Old and New Masters — 30 - Ch.22.ii - Swinburne: 2. Genius without Eyes

2. GENIUS WITHOUT EYES

Swinburne, says Mr. Gosse, "was not quite like a human being."

That is chiefly what is the matter with his poetry.

He did not write quite like a human being.

He wrote like a musical instrument.

There are few poets whose work is less expressive of personal passions.

He was much given to ecstasies, but it is remarkable that most of these were echoes of other people's ecstasies.

He sought after rapture both in politics and poetry, and he took as his masters Mazzini in the one and Victor Hugo in the other.

He has been described as one who, while conversing, even in his later years, kept "bobbing all the while like a cork on the sea of his enthusiasms."

And, in a great deal of his rapture, there is much of the levity as well as the "bobbing" quality of the cork.

He who sang the hymns of the Republic in his youth, ended his life as rhetorician-in-chief of the Jingoes against the Irish and the Boers.

Nor does one feel that there was any philosophic basis for the change in his attitude as there was for a similar change in the attitude of Burke and Wordsworth in their later years.

He was influenced more by persons than by principles.

One does not find any real vision of a Republic in his work as one finds it in the work of Shelley.

He had little of the saintliness of spirit which marks the true Republican and which turns politics into music in _The Masque of Anarchy_.

His was not one of those tortured souls, like Francis Adams's, which desire the pulling-down of the pillars of the old, bad world more than love or fame.

There is no utterance of the spirit in such lines as:-- Let our flag run out straight in the wind!

The old red shall be floated again When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned, When the names that are twenty are ten;

When the devil's riddle is mastered And the galley-bench creaks with a Pope, We shall see Buonaparte the bastard Kick heels with his throat in a rope.

It is possible for those who agree with the sentiments to derive a certain satisfaction from verse of this sort as from a vehement leading article.

But there is nothing here beyond the rhetoric of the hot fit.

There is nothing to call back the hot fit in anybody older than a boy.

Even when Swinburne was writing out of his personal experience, he contrived somehow to empty his verse of personality and to put sentimentalism and rhetoric in its place.

We have an instance of this in the story of the love-affair recorded by Mr. Gosse.

Swinburne, at the age of twenty-five, fell in love with a kinswoman of Sir John Simon, the pathologist.

"She gave him roses, she played and sang to him, and he conceived from her gracious ways an encouragement which she was far from seriously intending."

Swinburne proposed to her, and, possibly from nervousness, she burst out laughing.

He was only human in feeling bitterly offended, and "they parted on the worst of terms."

He went off to Northumberland to escape from his wretchedness, and there he wrote _The Triumph of Time_, which Mr. Gosse maintains is "the most profound and the most touching of all his personal poems."

He assured Mr. Gosse, fourteen years afterwards, that "the stanzas of this wonderful lyric represented with the exactest fidelity the emotions which passed through his mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but the infinite pity and the pain."

Beautiful though the poem intermittently is, however, it seems to me to lack that radiance of personal emotion which we find in the great love poems.

There is much decoration of music of a kind of which Swinburne and Poe alone possessed the secret, as in the verse beginning:-- There lived in France a singer of old By the tideless, dolorous, midland sea.

In a land of sand and ruin and gold There shone one woman and none but she.

But is there more than the decoration of music in the verses which express the poet's last farewell to his passion?

I shall go my ways, tread out my measure, Fill the days of my daily breath With fugitive things not good to treasure, Do as the world doth, say as it saith;

But if we had loved each other--O sweet, Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet, The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure, To feel you tread it to dust and death-- Ah, had I not taken my life up and given All that life gives and the years let go, The wine and honey, the balm and leaven, The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?

Come life, come death, not a word be said;

Should I lose you living, and vex you dead?

I shall never tell you on earth, and in heaven, If I cry to you then, will you care to know?

Browning, unquestionably, could have expressed Swinburne's passion better than Swinburne did it himself.

He would not have been content with a sequence of vague phrases that made music.

With him each phrase would have been dramatic and charged with a personal image or a personal memory.

Swinburne, however, was a great musician in verse and beyond belittlement in this regard.

It would be incongruous to attempt a close comparison between him and Longfellow, but he was like Longfellow in having a sense of music out of all proportion to the imaginative content of his verse.

There was never a distinguished poet whose work endures logical analysis so badly.

Mr. Arthur Symons, in a recent essay, refers scornfully to those who say that "the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance."

But he produces no evidence on the other side.

He merely calls on us to observe the way in which Swinburne scatters phrases and epithets of "imaginative subtlety" by the way, while most poets "present us with their best effects deliberately."

It seems to me, on the contrary, that Swinburne's phrasing is far from subtle.

He induces moods of excitement and sadness by his musical scheme rather than by individual phrases.

Who can resist, for example, the spell of the opening verses of _Before the Mirror_, the poem of enchantment addressed to Whistler's _Little White Girl?

_ One hesitates to quote again lines so well known.

But it is as good an example as one can find of the pleasure-giving qualities of Swinburne's music, apart from his phrases and images:-- White rose in red rose-garden Is not so white;

Snowdrops that plead for pardon And pine from fright, Because the hard East blows Over their maiden rows, Grow not as thy face grows from pale to bright.

