It has been crudely said that Swinburne pretended to be fond of infants because Victor Hugo had written poems about them. This is false; no one less than Swinburne “pretended” to be this or that, no one must be defended as possessing a more perfect personal sincerity. But it is very doubtful whether he would have noticed the beauty of little children if Hugo had not called his attention to it, and it is within the recollection of some of us that the publication of L’Art d’etre grand-père in 1878 was coeval with a tremendous revival of Swinburne’s admiration of the babies of his friends, and that it stimulated the composition of such songs as the delicious
Golden bells of welcome rolled
Never forth such notes, nor told
Hours so blithe in tones so bold,
As the radiant mouth of gold
Here that rings forth heaven
If the golden-crested wren
Were a nightingale — why, then,
Something seen and heard of men
Might be half as sweet as when
Laughs a child of seven.
The sentiment expressed here, and so often elsewhere, was perfectly genuine. Swinburne was never more radiantly happy than when passively enduring hardships from babes, and some of the most delightful recollections of him that my wife and I possess are connected with the infancy of our own little ones. I shall never lose from my memory the picture of the poet seated stiffly on the sofa (his favourite station) in our house, with one of my small girls perched on each of his little knees, while my son, just advanced to knickerbockers, having climbed up behind him, with open palm was softly stroking his bald cranium, as though it had been the warm and delicious egg of some enormous bird. At that moment the rapturous face of the poet wore no trace of the tyrannicide.
There is something very attractive in the accessibility of those who are difficult of approach. Swinburne was not at the beck and call of stray applicants, but he could, on due occasion, be extremely gracious. I owe to the kindness of H. H. the Ranee of Sarawak an affecting example of this. It was early, it appears, in 1893 that her younger son, after a long illness, was ordered to Wimbledon, where a very severe operation was performed on him. As he was recovering, the boy was taken out daily in a Bath chair on Wimbledon Common, and so crossed the poet’s regular walk. “One day, when Bertram seemed more cast down than ever, and depressed by his illness,” says the Ranee, “I asked him what I could do or get for him, as I would do anything that was possible to cheer him up. ‘Well,’ he answered, ‘I want but one thing, and that is — to know Mr. Swinburne. I see him almost every day, and I do so wish that he would once speak to me!’” The Ranee was greatly perplexed, for she knew no one who was intimate with the poet. By a fortunate chance, however, Lady Ritchie called on her that very afternoon, and she, when she heard the story, said, “Come along! I will take you to Mr. Swinburne now!” The Ranee continues the narrative:
A fourwheeler was procured in which we rumbled from Wimbledon to Putney. Conceive my excitement! We rang the bell at The Pines, and — both of us — were let in. We were led up two flights of stairs into the poet’s room, where he stood with his back to the chimney. Lady Ritchie told our story, when Swinburne said, “I’ll come at once. Only wait till I get my boots on.” So we sat down at each end of a table, whilst Swinburne pulled off a pair of scarlet flannel slippers, and then proceeded to hunt for his boots. These not turning up, he wandered into several rooms, reappearing again, after a long while, triumphant, boots in hand. He put them on before us, and then and there we carried him back in the four wheeler to our house in Wimbledon. You may imagine the delight of my boy. The beloved Poet’s visit, and his subsequent ones (for they were many, and covered weeks and months), were a principal factor in Bertram’s subsequent recovery. I could tell you much of those many visits, and of Swinburne’s kindness, his dear funny ways, his sense of humour, his readings of Dickens, the extraordinary humble way (and he so great!) in which he consulted Bertram about certain lines in his “Grace Darling,” which he was then writing.
