The only form in which his youthful republicanism survived was in an intense hatred of the professed tyrants and destroyers of liberty, in the van of whom he placed the rulers of Germany. He expatiated to the last in praise of
England, elect of time,
By freedom sealed sublime.
After reading J. S. Mill’s Autobiography, he had told John Morley (March 28, 1874), “I never had the honour to meet [Mill], but ever since his Liberty came out, it has been the text-book of my creed as to public morals and political faith.” In 1899 no one dared to approach him with an invitation to celebrate either of the South African republics. At the moment when war broke out he wrote the fine sonnet which closes with the words, “Strike, England, and strike home.” This was followed by others, all inspired by the noblest and purest indignation, and by a burning pride in our country. At the darkest moment, the old poet rejoiced at the vision of “England’s name a light on land and sea,” and boasted that —
Alone, as Milton and as Wordsworth found
And hailed their England, when from all around
Howled all the recreant hate of envious knaves,
Sublime she stands.
When the proper time for publication comes it will be found, with interest and perhaps surprise, how accurately Swinburne predicted the treachery of Germany almost with his latest lyric breath.
He went far in his attitude of complacency with what might even be called British prejudice, but he did not admit, and we need not perceive, any inconsistency between this “Jingo” patriotism and the ardours of his youthful republicanism. He would have said that what he desired was liberty for nations that are still captive, and not the disturbance of those that are already free. But his generous and emotional political opinions must not be too rudely examined.
In a life where action took scarcely any part at all, the spoken word came to be only second in importance to the written word. A Scotchman who met Swinburne when he was staying with Nichol at Glasgow early in 1878 said, “He is one of the finest talkers of sense, and certainly the best talker of nonsense I have ever met with.” A still earlier witness speaks of “the wild Walpurgis night of Swinburne’s talk.” His conversation was vehement and copious; it was usually concerned with literature, with which Swinburne showed a familiarity and an enthusiasm which were extraordinary. His criticism in conversation was exceedingly stimulating, partly because it was independent and resolute, and partly because it was illuminated, far more than his written criticism, by whimsical flashes of humour and startling colloquial images. Perhaps I may be permitted to give an example not hitherto printed. It is an extract from a journal, and records a visit paid to my house on the 16th of August 1876:
Swinburne complained of having been unwell, and he described his symptoms with an infantile ingenuousness and perfect plausibility. He was weak and pale at first, but soon brightened into a good flow of talk, first about dramatic literature. He has never been able to read Bailey’s Festus through. The difference between Festus and the Balder of Sydney Dobell is the same as that between Mr. Mantalini’s dowager who had a demd outline and the countess who had no outline at all. Bailey had no ear and no metrical power at all, but he had a demd outline. Dobell, on the contrary, had no outline at all, but he never wrote a bad verse. Swinburne recited with enthusiasm the passage about
... hellebore, like a girl murderess,
Green-eyed and sick with jealousy, and white
With wintry thoughts of poison, and so on, down to the “inglorious moschatel,” in Balder. We passed to Beddoes, of whom he said that no one else had ever written plays so utterly wanting in conversational truth. The dialogue in Death’s Jest-Book was the howls of madmen trying to out-stun one another. Of course Browning delights in Beddoes as the only writer of dialogue worse than himself. I suggested Byron was worse, but Swinburne waved that aside, and said that Byron’s plays were indeed flatter and less poetical than Browning’s, but the conversation in them was more reasonable. We then talked of Wordsworth’s single play, The Borderers; Swinburne expressing great admiration of it as a juvenile production, and noting with surprise the morbid hectic tone of its ethics. He would like to know what was passing in Wordsworth’s life when he wrote it: it is far superior, as a psychological product, to Coleridge’s Remorse. He praised the King Otho of Keats, but of the Ariosto vein of that poet he spoke with the greatest contempt. He thought the vulgarity of The Cap and Bells quite extraordinary; he had drawn the attention of D. G. R. to it, who had said that if it stood alone it would justify all Maga’s insolence to Keats. It alarmed Swinburne to think that Keats should have gone “back to his gallipots” after composing Hyperion and The Eve of St. Agnes, and that The Cap and Bells should be the latest of Keats’ productions. He pursed up his mouth and made an owlish gesture with his eyes, as he added, “It gives one a horrid thought!”