Behind the veil, forbidden, Shut up from sight, Love, is there sorrow hidden, Is there delight?

Is joy thy dower or grief, White rose of weary leaf, Late rose whose life is brief, whose loves are light?

The snowdrop image in the first verse is, charming as is the sound of the lines, nonsense.

The picture of the snowdrops pleading for pardon and pining from fright would have been impossible to a poet with the realizing genius of the great writers.

Swinburne's sense of rhythm, however, was divorced in large measure from his sense of reality.

He was a poet without the poet's gift of sight.

William Morris complained that Swinburne's poems did not make pictures.

Swinburne had not the necessary sense of the lovely form of the things around him.

His attitude to Nature was lacking, as Mr. Gosse suggests, in that realism which gives coherence to poetry.

To quote Mr. Gosse's own words:-- Swinburne did not live, like Wordsworth, in a perpetual communion with Nature, but exceptional, and even rare, moments of concentrated observation wakened in him an ecstasy which he was careful to brood upon, to revive, and perhaps, at last, to exaggerate.

As a rule, he saw little of the world around him, but what he did see was presented to him in a blaze of limelight.

Nearly all his poems are a little too long, a little tedious, for the simple reason that the muzziness of vision in them, limelight and all, is bewildering to the intelligence.

There are few of his poems which close in splendour equal to the splendour of their opening verses.

_The Garden of Proserpine_ is one of the few that keep the good wine for the last.

Here, however, as in the rest of his poems, we find beautiful passages rather than beauty informing the whole poem.

Swinburne's poems have no spinal cord.

One feels this even in that most beautiful of his lyrics, the first chorus in _Atalanta in Calydon.

_ But how many poets are there who could have sustained for long the miracle of "When the hounds of spring are on winter traces," and the verse that follows?

Mrs. Disney Leith tells us in a charming book of recollections and letters that the first time Swinburne recited this poem to her was on horseback, and one wonders whether he had the ecstasy of the gallop and the music of racing horses in his blood when he wrote the poem.

His poems are essentially expressions of ecstasy.

His capacity for ecstasy was the most genuine thing about him.

A thunderstorm gave him "a more vivid pleasure than music or wine."

His pleasure in thunder, in the gallop of horses, in the sea, was, however, one fancies, largely an intoxication of music.

It is like one's own enjoyment of his poems.

This, too, is simply an intoxication of music.

The first series of _Poems and Ballads_, it must be admitted, owed its success for many years to other things besides the music.

It broke in upon the bourgeois moralities of nineteenth-century England like a defiance.

It expressed in gorgeous wordiness the mood of every green-sick youth of imagination who sees that beauty is being banished from the world in the name of goodness.

One has only to look at the grey and yellow and purple brick houses built during the reign of Victoria to see that the green-sick youth had a good right to protest.

A world that makes goodness the enemy of beauty and freedom is a blasphemous denial of both goodness and beauty, and young men will turn from it in disgust to the praise of Venus or any other god or goddess that welcomes beauty at the altar.

The first volume of _Poems and Ballads_ was a challenge to the lie of tall-hatted religion.

There is much truth in Mr. Gosse's saying that "the poet is not a lotus-eater who has never known the Gospel, but an evangelist turned inside out."

He had been brought up Puritanically by his mother, who kept all fiction from him in his childhood, but grounded him with the happiest results in the Bible and Shakespeare.

"This acquaintance with the text of the Bible," says Mr. Gosse, "he retained to the end of his life, and he was accustomed to be emphatic about the advantage he had received from the beauty of its language."

His early poems, however, were not a protest against the atmosphere of his home, but against the atmosphere of what can only be described by the worn-out word "respectability."

Mrs. Disney Leith declares that she never met a character more "reverent-minded."

And, certainly, the irreverence of his most pagan poems is largely an irreverence of gesture.

He delighted in shocking his contemporaries, and planned shocking them still further with a volume called _Lesbia Brandon_, which he never published; but at heart he never freed himself from the Hebrew awe in presence of good and evil.

His _Aholibah_ is a poem that is as moral in one sense as it is lascivious in another.

As Mr. Gosse says, "his imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum, between the North and the South, between Paganism and Puritanism, between resignation to the insticts and an ascetic repudiation of their authority."

It is the conflict between the two moods that is the most interesting feature in Swinburne's verse, apart from its purely artistic qualities.

Some writers find Swinburne as great a magician as ever in those poems in which he is free from the obsession of the flesh.

But I doubt if Swinburne ever rose to the same great heights in his later work as in the two first series of _Poems and Ballads.

_ Those who praise him as a thinker quote _Hertha_ as a masterpiece of philosophy in music, and it was Swinburne's own favourite among his poems.

But I confess I find it a too long sermon.

Swinburne's philosophy and religion were as vague as his vision of the world about him.

"I might call myself, if I wished," he wrote in 1875, "a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Shelley), but assuredly in no sense a Theist."

Mr. Gosse has written Swinburne's life with distinction and understanding; but it was so eventless a life that the biographer's is not an easy task.

The book contains plenty of entertainment, however.

It is amusing to read of the author of _Anactoria_ as a child going about with Bowdler's Shakespeare under his arm and, in later years, assisting Jowett in the preparation of a _Child's Bible.

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