Swinburne was a great declaimer and reciter, both of his own poems and those of others. His voice was a strange but extremely agreeable one, when he did not allow it to get beyond his control. It was “the pure Ashburnham voice,” as Lord Redesdale tells me, which his mother had “passed down to him and to no other of her children.” Mr. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly reminds me of Swinburne’s “exquisite clearness of utterance, particularly noticeable in his pronunciation of such words as ‘Ariosto,’ in which he reproduced the full rich quality of the Italian vowels with perfect correctness.” As Mr. Max Beerbohm says, “the frail, sweet voice rose and fell, lingered, quickened, in all manner of trills and roulades. That he himself could not hear it seemed the greatest loss his deafness inflicted on him.” To the last he spoke in a gentle tone; unlike most deaf people, he did not raise his voice when he talked, except under excitement. “Save that now and again a note would come out metallic and overpitched, the tones were under good control.”
Elsewhere I have described the funny little ritual which Swinburne always went through after arriving at a friend’s house with a breastpocket bulging with manuscript. I do not remember any variation in this ceremony, which sometimes preluded many hours of reading and recitation. He delighted in repeating other poetry, and was particularly ready to spout the dramas of Æschylus, when he would gradually become intoxicated by the sonority of the Greek, and would dance about the room in the choral passages, making a very surprising noise. These performances were entrancing to some persons, of whom I was one, but annoying and even alarming to others. Watts-Dunton did not permit them after the exodus to The Pines, when Swinburne, although he read aloud and recited more than ever, was not allowed to be corybantic. Maarten Maartens, to whom the poet read The Tale of Balen in June 1895, did not unreservedly admire his delivery:
It was too subjective an out-pour, and wearisomely impassioned, like a child’s jump against a wall, but it was his appropriate utterance of his own creation. You felt the immediate concord between the travail and the bringing forth. At the first moment, however, when he ceased, I felt a poignant grief that it was over, a past experience in my life, an emotion of poetic sympathy I should never feel again. It had been very beautiful. Gloriously, and to me quite newly, direct; all the difference between seeing a beautiful woman and feeling her embrace.
A great deal of the prejudice which was felt against Swinburne in his early and middle life arose from the fact that he allowed himself to speak in somewhat reckless terms about the established forms of religion. His conversation, like his poems, was frequently ornamented with violent denunciation of priests, nor has a certain section of our reading public ever forgiven him for the “Hymn of Man,” which he wrote during the session in Rome of the Œcuinenical Council. It will not be contended by Swinburne’s best friends that his wonderful gift of metaphor did not tempt him to outbursts which in his more temperate moods he could hardly seek to justify. He had, to use his own hitherto unpublished words, “a touch of Byronic ambition to be thought an eminent and terrible enemy to the decorous life and respectable fashion of the world; and, as in Byron’s case, there was mingled with a sincere scorn and horror of hypocrisy a boyish and voluble affectation of audacity and excess.” He admitted that it was a pleasure to him to flutter the Philistines in Gath. On this subject his own words outweigh all other testimony; and these we possess in a letter (Feb. 21, 1875) addressed to E. C. Stedman:
A Theist I never was; I always felt by instinct and perceived by reason that no man could conceive of a personal God except by crude superstition or else by true supernatural revelation; that a natural God was the absurdest of all human figments; because no man could by other than apocalyptic means — that is, by other means than a violation of the laws and order of nature — conceive of any other sort of Divine purpose than man with a difference — man with some qualities intensified and some qualities suppressed — man with the good in him exaggerated and the evil excised.... But w
e who worship no material incarnation of any qualities, no person, may worship the Divine humanity, the ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshipping any god, any person, any fetish at all. Therefore I might call myself, if I wished, a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Shelley), but assuredly in no sense a Theist.
When he wrote this, he had just been reading with great emotion Matthew Arnold’s “very good and fine” Literature and Dogma, ostensibly to see whether Arnold gave him any reasons for abandoning the Pantheistic attitude which he had himself defined in “Hertha” and elsewhere. But this book only confirmed him in what he called a “clarified Nihilism” with regard to all faith which is founded upon an anthropomorphic illusion. The only degree in which Swinburne, to the very end of his life, approached orthodox Christianity was in his reiterated expressions of reverence for Christ as the type of human aspiration and perfection; “Jesus may have been the highest and purest sample of man on record,” he would grant, and this was the limit of his acquiescence. The best summing-up of his pantheism is to be found in the lofty stanzas of “Hertha.”
