Swinburne’s hatred of Euripides was never expressed more violently than when he was writing Erechtheus, perhaps because he was unable to forget that he was using a theme which had already passed through the hands of Euripides.
Indeed, he was not merely fully aware of, but grudgingly consented to adopt the argument saved for us by the orator Lycurgus and the long fragment, a speech of Praxithea, which are enough to give us some inkling of Euripides’ treatment. A clumsy reviewer described Swinburne’s play as “a translation from Euripides,” ignorant of the fact that the supposed original disappeared, save for the bit preserved, by Lycurgus, before the Christian era. Swinburne was too furious to see how funny this blunder was, but it provoked from him a private protest of great importance. In a letter to a friend (January 2, 1876) he said:
A fourth-form boy could see that as far as Erechtheus can be said to be modelled after anybody, it is modelled throughout after the earliest style of Æschylus.... I did introduce (instead of a hint and a verse or two acknowledged in my notes) a good deal of the “long and noble fragment” referred to, into Praxithea’s first long speech — but the translated verses (I must say it) were so palpably and pitiably inferior both in thought and expression to the rest that the first persons I read that part of the play to in MS., knowing nothing of Greek,... remarked the falling off at once — the discrepancy and blot on the face of my work — so I excised the Sophist — .. only keeping a hint or two, and one or two of his best lines. If this sounds outrecuidant or savouring of “surquedry,” you may remember that I always have maintained it is far easier to overtop Euripides by the head and shoulder than to come up to the waist of Sophocles or the knee of Æschylus.
He preserved this prejudice against Euripides from school-time to the grave, and he always asserted that he was supported in it by the conversation of Jowett. Neither the stoicism nor the scepticism of Euripides was agreeable to Swinburne, and what did not please him excessively he was apt to reject altogether. He detested the realism of “the Sophist,” but perhaps a few Euripidean touches would have preserved Erechtheus from what is really its only blemish, a too marmoreal uniformity of diction.
During the next, three years there is hardly anything to record of the external life of the poet. He became more and more isolated from human companionship, and more and more buried in books. This was the most painful portion of his career, during which he suffered from alternations of boisterous excitement, which his few faithful friends were unable to repress, and of dark melancholia which they were powerless to dispel. Hitherto his visits to Holmwood had always enabled him to regain the serenity of his spirits, but this resource also now began to fail him. It was from Holmwood that he wrote to a friend (March 27, 1876) of “the dull monotonous puppet-show of my life, which often strikes me as too barren of action or enjoyment to be much worth holding on to.” The great excitements of literature, which had supported him at such an altitude for so long, now seemed to lose their stimulus; he could speak of the spiritual pleasure of verse as only “better than nothingness, or at least seeming better than nothingness.” His lyrical gift had not, however, failed him, though at this time it often took on a melancholy air, well presented by the sad and enchanting “Forsaken Garden,” which was written in March 1876. He who, ten years earlier, had entered with such generous enthusiasm into the hopes and efforts of his most stirring contemporaries, now cut himself off from all such companionships; “of the world of letters I know personally less than little,” he wrote to an inquirer.
He stimulated his energies with controversy, and A Note on the Muscovite Crusade in prose and A Ballad of Bulgarie (the latter not printed till 1893), were contributions to a study of the Balkan War of 1876; the former disagreeable in tone, the latter a lively and amusing diatribe, showing great vivacity of mind and violence of temper; neither is of considerable value. Swinburne was now engaged in translating the poems of Villon, and in making a close study of that poet’s text and language, by such lights as were at that date available. In May of this year he went with John Nichol to Guernsey and Sark, a memorable visit which gave him the extremity of pleasure. When he returned to London in June he appeared to have been dipped in the waters of Youth, so much had he regained of his vigour, his sweetness, and his cheerfulness.