With this, the record of one who was constantly seeing Swinburne at that time, may be compared the impressions of a very acute observer, Professor Andrew C. Bradley, who saw him only twice:
I had a momentary vision of him in my first year at Balliol between October 1869 and June 1870, when he came down into the Garden Quadrangle with Jowett. But some seven years later I was in the same room with him for an hour or more. Jowett was then Master, and I a young don whom he knew to be interested in poetry; and he asked me to look in after dinner to meet Swinburne, who had come with Watts to stay with him. As soon as I entered the drawing-room he introduced me. I had a surprise. The poet’s hand, as I took it, turned out to be plump and flabby — not to say podgy — whereas I expected it to be nervous and thin. His cloud of hair was of the old red colour, but there was a suspicion, I think, of baldness, and his eyes seemed to me a little faded; but perhaps what had faded was really some of my hero-worship. Their colour I should call blue-grey with a tinge of green. He was very kind, and talked to me for some time without a trace of patronage or self-consciousness. When he became animated — and he was so for most of the time — he flapped his hands continuously, even reminding me, though not painfully, of a man I once saw who suffered from a mild form of St. Vitus’s dance. What I can now remember of his talk is little enough. I spoke to him with enthusiasm of “Mater Triumphalis”; and that pleased him, but he said — what to me sounded almost blasphemous — that it threatened to go on for ever and he cut it short. Perhaps it was the metre of this poem that made me ask him if he knew Myers’ Saint Paul, and what he thought of the metrical effect: but he had not read it. I questioned him about Beddoes, whom I had just read for the first time, and he spoke of him rather coolly, and said that his lyrics did not sing. He talked delightfully about Rossetti’s poems, quoting the first stanza of the Bride s Prelude (which was not published until a dozen years later), and he quoted it very musically. After a while he began to declaim against some of the Idylls of the King and to make fun of the Dedication, and went on to describe some kind of burlesque he had written, in which Queen Victoria figured as Guinevere and Lord John Russell, I think, as Lancelot. He was beginning to quote from it, and became excited and shrill; and, as the matter promised to be indecorous and the room was full of ladies, I was half-amused and half-alarmed: but Jowett came up and interrupted us — not, I think, because he heard what Swinburne was saying, but because I — had had my full share of the great man.
In 1881 Jowett sent Swinburne up to the Bodleian Library with a note addressed to Mr. F. Madan, now Bodley’s Librarian, asking him to turn the poet loose in the Malone Room, where the treasures of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama are kept in a delightful, unconventional kind of cottage “parlour,” with a homely look and in a quiet out-of-the-way position. Mr. Madan writes to me:
It was impossible to allow any one to be alone in the room, so I went down with Swinburne, who was soon pulling down volume after volume of that seductive literature, absolutely absorbed in it. When I occasionally made some remark, suggesting a new shelf for his attention, he used to give a violent start as if hit, fully illustrat
ing the common expression “struck with a sudden thought.” This was not resentment of interruption, but extreme nervous sensitiveness.
Professor W. P. Ker tells me that he dined in Swinburne’s company, as the guest of John Nichol, on the 31st of March 1891. Orchardson and Mrs. Lynn Linton were also present, with others:
Swinburne talked mostly to Mrs. Lynn Linton about Landor, and took no part in the general conversation, until a young Scotchman lately come from Paris declared that he understood the writings of Stéphane Mallarmé. Swinburne who was sitting next to him, turned upon him crying and flashing out, “Then I suppose you will say that you understand Cyril Tourneur’s Transform’d Metamorphosis?” I was glad to see him so suddenly liven us, but I wish he had said something less like the controversial style of Freeman.
But it appeared that the young man had spoken of Victor Hugo in a manner of which Swinburne disapproved.
To these early impressions may be added that of Mr. Sidney C. Cockerell, who went with Mr. Emery Walker to dine at The Pines so late as the 29th of September 1904. Mr. Cockerell has been kind enough to give me a copy of what he noted the next day:
Went with Emery Walker to dine with Swinburne and Watts-Dunton at The Pines. Watts-Dunton talked well at dinner, but Swinburne (who looked very well and young — his beard still with a tinge of red in it) said nothing until we were half way through, when he suddenly burst out with a eulogy of The Two Noble Kinsmen and expressed his wonder that it had never been acted. He also spoke of his reading Arden of Feversham at Oxford and coming to the conclusion that, if not by Shakespeare, it was by some one capable of even greater things than Shakespeare was capable of at the time when it was written. After dinner we went up into his room and he delighted us by reading out two fine scenes from his new unfinished play on the Borgias. He read in a loud and dramatic manner, with much nervous movement, enforcing every sentence. I took my Bembo and Catullus MSS. and the Ovid containing Ben Jonson’s signature, with all of which he was greatly pleased. He said that Catullus was the first Latin author to please him at Eton, Virgil and Horace having obviously written with the sole object of tormenting school-boys; and that Bembo’s Latin verse and Italian prose were respectively the best done in his day.
He was not disinclined, on occasion, to refer to himself with an engaging frankness, as if he were speaking of some one else. At Jowett’s dinner-table R. W. Raper once asked him which of the English poets had the best ear. Swinburne replied with earnestness and gravity: “Shakespeare, without doubt; then Milton; then Shelley; then, I do not know what other people would do, but I should put myself.”
These are fragments of the habitual “table-talk” of Swinburne, which flowed in this way from theme to theme with an inexhaustible humour and resource, but was almost wholly of an aesthetic, if not purely literary, character. It had, even by the year 1876, lost some of its disconcerting brilliance and daring. Of these, the best report yet forthcoming is that bequeathed to us by Guy de Maupassant, who met him at Etretat in 1868. What struck that remarkable observer was the “almost supernatural” aspect of the amazing English poet:
Il fut très cordial, très accueillant; et le charme extraordinaire de son intelligence me séduisait aussitôt. Pendant tout le déjeuner on parla d’art, de littérature et d’humanité; et les opinions de [Swinburne] jetaient sur les choses une espèce de lueur troublante, macabre, car il avait une manière de voir et de comprendre qui me le montrait comme un visionnaire malade, ivre de poésie perverse et magique.... Mais il était délicieux de fantaisie et de lyrisme.... Swinburne parla de Victor Hugo avec un enthousiasme infini.
Maupassant afterwards allowed his imagination to run away with him regarding the household of Swinburne and his surroundings at Etretat. His legends amused Paris in later days, and when the echo of them reached Putney, Swinburne was justly incensed. But Maupassant’s earliest unvarnished impression of the poet’s conversation and manner is admirable. The French are masters of the art of observation, and their records have an unprejudiced value. I may therefore be allowed to print here the report of M. René Maizeroy, written down immediately after meeting Swinburne in Paris:
Rien qu’à voir la silhouette étrange de l’homme, comme échappée d’un conte fantastique de Poë, ce corps maigre, raidi, secoué de frissons nerveux, les yeux fixes, dilatées comme par la contemplation de subtiles visions de rêve, l’impressionnante mobilité des traits, les lèvres pâles, le front démesuré autour duquel flottent des cheveux ni blonds, ni roux, on se sent en présence de quelque artiste bizarre et passionné.... Swinburne est... hanté de chimères radieuses, toujours poursuivi par d’impossibles et d’éperdus désirs et troublé par la pensée macabre de la Mort.
It is to be noted that each of these independent observers uses the word “macabre,” to describe one part of Swinburne’s conversation, in which a sort of aesthetic value in the circumstance of pain and horror was insisted on, with a rather childish dwelling upon dead bodies and skeletons, that struck some observers as being more serious than it really was. This love of the horrible was reflected, to some degree, in his early poetry, but was vigorously, and properly, stamped out by Watts-Dunton, who could not endure it. There was a side of Swinburne, in his early maturity, which delighted in being “horrid,” in the sense of Miss Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Legends have been spread, and more will doubtless turn up, in support of this charge of being “macabre.” They must not all be credited, nor must they all be summarily denied, because they are based on a certain rebellious impishness, a desire “to make your flesh creep,” which was eminently characteristic of the early Swinburne. He liked to be what Parisian journalists used to call “schoking”; and this must not be ignored as a part of his instinctive passion for revolt against authority.
