Pre-Raphaelite and other Poets

by Lafcadio Hearn

Now we can study Swinburne in some other moods. I want to show you the splendour of his long verse, verse of fourteen and sixteen syllables, of a form resurrected by him after centuries of neglect; and also verse written in imitation of Greek and Roman measures with more success than has attended similar efforts on the part of any other living poet. But in the first example that I shall offer, you will find matter of more interest than verse as verse. The poem is one of Swinburne's greatest, and the subject is entirely novel. The poet attempts to express the feeling of a Roman pagan, perhaps one of the last Epicurean philosophers, living at the time when Christianity was first declared the religion of the Empire, and despairing because of the destruction of the older religion and the vanishing of the gods whom he loved. By law Christianity has been made the state-religion, and it is forbidden to worship the other gods; the old man haughtily refuses to become a Christian, even after an impartial study of Christian doctrine; on the contrary, he is so unhappy at the fate of the religion of his fathers that he does not care to live any longer without his gods. And he prays to the goddess of death to take him out of this world, from which all the beauty and art, all the old loved customs and beliefs are departing. We cannot read the whole "Hymn to Proserpine"; but we shall read enough to illustrate the style and feeling of the whole. At the head of the poem are the words Vicisti, Galilæe!—"Thou hast conquered, O Galilean"—words uttered by the great Roman Emperor Julian at the moment of his death in battle. Julian was the last Emperor who tried to revive and purify the decaying Roman religion, and to oppose the growth of Christianity. He was, therefore, the great enemy of Christianity. His dying words were said to have been addressed to Christ, when he felt himself dying, but it is not certain whether he really ever uttered these words at all.

I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or
that weep;
For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.
Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove:
But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.

After speaking to the goddess of death, he speaks thus to Christ:

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in
the brake;
Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;
All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,
Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire.
More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things?
Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.
A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?
For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years?
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from
thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fulness of death.

Or, in other words, the pagan says: "O Christ, you would wish to take everything from us, yet some things there are which you cannot take: not the inspiration of the poet, nor the spirit of art, nor the glory of heroism, nor the dreams of youth and love, nor the great and gracious gifts of time—the beauty of the seasons, the splendour of night and day. All these you cannot deprive us of, though you wish to; and what is better than these? Can you give us anything more precious? Assuredly you cannot. For these things are fitted to human life; and what do we know about any other life? Life passes quickly; why should we make it miserable with the evil dreams of a religion of sorrow? Short enough is the time in which we have pleasure, and the world is already full enough of pain; wherefore should we try to make ourselves still more unhappy than we already are? Yet you have conquered; you have destroyed the beauty of life; you have made the world seem grey and old, that was so beautiful and eternally young. You have made us drink the waters of forgetfulness and eat the food of death. For your religion is a religion of death, not of life; you yourself and the Christian gods are figures of death, not figures of life."

And how does he think of this new divinity, Christ? As a Roman citizen necessarily, and to a Roman citizen Christ was nothing more than a vulgar, common criminal executed by Roman law in company with thieves and murderers. Therefore he addresses such a divinity with scorn, even in the hour of his triumph:

O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods!
O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!
Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end!

To understand the terrible bitterness of this scorn, it is necessary for the student to remember that a Roman citizen could not be tortured or flogged or gibbeted. Such punishments and penalties were reserved for slaves and for barbarians. Therefore to a Roman the mere fact of Christ's death and punishment—for he was tortured before being crucified—was a subject for contempt; accordingly he speaks of such a divinity as the "leavings of racks and rods"—that is, so much of a man's body as might be left after the torturers and executioners had finished with it. Should a Roman citizen kneel down and humble himself before that? A little while, some thousands of years, perhaps, Christianity may be a triumphant religion, but all religions must die and pass away, one after another, and this new and detestable religion, with its ugly gods, must also pass away. For although the old Roman has studied too much philosophy to believe in all that his fathers believed, he believes in a power that is greater than man and gods and the universe itself, in the unknown power which gives life and death, and makes perpetual change, and sweeps away everything that man foolishly believes to be permanent. He gives to this law of impermanency the name of the goddess of death, but the name makes little difference; he has recognised the eternal law. Time will sweep away Christianity itself, and his description of this mighty wave of time is one of the finest passages in all his poetry:

All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast
Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:
. . . . . . . . .
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as
with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;
In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;
With light of ruins and sound of changes, and pulse of years:
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour:
And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;
And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of
the sea:
And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air:
And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is
made bare.

When the poet calls this the wave of the world, you must not understand world to mean our planet only, but the universe, the cosmos; and the wave is the great wave of impermanency, including all forces of time and death and life and pain. But why these terrible similes of white eyes and poisonous things and shark's teeth, of blood and bitterness and terror? Because the old philosopher dimly recognises the cruelty of nature, the mercilessness of that awful law of change which, having swept away his old gods, will just as certainly sweep away the new gods that have appeared. Who can resist that mighty power, higher than the stars, deeper than the depths, in whose motion even gods are but as bubbles and foam? Assuredly not Christ and his new religion. Speaking to the new gods the Roman cries: