Swinburne.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, of an old Northumbrian family, which, according to the poet's verses, had suffered in the cause of Mary Stuart and of the last Stuarts, was born in 1837, the eldest son of Admiral Swinburne and Lady Jane Ashburnham. He was educated at Eton, where, as he tells us, Charles Lamb led him to study the early dramatists. When he was aged 12 he composed a tragedy in imitation of Cyril Tourneur's works ("The Atheist's Tragedy," "The Revenger's Tragedy"), but exceeding greatly their average of rapes and murders. The choice of themes, and of the model, argues unsurpassed precocity—among other things. Many of Swinburne's lyrics
Sang themselves to him in class time,
When idle of hand as of tongue.
He went up to Balliol, where he took no part whatever in the sports and amusements of the College, and appears to have lived in the society of Mr. T. H. Green (later the critic of Hume, and exponent of Hegel), and of Mr. John Nichol, later Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow. Swinburne obtained the Taylor Scholarship in Modern Languages, open to the whole University, and like Shelley and Landor, but not for the same sort of reasons, left Oxford without entering the Final Schools. He made the acquaintance at Oxford of Morris' Burne-Jones, and Dante Rossetti, who were painting on the ceiling of the Union the romantic pictures which instantly vanished away owing to some defect in the medium employed. Swinburne must already have had an extensive and peculiar knowledge of literature. In his last year as an undergraduate he began his play of "Chastelard," published in 1865, and he was contributing to "The Spectator" some of his poems including "Faustine". He must already have been the master of his rapid, ringing, and infinitely varied metres; his blank verse, taste, and manner were already themselves in his neglected volume of two plays, "The Queen Mother" (Catherine de Medici) and "Rosamund" (Fair Rosamund) (1860), and he had made an intimate study of the manners and absence of morals at the Court of the Valois. He had the cruelty to poison Chicot, who, in Dumas, survives immortally. In 1865 appeared "Atalanta in Calydon," a small quarto with a decorative white cloth binding. The poem at once swept every young reader off his feet by the wonderfully original and novel metres of the choruses, and by the remarkable beauty of the blank verse, which was entirely independent of the then reigning influence of Tennyson. Swinburne was indeed an "inventor of harmonies," and if his persons were not strictly Greek, the verdict of youth was that they were something much better! The action of the tragedy, the avenging by Althæa of her brothers on their slayer, her son, was more in the Germanic than the Greek taste, so here we had a "Revenger's Tragedy" wholly unlike that of Cyril Tourneur, and dignified by the beautiful figure of the maiden Atalanta.
It is probable that "Atalanta" remains Swinburne's masterpiece in poetry; but, owing to its classical character, it did not achieve the instantaneous popularity of his "Poems and Ballads" of 1866. Here was a nest of singing birds of every note, from the sonorous splendour of "The Triumph of Time," in a new stanza already employed in "Atalanta," to "The Garden of Proserpine" (in the measure, improved, of Keats's "Some drear-nighted December") and "The Hymn to Proserpine" with the surge and reflux of its anapæsts, and "Dolores" in a measure which Mr. Chivers, an American poet, had already used, with a poor ha'porth of sense to a monstrous deal of sound. Some of the subjects ("very curious and disgusting") and some of the sentiments (distinctly anticlerical, to state it mildly) were unfavourably criticized, not unnaturally, and the volume was transferred from Mr. Moxon, long the poets' publisher, to Messrs. Chatto & Windus.[2] But most of Swinburne's readers, at Oxford at least, were quite-indifferent as to the nature of his opinions and sentiments, which were suspected to be, in Lamb's words, "only his fun". He was staunch to them, however, always, both in prose and poetry; indeed, whatever be the subject of his prose, he usually gets in hits at the clergy of all denominations, "The blood on the hands of the King, and the lie on the lips of the priest". He also attacks Carlyle, in and out of season, and is severe on a race of reptiles unnamed who haunt his imagination. Meanwhile his "Chastelard" had not the attraction of his lyrics. "Bothwell," the second in the trilogy of Queen Mary, was of excessive length, though the natural limit of a play is almost as much defined as that of a sonnet; and the last of the trilogy, "Mary Beaton" was rather too daring in contradiction of historic fact. Mistress Beaton was not in love with Chastelard any more than Queen Mary was. She did not vengefully pursue her mistress to Fotheringay, but married Ogilvy of Boyne, when Lady Jane Gordon (in love with Ogilvy) married the Earl of Bothwell, who was in love with her, never with the Queen.
