I remember the first poet I ever met in my youth; one of the “pure” poets, a dreamy soul, who lived in the ugly city of New York, and wrote about beauty in distant Nineveh and Tyre. He earned his living in a book-store, where he faded slowly, and his hair came to look as if the moths had been feeding on it. Only once I saw fire in his eyes, and that was when the name of Swinburne was mentioned. “Swinburne is a god!” he exclaimed.
Yes, Algernon Charles Swinburne is no mere poet; he is divinity, before whose high altar the art-for-art’s-sakers perform obeisance. He was born in 1837, of an aristocratic county family in the North of England. So he always had plenty of money, and lived his own life in the aristocratic fashion. They sent him to Eton at the age of twelve, and then to Oxford, but respectability failed to “take” with him.
He was the strangest figure in which the soul of a poet was ever housed. As a child he had been beautiful, but something must have gone wrong with his glands, so that his head grew faster than his body. He developed a noble brow, but a weak mouth and receding chin; his enormous head was lighted by two bright green eyes, and covered with a shock of vivid red hair. When he became excited, which he was liable to do at a moment’s notice, his arms and legs began to jerk convulsively, and he would rush about the room, orating vehemently, perhaps hopping upon the sofa, like a bright-colored parrakeet. He was an omnivorous reader, and knew all the poetry there was in the world—most of it by heart, and would pour it out by the hour, in Latin, Greek, French, Italian or English. If he became too much excited, he would suddenly have a fit and fall unconscious, to the terror of the company; but after a while he would come to, just as lively and full of words as ever.
In his childhood and youth, according to the English custom, they filled him up with Greek and Latin verses; he absorbed the bad as well as the good, wine and women as well as song. Then he came under the spell of Victor Hugo, who filled him with a fervor for liberty. It is an interesting illustration of the influence a great poet can exert. Swinburne worshipped Hugo with frenzied extravagance, and remained a disciple of republicanism all through his seventy-two years; and this without the slightest actual contact with republicanism, without anything in his environment or his actions to explain such revolutionary fever.
Worldly impracticability was carried to its last extreme in this combustible youth; he always had to have somebody to take care of him, and fell under the spell of one personality after another: Rossetti, William Morris, Mazzini, and finally Watts-Dunton, who literally saved his life. Swinburne would come up to London and engage in what he called “racketing”—by which he meant stimulating his frenzies with alcohol. He would keep this up until he was completely prostrated, and then his father or one of his friends would carry him off to the country and mount guard over him, and there he would live a quiet and placid literary life until the world lured him forth again. By the time he was forty he had carried his dissipation to such extremes that he was all but wrecked. One by one his friends had to give him up, and he was living in wretched lodgings at the point of death.
It was then that Watts-Dunton took charge of his affairs once for all, and turned his country house into a sort of literary sanitarium, and kept the poet for thirty years, strictly forbidding any but respectable citizens to call upon him. Here the queer little parrakeet hopped about in the library, and gradually grew old and deaf, and wrote a great deal of prose and verse of little consequence. Some critics fight with the moralists over the question, Is it better for a poet to die drunk and inspired, or to live sober and dull? My friend, George Sterling, writes me on this point: “I still refuse, probably from personal experience, to believe that alcohol helps the artist to function at his best.”
Swinburne’s first great work, published at the age of twenty-eight, was an imitation Greek play, “Atalanta in Calydon.” As poetry it is marvelous; nobody since Shelley had poured out such a torrent of glorious words. All the tricks of the trade are in it—how many you can learn from Professor Saintsbury, who lists them: “equivalence and substitution, alternative and repetition, rhymes and rhymeless suspension of sound, volley and check of verse, stanza construction, line-and pause-moulding, foot-conjunction and contrast.” Such are the weapons in the armory of those who have read all the poetry there is in the world!
What else is there beside verbal splendor and technical tricks? The answer is: The familiar Greek aristocratic personages, struggling in vain against their gods; the old Greek fatalism and pessimism, taken up as a literary exercise and carried to un-Hellenic extremes. It might have puzzled you, perhaps, that a poet of republicanism and revolt should also be a poet of pessimism; but you would have been ill-advised to ask the question of Swinburne, for once, when a friend ventured to criticize his work, he stared for a moment or two of horror, then uttered a shrill scream, and rushed upstairs to his room, and seized his manuscript and spent hours tearing it into shreds and throwing it into the fire—and then spent the rest of the night rewriting it from memory!
Swinburne could not think, he could only feel, and so he was capable of pouring his poetic frenzy into absolutely contradictory ideas. So we have these magnificent choruses of “Atalanta,” in which man’s despair at his own fate is voiced with overwhelming poignancy:
For a day and a night and a morrow,
That his strength might endure for a span
With travail and heavy sorrow,
The holy spirit of man....
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.