The Channel Islands immediately inspired him with the old enthusiasm for the sea, and he now wrote “The Garden of Cymodoce” and other powerful lyrics in praise of Sark, “qui dépasse,” he wrote to Stéphane Mallarmé (June 1, 1876), “même les éloges d’Auguste Vacquerie. Moi, nourris aux bords de la mer, je n’ai jamais rien vu de si charmant.” He declared that he would be King of Sark. He became quite infatuated with the enchantment of this rocky islet, and I have memories of embarrassing walks with him in the streets of London late at night, when crescendo praises of the glorious beauty of Sark, delivered at the top of his voice in a very shrill key, attracted the unfavourable attention of the police. But in August, after two months of London, he sank very low again. He attributed his loss of health and spirits to having been “poisoned by perfumes.” A lady, at whose house he had spent a night, had, he said, sought to do him honour by filling his bedroom with great Japanese lilies in blossom, and the poet had waked in the middle of the night in a delirium, rousing the household with his shrieks. Whatever the cause, he was certainly extremely ill, and again a long retirement at Holmwood proved the remedy. He was seen no more in London until the spring of 1877.
On the 4th of March his father, Admiral Swinburne, died and was buried at Bonchurch beside the daughter whom he lost in 1863. As it was said at the time, and has been repeated, that Admiral Swinburne’s Will contained reflections on his eldest son, which were painful to the poet’s feelings and tended to estrange him from his family, it is perhaps well to say that these rumours were wholly unfounded. It is true that the Admiral named as executors his brother-in-law, Sir Henry Percy Gordon, and his younger son, Edward Swinburne (who died in 1891). But Algernon’s notorious inaptitude for any species of business was quite sufficient to account for that. By the Will, which was signed in May 1875, the Admiral left Algernon £5000, and the ultimate possession of his books, which he valued at £2000, so that if any difference at all was made between his children, it was a little to his eldest son’s advantage. Algernon returned to Holmwood after the funeral, but for a very short time. He refrained from going back there any more, and when the summer of 1877 came round, he went to South wold in Suffolk again, instead of going to Holmwood, and then returned to London. In November of the same year Lady Jane Swinburne told Messrs. Chatto and Windus, his publishers, that she did not know her son’s address.
His principal occupation or diversion for some time had been a study on the character and writings of a novelist for whom he cultivated a deep devotion. On his return to London he completed his Note on Charlotte Bronte, a “note” which extended to a volume. The object of this work was controversial; it was intended to undermine the reputation of George Eliot, which was particularly obnoxious to Swinburne, by insistence on the superior claims of Charlotte Brontë, who was being unduly neglected. So far so well, and Swinburne deserves great credit for having set the pendulum swinging back in favour of the Brontes. Nor was his praise of Charlotte, though expressed in dithyrambic language, excessive. It sweeps away The Professor and pronounces Shirley essentially a failure, while basing the triumphant claim of Charlotte Brontë to eternal fame on Jane Eyre and Villette. Swinburne took the opportunity to celebrate the genius of Emily, and criticism has in the main accepted a view, which he was the earliest to state with vigour. The Note, however, in spite of much that is amusing and valuable, is not a success. It marks a stage in the decline, or at least in the ossification, of Swinburne’s genius. His firmness has become arrogance, his zeal violence, his chiaro a blaze and his oscuro pitch-darkness. There are offences against taste; he seriously grieved a number of his own friends by calling George Eliot “an Amazon thrown sprawling over the crupper of her spavined and spur-galled
Pegasus.’’ Indeed there is ample proof offered by the Note of 1877 that Swinburne at the age of forty had adopted mannerisms of style and temper which could not but injure his future writings in prose. If any one made this prediction at the time, it was only too sadly confirmed by the results of the next three decades.
At this time he lived in one very large sitting-room and a bedroom on the first floor of 3 Great James Street, Bedford Row, and here he had arranged his favourite possessions. Among these were a collection of precious glass, a wonderful mosaic top-table, a swinging pier-glass before which the poet would perform a sort of solemn dance, and the famous serpentine candlesticks. These objects were in curious discord with the rest of the lodging-house furniture. He was accustomed to draw the particular attention of visitors to each of them in turn, like a showman, saying of the top-table, “Great God, how beautiful it is!” or of the candlesticks, “Lovely! lovely!” with a strong indrawing of the breath.
