Swinburne was an absurd character. He was a bird of showy strut and plumage. One could not but admire his glorious feathers; but, as soon as he began to moult—and he had already moulted excessively by the time Watts-Dunton took him under his roof—one saw how very little body there was underneath. Mr. Gosse in his biography compared Swinburne to a coloured and exotic bird—a "scarlet and azure macaw," to, be precise—and the comparison remains in one's imagination. Watts-Dunton, finding the poor creature moulted and "off its feed," carried it down to Putney, resolved to domesticate it. He watched over it as a farmer's wife watches over a sick hen. He taught it to eat out of his hand. He taught it to speak—to repeat things after him, even "God Save the Queen." Some people say that he ruined the bird by these methods. Others maintain that, on the contrary, but for him the bird would have died of a disease akin to the staggers. They say, moreover, that the tameness and docility of the bird, while he was looking after it, have been greatly exaggerated, and they deny that it was entirely bald of its old gay feathers.
There you have a brief statement of the great Swinburne question, which, it seems likely, will last as long as the name of Swinburne is remembered. It is not a question of any importance; but that will not prevent us from arguing it hotly. The world takes a malicious joy in jibing at men of genius and their associates, and a generous joy in defending them from jibes. Further, the discussion that interests the greatest number of people is discussion that has come down to a personal level. Ten people will be bored by an argument as to the nature of Swinburne's genius for one who will be bored by an argument as to the nature of Swinburne's submissiveness to Watts-Dunton. Was Watts-Dunton, in a phrase deprecated by the editors of a recent book of letters, a "kind of amiable Svengali"? Did he allow Swinburne to have a will of his own? Did Swinburne, in going to Putney, go to the Devil? Or did not Watts-Dunton rather play the part of the good Samaritan? Unfortunately, all those who have hitherto attempted to describe the relations of the two men have succeeded only in making them both appear ridiculous. Mr. Gosse, a man of letters with a sting, has done it cleverly. The others, like the editors to whom I have referred, have done it inadvertently. They write too solemnly. If Swinburne had lost a trouser-button, they would not have felt it inappropriate, one feels, for the Archbishop of Canterbury to hurry to the scene and go down on his knees on the floor to look for it.... Well, no doubt, Swinburne was an absurd character. And so was Watts-Dunton. And so, perhaps, is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Most of us have, at one time or another, fallen under the spell of Swinburne owing to the genius with which he turned into music the enthusiasm of the heretic. He fluttered through the sooty and Sabbatic air of the Victorian era, uttering melodious cries of protest against everything in morals, politics, and religion for which Queen Victoria seemed to stand. He was like a rebellious boy who takes more pleasure in breaking the Sabbath than in the voice of nightingales. He was one of the few Englishmen of genius who have understood the French zest for shocking the bourgeois. He had little of his own to express, but he discovered the heretic's gospel in Gautier, and Baudelaire and set it forth in English in music that he might have learned from the Sirens who sang to Ulysses. He revelled in blasphemous and licentious fancies that would have made Byron's hair stand on end. Nowadays, much of the blasphemy and licentiousness seems flat and unprofitable as Government beer. But in those days it seemed heady as wine and beautiful as a mediaeval tale. There was always in Swinburne more of pose than of passion. That is why we have to some extent grown tired of him. But in the atmosphere of Victorianism his pose was original and astonishing. He was anti-Christ in a world that had annexed Christ rather than served him. Nowadays, there is such an abundance of anti-Christs that the part seems hardly worth playing by a man of first-rate ability. Consequently, we have to remember the circumstances in which they were written in order to appreciate to the full many of Swinburne's poems and even some of the amusing outbursts of heresy in his letters. Still, even to-day, one cannot but enjoy the gusto with which he praised Trelawney—Shelley's and Byron's Trelawney—"the most splendid old man I have seen since Landor and my own grandfather":—
Of the excellence of his principles I will say but this: that I did think, by the grace of Saban (unto whom, and not unto me, be the glory and thanksgiving. Amen: Selah), I was a good atheist and a good republican; but in the company of this magnificent old rebel, a lifelong incarnation of the divine right of insurrection, I felt myself, by comparison, a Theist and a Royalist.
In another letter he writes in the same gay, under-graduatish strain of marriage:—
When I hear that a personal friend has fallen into matrimonial courses, I feel the same sorrow as if I had heard of his lapsing into theism—a holy sorrow, unmixed with anger; for who am I to judge him? I think at such a sight, as the preacher—was it not Baxter?—at the sight of a thief or murderer led to the gallows: "There, but for the grace of——, goes A.C.S.," and drop a tear over fallen man.
There was, it is only fair to say, a great deal in Swinburne's insurrectionism that was noble, or, at least, in tune with nobleness. But it is impossible to persuade oneself that he was ever among the genuine poets of liberty. He loved insurrectionism for its own sake. He revelled in it in the spirit of a rhetorician rather than of a martyr. He was a glorious humbug, a sort of inverted Pecksniff. Even his republicanism cannot have gone very deep if it is true, as certain of his editors declare, that having been born within the precincts of Belgravia "was an event not entirely displeasing to a man of his aristocratic leanings." Swinburne, it seems, was easily pleased. One of his proudest boasts was that he and Victor Hugo bore a close resemblance to each other in one respect: both of them were almost dead when they were born, "certainly not expected to live an hour." There was also one great difference between them. Swinburne never grew up.
His letters, some of which Messrs. Hake and Compton Rickett have given us, are interesting and amusing, but they do not increase one's opinion of Swinburne's mind. He reveals himself as a sensitive critic in his remarks on the proofs of Rossetti's poems, in his comments on Morris, and in his references to Tennyson's dramas. But, as a rule, his intemperance of praise and blame makes his judgments appear mere eccentricities of the blood. He could not praise Falstaff, for instance, without speaking of "the ever dear and honoured presence of Falstaff," and applauding the "sweet, sound, ripe toothsome, wholesome kernel" of Falstaff's character as well as humour. He even defied the opinion of his idol, Victor Hugo, and contended that Falstaff was not really a coward. All the world will agree that Swinburne was right in glorifying Falstaff. He glorified him, however, on the wrong plane. He mixed his planes in the same way in his paean over Captain Webb's feat in swimming the English Channel. "I consider it," he said, "as the greatest glory that has befallen England since the publication of Shelley's greatest poem, whatever that may have been." This is shouting, not speech. But then, as I have said, Swinburne never grew up. He never learned to speak. He was ever a shouter. The question that has so far not been settled is: Did Watts-Dunton put his hand over Swinburne's mouth and forcibly stop him from shouting? As we know, he certainly stopped him from swearing before ladies, except in French. But, as for shouting, Swinburne had already exhausted himself when he went to the Pines. Meanwhile, questions of this sort have begun to absorb us to such a degree that we are apt to forget that Swinburne after all was a man of genius—a man with an entrancing gift of melody—spiritually an echo, perhaps, but aesthetically a discoverer, a new creature, the most amazing ecstatician of our time.
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:—