'Dawn is dim on the dark soft water,
Soft and passionate, dark and sweet.'
'Loch Torridon' preserves the charm of what might be a landlocked lake, if it were not that the rippling tide flows in by an almost invisible inlet from the sea. From his earliest to his latest poems the magic of nature's changing aspects fascinates him; they inspire him with a kind of ecstasy that finds utterance in the variety of his verse, which reflects all the lights and shades of earth, sea, and atmosphere. One may remark, by the way, that in proportion as his poetic strength matures, the pagan gods and goddesses, who disported themselves so freely in his juvenile verse, visit him much more rarely; his imagery draws much less profusely upon the classic mythology for symbols and figures of divinities whose diaphanous robes are ill suited to our northern climate and Puritanic traditions, in the wolds and forests once sacred to Thor and Woden.
It will be admitted by Mr. Swinburne's least indulgent critics that his poetry displays throughout a marvellous power of execution. He runs over all the lyrical and elegiac chords with unabated facility; his metrical variations and musical phrasing bring out and extend the capacity and fertility of our language as a poetic instrument; he is master of his materials. No doubt there is some repetition, some iteration, which becomes slightly wearisome, of his favourite rhymes, indicating, what has been observed independently of reference to this particular writer, that the resources of the English language for terminal assonance, under the stringent conditions required by the modern rules of versification, are inevitably limited and show signs of exhaustion.
In a Note on Poetry appended to his latest volume of verses,[35] Mr. John Davidson has classed rhyme as a kind of disease of poetry. Rhyme, he says, is probably more than seven hundred years old—in Europe, he must mean, for it is far older in Asia, whence it originally came—and since the days of the troubadours and Minnesingers it has corrupted, in his opinion, the ear of the world. At best it is, he thinks, a decadent mode, imposing shackles on free poetic expression; and though in these fetters great poets have done magnificent work, in their finest rhymed verse he finds a feeling of effort. They have always been obliged to throw in something that need not have been said, some words inserted under compulsion, to bring the rhyme about. Mr. Davidson declares that the true glory of free untrammelled poetry shines out in the rhythmic periods of blank verse. That there may be some truth, or at least some convenience, in this theory of the poetic art, the modern poet may not be concerned to deny; for, as we have already said, rhymes will not withstand incessant and familiar usage; they become commonplaces, and the rhymer wanders away from the natural direction of his thought in search of fresh ones. The most devout admirers of Browning must admit that his verse is often distorted in this way—so that a fine stanza sometimes finishes with a jolt and ends with a tag—and it must be allowed that this necessity of making both ends meet is bad for the poetic conscience, a temptation to indefensible laxities. Even Mr. Swinburne, the inventor of exquisite harmonies, whose work is indisputably sincere, can be occasionally observed to be diverging from the straight line of his impetuous flight, hovering and making circuits that lead up skilfully to the indispensable rhyme. More frequently, perhaps, there is a tendency to interpose some metaphor, or rather far-fetched allusion, for the sake of the clear, full, recurrent intonation of echoing words that can only be marshalled into their places by artistic ingenuity.
We may so far agree with Mr. Davidson that most of the sublime passages in English poetry are in blank verse, though it may be noticed that the four lines which he quotes from Macbeth,[36] as containing the 'topmost note in the stupendous agony of the drama,' are rhymed. The management of rhyme is a difficult and very delicate art; it is an instrument that requires a first-class performer, like Mr. Swinburne, to bring out its potency; to this art the English lyric, the ode and the song, owe their musical perfection. Mr. Swinburne, in an essay upon Matthew Arnold's New Poems (1867), has said, truly, that 'rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in England'; and that 'to throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is a wilful abdication of half the charm and half the power of verse.' To this general rule he might possibly admit one exception—Tennyson's short poem beginning with 'Tears, idle tears,' which is so delicately modulated that the absence of rhyme is not missed. At any rate it is certain that all popular verse needs this terminal note; for a ballad in blank verse is inconceivable. On the other hand, the proper use of rhyme demands a fine ear, which is a rare gift; for our language has no formal rules of prosody, so that in maladroit hands rhyme becomes an intolerable jingle. At the present day, however, there is a tendency to run into excessive elaboration, largely due to superficial imitation of such masters of the poetic art as Tennyson, and especially Swinburne, so that we have a copious outpouring of feeble melodies.
Mr. Swinburne, on the contrary, is never feeble; he combines technical excellence with the power of vehement, often much too violent, expression. His character may be defined by the French word 'entier'; he is uncompromising in praise or blame. He insists (to quote his own words) that 'the worship of beauty, though beauty be itself transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be simple and absolute'; nor will he tolerate reserve or veiled intimations of a poet's inmost thought.
'Nothing,' he has written, 'in verse or out of verse is more wearisome than the delivery of reluctant doubt, of half-hearted hope and half-incredulous faith. A man who suffers from the strong desire either to believe or disbelieve something he cannot, may be worthy of sympathy, is certainly worthy of pity, until he begins to speak; and if he tries to speak in verse, he misses the implement of an artist.'
He is pained by Matthew Arnold's 'occasional habit of harking back and loitering in mind among the sepulchres.... Nothing which leaves us depressed is a true work of art.' Yet, it may be answered, the habit of musing among tombs has inspired good poetry; and when doubt and dejection, perplexed meditation over insoluble problems, are in the air, a poet does well to express the dominant feelings of his time; and a modern Hamlet is no inartistic figure.