An almost religious character accompanied his ideas of friendship, which he understood as involving a certain amount of devotion and, at least theoretically, of sacrifice. Those who have followed this record of his life will be aware of the absorbing part which Swinburne’s friends occupied in his thoughts and actions. He was not very effusive in his protestations of affection, and in his social relations he usually kept himself, with a certain dignity, a little aloof from even those whom he most admired and loved. He was seldom demonstrative, and he greatly disliked a “gushing” or overconfidential manner; perhaps one of his most charming traits was the refinement of his reserve. But he cultivated the essentials of friendship with great care, and he was loyal to those to whom he had once surrendered his heart. Forty years after their Oxford days together, and when they had been drawn far from one another by circumstances, news of the sinking health of William Morris drew from Swinburne to Burne-Jones a most delicate and tender communication, in which he told his old friends that he often composed letters to them both in his mind,— “Such letters, my dear Ned, as St. Jerome might have indited to St. Augustine if they had been contemporaries, as no doubt they were capable of being.” They were priests together in the service of art, which to Swinburne was religion, and there existed, besides, the ties of old companionship and unbroken personal confidence.
For some objects of his intellectual admiration, Swinburne frankly cultivated a worship which seemed uncouth to the profane. His attitude to old men of genius, or even of beautiful talent, was unique; he was adorable in humility and sweetness to Landor, to Barry Cornwall, to that wild pirate Trelawney, to the still wilder Wells of Joseph and his Brethren. He delighted in the abandonment of praising these aged heroes, and he thrilled to meet their gratified response. “It is comfortable,” he said on one occasion, “when one does, once in a way, go in for a complete quiet bit of hero-worship, and it is an honest interlude of relief to find it taken up instead of thrown away.” After describing the idolatry with which he flung himself at the feet of Landor in 1864, he wrote: “I am not sure that any other emotion is so endurable and persistently delicious as that of worship, when your god is indubitable and incarnate before your eyes.” In his ecstasy he clothed these divinities with the glory of his own imagination, and poor old threadbare Bryan Waller Procter marched in a splendour of laudation “to the beautiful veiled bright world where the glad ghosts meet.” A friend who watched him closely says: “It was one of Swinburne’s charms, that he took for granted every one’s delight in what he himself so fervidly delighted in. He could as soon have imagined a man not loving the very sea as not doting on the aspect of babies or not reading at least one play by an Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatist every day.” This generous extravagance was not without its inconvenient side. Where the interests of two sentiments clashed, it was impossible to induce Swinburne to compromise, and his refusal to yield one iota of his selected loyalty not unfrequently exposed him to the censure of his acquaintances. A single instance, with the ramifications of which I was personally well acquainted, will serve to exemplify this trait. In the summer of 1876, Robert Buchanan brought a suit for libel against the Examiner newspaper, grounded on a pseudonymous article, which was written by Swinburne. This marked the last stage of the celebrated “Fleshly School” controversy. The Examiner was defended by Hawkins (afterwards Lord Brampton), then pre-eminent in public opinion through his recent conduct of the Tichborne case. It was held that Buchanan had no chance of success, but it appeared necessary that Hawkins should have a private consultation with Swinburne before the trial. This Swinburne flatly refused to give, to the consternation of William Minto, the editor of the Examiner, who had always treated Swinburne with the highest consideration and friendliness. In vain was this presented to the poet, and in vain was it pressed home to him that it was his own vivacity which had got the Examiner into trouble. He obstinately declined to see Minto or to communicate with Hawkins. Why? Simply because the Examiner had just then published an article disagreeable to the feelings of — Mrs. Lynn Linton, who had been a sort of adopted daughter of Landor, and who therefore had a claim on Swinburne’s loyalty which destroyed all sense of what he owed to the Examiner and indeed to his own honour. He persisted, Hawkins was cross, Buchanan won his case, and the Examiner had to pay £150 damages. Nor could Swinburne ever be made to see that he had incurred any blame in the matter.
