreigners, failed to perceive the point, and it was even less attracted by a pamphlet of verse, an Appeal to England against the execution of the Manchester Fenians, which Swinburne circulated late in 1807. This, however, is a political poem of great merit, direct, intelligible, and brief, written in language of high simplicity. The Appeal, which is rather to England for mercy than in commendation of the condemned Fenians in particular, is remarkable because Swinburne never repeated his defence of Ireland or hinted again at an Irish republic; and also because it has a very fine passage in celebration of the United States, a country otherwise scarcely mentioned in all the poet’s writings.
The Appeal scandalised the reviewers, but it had one interesting result. The Reform League, then a body of some influence, solicited the poet to enter Parliament, offering to ensure his seat and pay his expenses. They took this step on the ground that Swinburne was representative of more advanced or republican opinions than any member of the existing House of Commons. The poet, excessively gratified, but conscious that never in his life had he “felt any ambition for any work or fame but a poet’s, except, indeed, while yet a boy, for a soldier’s,” very wisely applied to Mazzini for advice. The Italian patriot at once instructed him to refuse the invitation; telling him that he had other service to do. Swinburne was greatly relieved when he found he could dismiss the application with a wholly clear conscience, and thus ended his one and only episode on the brink of public affairs. One cannot imagine him in the House of Commons; he would have been a portent of ineffectuality in a place where even John Stuart Mill was little better than a failure.
A little puzzle of bibliography must here be noted. An examination of the original MSS. of the Dirae in Mr. Wise’s possession shows that these sonnets were not written at one time, but at two different periods, separated by several years. When Swinburne published the whole series, the four terrific sonnets called “Intercession,” —
O Death, a little more, and then the worm, —
praying for lingering torments to consume the miserable Louis Napoleon, were dated “Paris: September 1869.” It is apparent, however, that they were written earlier, for in a letter of February 5, 1868, writing from Holmwood, Swinburne says:
I have had a very jolly note from Victor Hugo.... The Master approves highly of my sonnets of intercession for “our mutual friend” [Napoleon III.], calling them “strophes magnifiques.”
It seems that he must have sent to Hugo, who was in Guernsey, the manuscript of those sonnets, or an early draft of one or more of them, early in 1868, although he did not completely revise the set until eighteen months later. Unfortunately “Intercession” is missing from among Mr. Wise’s MSS.
Throughout the early months of 1868, he was wholly absorbed in writing what was eventually to be collected as Songs before Sunrise. In April he wrote “Tiresias”; in June he published “Siena.” The magnificent “Prologue” to the volume of 1871 clearly betrays what was passing through his mind in this period of rapturous creative energy. We can hardly question that it was now, at the opening of this thirty-second year, that he felt most ecstatically the ripeness and magnitude of his lyric powers. ( His intellect was at its ( zenith; he was capable, as rarely before, and still more rarely afterwards, of clothing his thought with the most sumptuous and most radiant veils of imagination, and yet of retaining his command over its movement ln other times and cases we find Swinburne the slave of his own splendours, carried whither he would not by the Pythian intoxication of words. But this is not the case in the finest pages of Sonas before Sunrise, and fine pages in that book are as leaves in Vallambrosa. In “Hertha,” in “The Pilgrims,” in “Tirësias,” we are surprised to discover the most rapturous of troubadours transformed into one of the great poetic intelligences of the modern world.
A passage from a private letter may be quoted at this place. On the 17th of April 1868, Swinburne, after saying that “illness hardly intermittent during weeks and months of weather which would have disgraced hell and raised a revolution among the devils,” has yet been steadily at work on what was later known as Songs before Sunrise:
II — have lots of work in embryo, and some already born. I have such a subject before me, untouched — Tiresias at the grave of Antigone — i e. (understand), Dante at the grave of Italia. I do not say the living heir and successor of Dante as a patriot, for he sees her slowly but hopefully rising, though with pain and shame and labour.
My beloved chief [Mazzini] is still with us, very ill and indomitable, and sad and kind as ever.
All this labour, all the fury and flame of intellectual productivity, could not be indulged. in without manifest danger to his health. A long stay in London was once more disastrous, and his epileptic attacks recurred. By a distressing chance, it was during one of these fits that the writer of these pages first cast eyes upon the poet who was later to honour him with his friendship. The circumstances were terrifying in the N extreme. It was on the 9th of July, 18G8, rather late in the afternoon. Swinburne had fallen in a fit while working in the reading-room of the British Museum, and had cut his forehead superficially against the iron staple of the desk. I was walking along a corridor when I was passed by a couple of silent attendants rapidly carrying along in a chair what seemed to be a dead man. I recognised him instantly from his photographs which now filled the shop
windows. His hanging hands, closed eyelids, corpse-white face, and red hair dabbled in blood presented an appearance of the utmost horror, but I learned a few days later that his recovery was rapid and complete.
An illness of his mother’s again delayed him, but as soon as he could get away, he again joined Powell, who now had rented a villa near Etretat, and Swinburne did not return till the weather began to grow chilly in November. To this residence, which has since disappeared, Powell gave the preposterous name of Dolmancé, and Jean Lorrain, who visited it later, has described it as standing: en plein verger de fleurs, une vraie chaumière à toit de chaume, au beau milieu d’un préau de pommiers: tout à l’entour de profondes cavées, ces sortes des chemins creux, ombragés et toujours frais, même au moment de la canicule, que forment en Normandie les hauts talus, plantés de hêtres. L’endroit est ealme, en pleine vallée, déjà loin de la mer.
The poet indulged to his fill in his favourite pastime of sea-bathing, so recklessly indeed that in the early part of October, 1868, he was very nearly drowned by being carried out to sea on the tide that was setting from the Porte d’Amont. He was never a powerful swimmer, in consequence of the weakness of his arms, but he was untiring, and accustomed to relieve his limbs by frequently floating. He had however nearly reached the limits of his endurance when he was sighted by a fishing-vessel, the Marie Marthe, which was making for Yport, where the poet was ultimately landed, wrapped in a sail. An inquisitive and precocious collegian, home for the holidays, offered his services and was received by the English friends. This was Guy de Maupassant, who has left an account of Swinburne’s appearance and manner at this time, which, if highly colored, is of extreme value. Offenbach also visited Powell and Swinburne at Étretat.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 364