As every development of character in Swinburne was justified and fostered by literature, we may look with confidence to his early reading of such vehement writers as Milton, Landor, and Carlyle for the sources of his rebellious attitude to society. It was largely intellectual, for he did not rebel with any consecutive violence against the laws of the land. But the idea of “passive obedience” filled him with wrath, and he could not write about so elegant and frosty a poet as Collins without a diatribe on “the divine right and the godlike duty of tyrannicide.” To a nature such as Swinburne’s a single book will sometimes come in early youth with an appeal so penetrating and at the same time so overwhelming that the whole nature is, for the rest of life, subdued and tinctured by it. So to Swinburne came Les Châtiments of Victor Hugo, published in 1853, when the English boy was entering his seventeenth year, and in a condition of the keenest precocious susceptibility. It seemed to him then, as it continued to seem until the end of his life, that “if ever a more superb structure of lyric verse was devised by the brain of man” it must have been in some language unknown to him. It was not the style, but the temper of it, which passed into his blood.
The dominant note of Les Châtiments is one of arrogant indignation, splendid scorn, withering and melodious invective. If Swinburne had first met with this mass of inflammatory verse at a later date, when his own taste was more mature, it is probable, nay, almost certain, that he would have perceived in it faults of vociferous and mechanical over-emphasis. He might have hesitated before flinging himself before the remarkable exile of Jersey, and calling him “the omnipotent sovereign of song,” on the single score of his rodomontade against “dead dogs and rotting Caesars.” And it is noticeable that. Les Contemplations, much as he applauded them, never approached Les Châtiments in their effect upon Swinburne’s temperament, mainly, no doubt, because they were published three years later, and did not reach him till his taste had reached a point where it was no longer subject to much modification. From the satirical poems of Hugo — the Hugo travestied as Juvenal in such pieces as “Lazare” and “L’Empereur s’amuse” — Swinburne adopted a certain attitude of being astride the barricade of existence, shouting at the top of his voice, with a flambeau in his
fist. It was inconsistent with the dignity, gentleness, and docility which were also natural to him.
These latter were much accentuated in his declining years. An observer of more than usual penetration visited him in the spring of 1899, and Mr. Max Beerbohm obliges me with some notes of great value:
A strange small figure in grey, having an air at once noble and roguish, proud and skittish. My name was roared to him. In shaking his hand, I bowed low, of course, — a bow du cœur; and he, in the old aristocratic manner, bowed equally low, but with such swiftness that we narrowly escaped concussion.... The first impression he made on me, or would make on any one, was of a very great gentleman indeed. Not of an old gentleman either. [He was, in fact, not 62.] Sparse and straggling though the grey hair was that fringed the immense pale dome of his head, and venerably haloed though he was for me by his greatness, there was yet about him something — boyish? girlish? childish, rather; something of a beautifully well-bred child. But he had the eyes of a god and the smile of an elf. In figure, at first sight, he seemed almost fat, but this was merely because of the way he carried himself, with his long neck strained so tightly back that he all receded from the waist upwards.... When he bowed, he did not unbend his back, but only his neck — the length of the neck accounting for the depth of the bow. His hands were tiny, even for his size, and they fluttered helplessly, touchingly, unceasingly.
In absolute contrast, too, to his rebellious and tempestuous effusion, was the intense delight which he unaffectedly felt in the company of little children. This did not, I believe, develop very early; I have not found any traces of it before 1870, and it did not until very much later take those proportions which made Swinburne at Putney the idol of mothers and the laughingstock of nursery-maids. Here, again, it is impossible not to see in what became a perfectly natural and sincere movement an impulse originally coming less from life than from literature.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 374
