The war that follows on the flame
When lightning dies.
Here the homage is given with splendid energy, but with fine justice. There are other poems of homage in this book, along with denunciations, as there are on so many pages of the Songs before Sunrise and the Songs of Two Nations, in which the effect is far less convincing, as it is far less clear. Whether Mazzini or Nelson be praised, Napoleon III. or Gladstone be buffeted, little distinction, save of degree, can be discerned between the one and the other. The hate poems, it must be admitted, are more interesting, partly because they are more distinguishable, than the poems of adoration; for hate seizes upon the lineaments which love glorifies willingly out of recognition. There was a finely ferocious energy in the Dirae ending with The Descent into Hell of 9th January 1873, and there is a good swinging and slashing vigour in The Commonweal of 1886. Why is it that this deeply felt political verse, like so much of the political verse of the Songs before Sunrise, does not satisfy the ear or the mind like the early love poetry or the later nature poetry? Is it not that one distinguishes only a voice, not a personality behind the voice? Speech needs weight, though song only needs wings.
I set the trumpet to my lips and blow,
said Swinburne in the Songs before Sunrise, when he was the trumpeter of Mazzini.
And yet, it must be remembered, Swinburne has always meant exactly what he has said, and this fact points an amusing contrast between the attitude of the critics thirty years ago towards work which was then new and their attitude now towards the same work when it is thirty years old. There is, in the Songs before Sunrise, an arraignment of Christianity as deliberate as Leconte de Lisle's, as wholesale as Nietzsche's; in the Poems and Ballads, a learned sensuality without parallel in English poetry; and the critics, or the descendants of the critics, who, when these poems first appeared, could see nothing but these accidental qualities of substance, are now, thanks merely to the triumph of time, to the ease with which time forgets and forgives, able to take all such things for granted, and to acknowledge the genuine and essential qualities of lyric exaltation and generous love of liberty by which the poems exist, and have a right to exist, as poems. But when we are told that Before a Crucifix is a poem fundamentally reverent towards Christianity, and that Anactoria is an ascetic experiment in scholarship, a learned attempt at the reconstruction of the order of Sappho, it is difficult not to wonder with what kind of smile the writer of these poems reflects anew over the curiosities of criticism. I have taken the new book and the old book together, because there is surprisingly little difference between the form and manner of the old poems and the new. The contents of A Channel Passage are unusually varied in subject, and the longest poem, The Altar of Righteousness, a marvellous piece of rhythmical architecture, is unusually varied in form. Technically the whole book shows Swinburne at his best; if, indeed, he may ever be said not to be at his best, technically. Is there any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of a wave. Most poets present us with their best effects deliberately, giving them as weighty an accent as they can; Swinburne scatters them by the way. Take, for instance, the line:
The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness fell.
The line comes rearing like a wave, and has fallen and raced past us before we have properly grasped what is imaginatively fine in the latter clause. Presented to us in the manner of slower poets, thus:
The tyranny
Kindled in darkness fell,