A sketch of Swinburne’s character would be imperfect without a tribute to his personal courage. He was afraid of nothing, and, nervous as he was, his nervousness never took the form of timidity. When he was an elderly man, a hulking poetaster, half-mad with vanity, who had endeavoured without success to engage Swinburne in a correspondence, waited for him with a big stick on one of his lonely walks, and proposed to give him a thrashing. The antagonist was a powerful man, his victim a sort of fairy; but Swinburne cowed him by sheer personal dignity, and serenely continued to walk on, with the blusterer growling behind him. Watts-Dunton was so much concerned at this occurrence, that he took out a warrant against the bully, but Swinburne laughed at his friend’s fears. His own fearlessness, indeed, often exposed him to danger in crossing streets, in riding, in swimming; but his life was charmed.
Algernon Swinburne’s character was essentially trustful and confiding. He thought no evil of those to whom he had granted his affection, but he was subject to violent and excessive revulsion of feeling if he discovered, or thought that he discovered, that his kindness had been repulsed. His sentiment for Matthew Arnold, expressed over and over again, in almost hyperbolic terms, received a rude shock in 1895 when Arnold’s Letters were collected by a well-known person. This editor, either through carelessness or malice, allowed a passage to be printed which gave Swinburne exquisite annoyance. He had been present, in company with Froude, Browning, Ruskin, Herbert Spencer, George Lewes and Matthew Arnold, at a dinner-party given by Monckton Milnes in June 1863. Matthew Arnold, describing this dinner in a letter to his mother, very innocently mentioned as curiosities “a Cingalese in full costume, and a sort of pseudo-Shelley called Swinburne.” That such a phrase should be printed in the lifetime of a famous man-of-letters was inexcusable. Swinburne came upon it by accident, and it turned all his long admiration for Arnold to gall and hatred.
With regard to Swinburne’s manner of work, it was modified by his extreme dislike to the physical act of writing. What he called “the curse of penmanship” weighed heavily upon him. This was due to a weakness of the wrist which began to show itself quite early in life, and was at one time a little alarming. It developed, however, very slowly, and was at no time absolutely serious, but it made the act of holding a pen very irksome. The progress of this weakness may be traced in Swinburne’s handwriting, which about 1862 became so feeble and illegible that he altered his style of holding the pen, his manuscript thereby becoming easier to read, but still more wearisome to write. The actual
battling with ink and paper being a positive and often a painful effort, Swinburne evaded it as much as possible. He wrote to John Morley (May 17, 1880): “Copying is impossible to me; I could never learn the art of transcription; and I always blunder. I used always to think it, and I do now, the heaviest, brutallest and stupidest of school punishments.”
He gave up copying his poems, even for the press, and adopted the habit of sending to the printers his first rough draft, with all his corrections and changes. The result is that from the time of Chastelard downward few works of Swinburne’s exist or have ever existed in a MS. duplicate. Swinburne nourished the belief that his hatred of the act of writing was shared by Shakespeare, whose “villainous pothooks” he used to compare with his own. He spoke, not without a certain complacency, of his “exceptionally awful scrawl, almost as bad as Landor’s own —— the only point on which I can hope to rival him in writing, if even there he can ever be rivalled, except by Shakespeare.” It has been suggested to me by Mr. Wise, who was unusually familiar with Swinburne’s methods, that his physical difficulty in writing, and his habit of composing, revising, and working up his complete sentence before struggling with the unwelcome pen, had something to do with the artificial and ponderous character of his later prose.
THE END
St Boniface Bonchurch, Isle of Wight — Swinburne’s final resting place
Swinburne’s grave
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 375