Mr. W. Lestocq, the actor, who lived in the same house at this time, and who often was of use to him, recalls that he seldom entered Swinburne’s sitting-room without the poet’s calling his attention to the portrait of Orsini, the identical pastel or print which had adorned his rooms at Oxford, “and that frequently, though it hung much above his head, he would jump up and try to kiss it.” He entertained his particular friends here rather frequently, but these feasts were apt to be agitating affairs. The following extract from my own journal may be taken to illustrate his life at this time:
June 11th, 1877. A. C. S. having summoned me to go to his rooms on Saturday evening for the particular purpose of hearing a new Essay he has written on Charlotte Brontë, I duly arrived at 3 Great James Street about 8. Algernon was standing alone in the middle of the floor, with one hand in the breast of his coat, and the other jerking at his side. He had an arrangement of chairs, with plates and glasses set on the table, as if for a party. He looked like a conjurer, who was waiting for his audience. He referred vaguely to “the others,” and said that while they delayed in coming, he would read me a new poem he had just finished, called “In the Bay,” which he said he should solemnly dedicate to the spirit of Marlowe. He brushed aside some of the glasses and plates, and sat down to read. The poem was very magnificent, but rather difficult to follow, and very long. It took some time to read; and still no one came. As the evening was slipping away, I asked him presently whether the reading of C. Bronte should not begin, whereupon he answered, “I’m expecting Watts and Ned Burne-Jones and Philip Marston, and — some other men. I hope they’ll come soon.” We waited a little while in silence, in the twilight, and then Swinburne said, “I hope I didn’t forget to ask them!” He then trotted or glided into his bedroom, and what he referred to there I don’t know, but almost instantly he came out and said cheerfully, “Ah! I find I didn’t ask any of those men, so we’ll begin at once.” He lighted his two great candlesticks of serpentine and started. He soon got tired of reading the Essay, and turned to the delights, of which he never wearies, of his unfinished novel. He read two long passages, the one a ride over a moorland by night, the other the death of his heroine, Lesbia Brandon. After reading aloud all these things with his amazing violence, he seemed quite exhausted, and sank in a kind of dream into the corner of his broad sofa, his tiny feet pressed tight together, and I stole away.
He was very solitary at this time. His breakfast was served to him in his rooms, but he had to go out for his other meals, which he used to do with mechanical regularity. It was a curious spectacle to see him crossing Holborn on his way to the London Restaurant, which then existed at the corner of Chancery Lane. Swinburne, with hanging hands, and looking straight before him, would walk across like an automaton between the vans and cabs, and that he was never knocked down seemed extraordinary. Occasionally he took Watts or myself to dine with him, but seldom, and he never made any casual acquaintances. Mr. R. B. Haldane (now Lord Haldane) tells me that he happened to go into the London Restaurant one day in 1877. When he had given his order for luncheon, the waiter leaned down and whispered, “Do you see that gentleman, Sir?” Haldane then perceived a little gentleman sitting bolt upright at a table by himself, with nothing before him but a heaped-up dish of asparagus and a bowl of melted butter. His head, with a great shock of red hair round it, was bent a little on one side, and his eyes were raised in a sort of unconscious rapture, while he held the asparagus, stick by stick, above his face, and dropped it down as far as it would go. “That’s the poet Swinburne, Sir!” the waiter said, “and he comes here on purpose to enjoy our asparagus.”
In May 1878, Victor Hugo invited Swinburne to Paris, to be present, as the official representative of English poetry, at the centenary of the death of Voltaire. But the letter arrived at a moment of suffering and depression, and Swinburne could not find a companion. A second invitation suggested that Swinburne should himself have a welcome in Paris, Mlle. Augusta Holmès having consented to put some of his poems to music for a public performance, at which Swinburne was to be crowned by an Academician. What the voice of Zeus could not perform was not likely to be wrought by a siren, and Swinburne abode wearily in 3 Great James Street.
