ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

Memories and Appreciations

ARTHUR SYMONS

IT was on the 28th of January, 1898, that Swinburne said to me, as he showed me his copy of Baudelaire's "Richard Wagner et Tannhauser a Paris" (1861), a pamphlet of 70 pages, on which was written: "Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne, en bon souvenir . . . C. B.," in pencil, "that Baudelaire was always a boy: he liked to contradict people." He spoke with the greatest admiration of "Les Fleurs du Mal" and of most of his prose; but pointed out his critical failures in his worship of Poe and of "a popular draughtsman in the Illustrated London News". "Poe," he went on, "had the luck to be born on the right side of the Atlantic. Now, Tupper, had he done the same, would have combined Walt Whitman and Longfellow in one: half would have been one and half the other."

AFTER these splendid paradoxes one has simply to say that Swinburne was the first English writer who ever praised "Les Fleurs du Mal." His review was printed in The Spectator, September 6, 1862. He wrote: "He has more delicate power of verse than almost any man living. The style is sensuous and weighty; the sights seen are steeped most often in sad lights and sullen colours." He notes: "Not the luxuries of pleasure in their simple first form, but the sharp and cruel enjoyments of pain, the acrid relish of suffering felt or reflected, the sides on which nature looks unnatural."

"Les Litanies de Satan" are in a way the keynote to this whole complicated tone of the poems. Here it seems as if all failure and sorrow on earth, and all the cast-out thoughts of the world— ruined bodies and souls diseased—made their appeal, in default of hope to those in whom all sorrow and all failure were incarnate. As a poem it is one of the noblest lyrics ever written; the sound of it between wailing and triumph, as it were the blast blown by the trumpets of a brave agony on inextricable default. On "Un Martyre" he says: "The heavy wave of dark hair and heaps of precious jewels might mean the glorious style and decorative language clothing this poetry of strange disease and sin; the hideous violence unwrought by a shameless and senseless love might stand as an emblem of that analysis of things monstrous and sorrowful, which stamps the book with its special character. Then again the divorce between all aspiration and its result might be here once more given in type; the old question reiterated:

'What hand and brain were ever paired?

What hand alike conceived and dared?'

and the sorrowful final divorce of will from deeds accomplished at last by force." "Like a mediaeval painter, when he has drawn the heathen love, he puts sin on its right and death on its left."

OF "Les Femmes Damnees" he wrote: "It is an infinite perverse refinement, an infinite reverse expiration, the end of which thing is death; and from the barren places of unsexed desire the tragic lyrist points them at last along their downward way to the land of sleepless winds and scourging storms, where the shadows of things perverted shall toss and turn in a Dantesque cycle and agony of changeless change."

Swinburne was a great praiser of great work, as he himself admits in his "Notes on Poems and Ballads" (1868): "I have never been able to see what should attract men to the profession of criticism but the mere pleasure of praising." He was the only critic of our time who never by design or by accident praised the wrong things. The main quality in his criticism was its exultation. "There is a joy in praising" (words written by Landor) might have been written for him (they were written for Browning). The motto from Baudelaire that Swinburne gave at the head of his "William Blake" that "it would be prodigious for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to contain a critic," is equally true of that prose-poet whose genius was not unsimilar with Baudelaire. In certain pages even the paradoxes make one realize how much of this solemn jocoseness went to the making of these un wounding darts: so curiously exhilarating are these criticisms which quicken the blood rather than stir the intelligence. And for these reasons Swinburne's place is eternally among the greatest of creative writers, with Lamb and with Coleridge and with Baudelaire.

"LIE had a sovereign disdain, an infinite contempt for the mediocrities, the pedants, that, as they seemed to crawl in his way, he crushed under his heel. He had a kind of instinct in the art, not of making mischief, but of mischief-making, which came and went in innumerable nicknames, in sly insinuations, in shouts of ironical laughter; in a word, he inherited Blake's "subtle humour of scandalizing."