In his poem of farewell to the Queen of Scots, Swinburne sang of her eyes as "blue," a curious error to make after so many years of study. "Songs before Sunrise" were often of great technical—beauty, abounding in the old political enthusiasms and aversions; while lovers of poetry almost wished, with all respect, that the applause of Victor Hugo could be "taken as read," with the panegyrics of babies, and the abuse of "Bonaparte the Bastard". The tragedy "Erechtheus" more closely conformed to the early Greek model than "Atalanta," but the subject was of inferior interest, and what FitzGerald, speaking of Tennyson's later poems, called "the old champagney flavour" was, in the choruses, less exhilarating. Narrative was not the poet's forte, he was too ebullient, and neither "Tristram" (in rhymed heroic couplets) nor "Balin and Balan" (in the stanza of'"The Lady of Shalott") was on a level with the early triumphs. Three or four later volumes of verse were marked by the tour de force of using lines of extraordinary length; the skill never failed the poet, what failed more and more was the interest of his readers. The generation which first welcomed him had grown grey, it may be said, and cold to new poetry, but it did not appear that the new generation was warmer. In his delight in the sea, tempest, frost and fire, and all meteoric forces and elemental things, Swinburne resembled Shelley, but Shelley's music is more spontaneous and of a more natural charm than Swinburne's, who relied so much on "apt alliteration's artful aid," and on double rhymes. His characters, in play and narrative poetry, do not dwell in the memory like the creations of great tragedians and narrators; they are rather sonorous than sympathetic, more "heroic" than human. Queen Mary and her Maries did not speak in Swinburne's tones, but like women of this world. "Before his fortieth year," Mr. Gosse informs us, "there had set in a curious ossification of Swinburne's intellect." But this appears merely to mean that he saw no merit in Ibsen, Stevenson, Dostoieffsky. As to Ibsen, it was not likely that he should see any merit; as to the others, most ageing men rather shun new novelists, there is nothing "curious" in that; while with his "hostility to Zola" it is easy to sympathise. The ossification left him as exuberant as ever in his old tastes, which included all that is best in the literature of the world, and as vehement in the old way on the old themes. But if, by forty, he "had done his do" in Cromwell's phrase, the phenomenon is usual among poets, "the new wine is best," with most of them, and perhaps none, save Scott, has ever been able to turn with success to an entirely fresh field.
As a critic, Swinburne had a transcendent knowledge of literature, and a power of appreciation only rivalled by Charles Lamb; but whether he loved or hated an author, his language was certainly too violent in praise or dispraise. His essay on Wordsworth and Byron, and incidentally on Matthew Arnold, contains many things that are true, and needed to be said, but their truth would not be less apparent if the critic did not speak in the tones of a demoniac, and write sentences longer, and less easily to be construed, than those of Clarendon. Of his prose works the "George Chapman," "Essays and Studies," "Note on Charlotte Brontë," "Study of Shakespeare," and "Miscellanies," may all be read with pleasure, instruction, and gratitude, though here and there with surprise and regret. The vehemence and turbulence appear almost incompatible with the possession of humour, of which, none the less, whether in Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, or the Bab Ballads, Swinburne had a very keen appreciation. Humour was not conspicuous in his book of parodies, "Cap and Bells," and memory recalls no amusing comic relief in his tragedies. But he must have meant to-be amusing when he said that "in all things he desired to preserve the golden mean of scrupulous moderation". There is somewhat lacking to that remarkable genius of almost the last true English poet; we can but say "he was born to be so". As English in heart he was as Shakespeare, but a patriot need not have insulted the enemies of his country, especially, in one instance, when they were Republicans.
One field in which he worked industriously has yet to be mentioned, his punctual and frequent celebration of the recently dead. Of his many elegies that on Charles Baudelaire is perhaps the best, but it attains not unto "Lycidas," "Adonais," and "Thyrsis".
Poetic Underwoods.