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.