The texture of his verse now showed greater elasticity and freshness than that of his prose. No one would have guessed at the distracted and even alarming physical condition of the author from the serene volume of Poems and Ballads: Second Series which he published in June 1878. Not a few of Swinburne’s closest admirers would, indeed, sooner part with any other of his books than with this, which exhibits his purely lyrical genius in its most amiable and melodious form. It was dedicated to Richard Burton, in whose company and in that of Adelaide Sartoris the poet had spent some enchanting weeks at Vichy, in September 1869. He reminded his friends how
Some nine years gone, as we dwelt together
In the sweet hushed heat of the south French weather,
Ere autumn fell on the vine-tressed hills
Or the season had shed one rose-red feather, while Swinburne and Burton stood together at the Grand Grille at Vichy, the poet pledged the traveller in a beaker of hot water, and promised that his next book of songs should bear the name of Burton:
Nine years have risen and eight years set
Since there by the well-spring our hands on it met:
And the pledge of my songs that were then to be,
I could wonder not, friend, though a friend should forget.
For life’s helm rocks to the windward and lea,
And time is as wind, and as waves are we;
And song is as foam that the sea-winds fret,
Though the thought at its heart should be deep as the sea.
The sentiment of friendship is very strongly marked in the volume of 1878, and is displayed in the successive elegies which distinguish it from other collections of the poet’s work. Some of these have already been mentioned, but they deserve reconsideration. The poems on the deaths of Baudelaire, of Théophile Gautier, of Barry Cornwall, of Lorimer Graham (“Epicede”), of Admiral Swinburne (“Inferiae”) are amongst the most tender, the most sincere, and the most inspired which the author ever composed. Moreover, they combine with an elegiac accent of regret a formal and considered analysis of work and character. The three first of those just mentioned rank among Swinburne’s most exquisite pieces of criticism, and the critical elegy may be said to be a form of verse which he practically invented.
But the Poems and Ballads of 1878 is also remarkable as containing a large number of pieces in which the melody of Swinburne’s verse reached its highest refinement. There is not here a question of the torrent of palpitating and trumpeting music which fills the choruses and odes of earlier volumes, nor even of the Corybantic dance-measures of the poems of 1866, but of a delicate, tremulous melody like that of a nightingale, poured forth in a stream of pensive but not dejected enthusiasm. This witchery of exquisite sound, the tone of the Æolian harp, had rarely been heard before in Swinburne’s poetry, and was scarcely ever heard in it again. It is fo
und here in its most harmonious ecstasy in such magical lyrics as “A Forsaken Garden,” “The Year of the Rose,” “A Ballade of Dreamland,” and “A Vision of Spring in Winter.”
Of “A Ballade of Dreamland” he told Miss Alice Bird that, going to his bedroom early one night, he sat down to write a poem with the refrain, “Only the song of a secret bird,” but that to his astonishment and disgust the words would not come. He got into bed, savagely uttering imprecations. In the morning, when he awoke with rested brain, he wrote the ballade off without a halt. He described to her, also, the circumstances in which “A Vision of Spring in Winter’’ was composed. He produced the three first stanzas in his sleep. “I was not dreaming,” he declared, “nor in the borderland of sleep, but sound asleep,” when the ideas were born. He woke in the night, and jumping out of bed, he scribbled the verses down. He expected in the morning to find that they were nonsense, but no alteration of the verses as he had written them was needed, and then he added the four concluding stanzas. In a totally different key, this volume presents to us what is perhaps the most powerful of all Swinburne’s lyrics of experience, “At a Month’s End” — which as a parallel between storm on the sea and passion in the soul has never been equalled.
This volume of 1878, which was remarkable, among other things, as containing the translations from François Villon on which Swinburne had been so long engaged, was originally destined to be dedicated to William Bell Scott. When the poet recalled his promise to Burton, he cancelled this dedication to Scott, which remains unpublished. It is called “Recollections,” and contains some lines of great beauty. It opens thus:
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 369