I SHALL never forget a certain morning at the Pines, as I waited in Watts-Dunton's study for Swinburne's appearance before luncheon. He floated in, entirely unconscious of my being there; went up to his friend with a newspaper in his hand; from one of the pages he read, with a smile of calm contempt, in his usual voice,—yet with mocking accents in it—a scrap of a kind of advertisement, taken from the review of a mediocre verse writer, where the insolent critic had dared to contrast his debut with this poetaster's. I was aware of the comedy of this proceeding before Swinburne was aware of my presence. Without a word more he came up to me and shook hands in his cordial way of welcoming one who was not quite a stranger in the house.

I remember also our entire agreement in regard to Tennyson: that he had an imperfectness of the ear, which even after much cultivation was never entirely out of his verse. I find, in reference to this, in his essay on Morris's verses, when, after quoting from memory those unforgettable lines:

"O sickle cutting harvest all day long,

That the husbandman across his shoulder hangs,

And going homeward about evensong,

Dies the next morning struck through by thy fangs,"

he says: "They are not INDEED-MS are 'The Idylls of the King'—the work of a dexterous craftsman in full practice. Little beyond dexterity, a rare eloquence, and a laborious patience of hand, has been given to the one and denied to the other. These are good gifts and great; but it is better to want clothes than limbs." There, to a certainty, is "the sting in the tail of the honey."

IN his unsurpassably original essay on "Alfred de Musset and Alfred Tennyson" he comes in with a kind of jocund joviality as if a Harlequin stepped into the arena, and transposed, mockingly, the sexes of Mlle. Alfred and M. George. After a finely critical estimate of the qualities of Musset's works praising with sure instinct that inimitable song:

"A Saint Blaise, a la Zucca,"

a song in which Venice seemed to sing and which haunted Gautier; after this and an enormous rapture over "Mizpah," he proceeds with sinister intentions and subtle undercurrents of irony to unravel the udobscure web of Tennyson's spider-like creations; such as the loathsome Vivien, the abjectness of the King to Guinevere; the downward sweep over a certain Gadanear height of his later "Idylls of the King" from the really splendid first one; the spiteful stupidity of "Locksley Hall"; and, above all, of Tennyson's invariably contemptible opinion of women in general.

As for Swinburne's persiflage, I have an amusing story to relate. One afternoon he came up to me in his study, and, with a curious smile, said: "Mr. Symons, shall I quote for your edification the most indecent line in the Elizabethan Drama ?" This is the line, which he had only recently discovered: of course, a question of sex:

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"On this soft anvil all the world was made."

Few people, I suppose, have read in The Cornhill (1866) "Cleopatra," signed Algernon Swinburne. It is steeped deep in the spirit of Baudelaire, with certain tricks of style learned from Rossetti. It is intense with vision, it is perverse, it is a reincarnation of that queen who ruled the world and Antony. I give two stanzas of the twenty:

"Her mouth is fragrant as a vine,

A vine with birds in all its boughs;

Serpent and scarab for a sign Between the beauty of her brows And the amorous deep lids divine.

"Dark dregs, the scum of pool or clod God-spawn of lizard-footed clans,

And those dog-headed hulks that trod Swart necks of the old Egyptians,

Raw draughts of man's beginning God."

ONE day, in Swinburne's study, as we stood side by side I asked him why he had never printed in any of his books these wonderful verses. A subtle smile stole across his features. He said to me with a gesture: "C'est un peche de jeunesse!"

He wove his satirical qualities into his prose. And it is with a touch of learned humor that he writes on one who tried to vindicate the moral worth of Petronius. Arbiter: "A writer, I believe, whose especial weakness (as exhibited in the characters of the book) was but a 'hankering' after persons of the other sex." And for fine sardonic humor take this one sentence: "But at the ovens and the cesspools of Dante's hell, the soul, if the soul had fingers, would snap them." Surely this phrase is Juvenalian!

II

THERE was something ceremonial in the lunches at the Pines; in that immense room, study and dining-room, glorified by some of Rossetti's finest pictures in oils. In the centre was the long table; Watts-Dunton sat at the top, Swinburne on his right, I at the end. There was generally near me a small bottle of sherry, which no one ever tasted; WattsDunton and I drank water; Swinburne stout. He drank it with a certain air of satisfaction, holding up the glass to see how much was left in it. I thought then of his earlier years, when it pleased him to drink wine; when only a few glasses of wine inspired him in his unsurpassable conversations. He felt as one feels that actual luxury when one's tongue is loosened, and one forgets half of what one is saying. It is certainly a Bacchic luxury that the Bacchanals in ancient ages exulted in; it gives one the sublime qualities of a liar; it "loses count in the hours"; it stirs one's blood till one is rapt into the exquisite life-in-death of Circe's Sorcerous wine!

I HAD a certain difficulty in raising my voice high enough to be heard by Swinburne, as we were seated at a certain distance from one another. Generally my voice reached him and his answers were prompt, spontaneous, wonderful. At times when he failed to hear my voice, he said resignedly: "I don't quite hear," and relapsed into silence.

Rarely did I hear him talk with more eloquence than of Mazzini and Sir Richard Burton; Mazzini, who had inspired in him a breath of lyrical song unsung by him until his "Songs before Sunrise": Burton who had saved him from a certain sickness that came on him on the French coast, to whom he dedicated "Poems and Ballads" of 1878, in these words: "Inscribed to Richard L. Burton in redemption of an old pledge and in recognition of a friendship which I must always count among the highest honours of my life."

SWINBURNE continually spoke to me of Rossetti;

for his reverence for the man himself and for the man's genius was quite wonderful. Nor is it questionable that Rossetti was the inspiring spirit of his "Oracle"; for in every one of them one finds his influence, in the lesser as in the greater: and this one man alone possessed the double gift of the poet and the painter. And in the intensity of his imagination, in the fire and glory of his genius, there was, I think, in him alone, that "sweep from left to fight, fiery and final," which he applied to the work of Dante and of Michelangelo.

In his subtle essay on William Morris's verse Swinburne acknowledged the debt of both writers to the creative genius of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As to me, perhaps, the most rapturous prose he ever wrote is in the essay on Rossetti, I quote one sentence, for to read all the pages of this prose is to be thrilled in one's senses with almost as much delight as the man about whom they were written must have felt "The Song of Lilith has all the beauty and glory and force in it of the splendid creature -so long worshipped of man as God, or dreaded as devil; the voluptuous swiftness and strength, the supreme luxury of liberty in its measured grace and the lithe melodious motion of rapid and revolving harmony; the subtle action and majestic recoil, the mysterious charm as of soundless music that hangs about a sfcrpent as it stirs and springs."

And I give one more sentence, as the exact words, printed in his pages, bring back to me "the very echo" of that voice in all its attractiveness. It is in regard to his translations. "Wonderful as is the proof of it shown by his versions of Dante and his fellows, of Villon's and other ballad-songs of old France, the capacity of recasting in English the Italian poems of his own seems to me more wonderful; and what a rare and subtle power of work has been done here they only can appreciate who have tried carefully and failed utterly to refashion in one language a song thrown off in another."

ONE thing I have never forgotten in regard to his conversation was that he talked to me as man to man, with a simplicity of manner all his own; so much so, that all this left on me a kind of entrancement, of enchantment. Living, as he did, at a height higher than an eagle's flight, he showed it as often in his silence as in his words. And if was always there— in the strange green eyes that gazed on yours in a kind of abstract passion; in the face that suggested the sense of flight, with its aquiline features. And one saw in his whole aspect his French subtlety, ardor, susceptibility, with his sensual and sensuous temperament; and in his northern blood the wildness of his imagination, the strength that vibrated in every movement, slender in body though he was. Nor was there ever, I think, a more perfect mixture of foreign blood, than in Swinburne. I saw in him that inordinate nervous energy, that rose to a point of excitability, that dropped to the level of courteous resignation; as if he had never flagged in life's endeavor, had never been over-weary of life's worst evils. Nor was any man more certain of his own existence than Swinburne. His voice, when he read his verse, was high-pitched: it was an ecstatic, a rapturous voice; it never went deep, but often up and up, as he emphasized every word that had a special significance : he stressed them, he cadenced them, as when he uttered his favorite words, "fire," "sea," "wind," "spirit and sense," "scent and -shade,"

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"The very soul in all my senses aches:"

as if such words as these had never before been said with so intense a sense of their inner meaning. His voice was not musical, yet it was a beautiful voice; it did not ring many changes on the variations of the notes: but it was an inspired voice; a voice that went on and on, as he lifted his eyes from his MS. and raised them to the ceiling, or fixed them on mine. I have heard many poets read their verse; but (save with the sole exception of Verlaine) never have I been so thrilled, so rooted in my chair, nor drawn in my breath as I did then when Swinburne read me his verses.

III

NE afternoon, as I arrived rather late, I was shown into Swinburne's study, when he was in the act of reading some of his MS. prose to Sir Frederick Pollock. He went on with it; it was one of his tremendously denunciatory invectives against some tamperers with the texts of Elizabethan dramas; underlying which I saw, for the first time, that natural sense of humor (never wit) but often fine satire and that kind of quaint jesting that was more in the man when he spoke than in the writer when he wrote. He relished this sort of prose as he relished his malevolent and magnificent sonnets "Dirae"; certainly the most stupendous things he ever wrote: they have that eternal ring of just anger, that infinite hatred of all the spawned forces of evil that have besmeared the surface of the world, shown in that incredible King-Idol named (wrongly) The Saviour of Society.

The sense of Fate's implacable laws, of Destiny's inexorable following on men's steps, both primeval conceptions, fashioned for eternity by the genius of Aeschylus, passed, I think, into the life blood of Swinburne. And he believed, as all great artists have believed: "In art all that ever had life in it has life for ever." He said also: "No man can prove or disprove his own worth except by his own work; and is it after all so grave a question to determine whether the merit of that be more or less?" This also he wrote: "No work of art has any worth or life in it that is not done on the absolute terms of art. It is equally futile to bid an artist forego the natural bent of his genius or to bid him assume the natural "office of another." And if ever poet left his "Credo" to the world, he, I think, does in those sentences.

IV

WINBURNE said to me, at the beginning of 1907: "My magnum opus will be my Book on the Elizabethan Dramatists. I have put so much of my life, of my thoughts, of my reading, of my research, of even my painstaking in minute details, into the production of this volume that I don't mind if it chances to be my last book of prose." It was so: "The Age of Shakespeare" (1908). I think, on the whole, that he was right; for it began with his John Ford in 1871, before he had printed any prose book. In so absolute an achievement of so fixed a purpose, there is the passion and enthusiasm of his youth, his maturer judgments, his last refinements. Yet it has neither the glory of his "Blake" (1868) nor the absolute perfection of his "Study on Shakespeare" (1886) : for in this there is an adoration, purer perhaps'in essence than in his adoration of Blake, for Shakespeare; it is written in his most imaginative prose style: it is faultless, it is without flaw.

I saw Swinburne for the last time in the winter of 1907. After some general conversation he told me of his intention of writing a Five Act Play on the Borgias. Then he lighted his three small candlesticks, arranged them before him on his desk with an infinite sense of order; and turned to the small cupboard behind his chair where he kept all his manuscripts.

I never imagined that Swinburne could have conceived this One Act Drama, so subtly, so supremely, out of such sonorous material as lies in the loves and hates and deaths of the Borgias, and carried it to so consummate an end. For the story is the most fascinating of all such relations of actual lives. And, in these two scenes, I found, as I heard them, that salt and sense of pity and wonder in their elemental grandeur, severity and implacability have a spiritual kinship with the great dead and alive spirits, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare.