But then, if that be true, what is the use of struggling for liberty and overthrowing tyrants? What indeed is the use of writing beautiful verses and reading proofs and wrangling with publishers and critics? Manifestly, no use whatever. Nevertheless, Swinburne would read a news item about Napoleon the Little, and he would fly into another frenzy, and write a poem in which he called for the blood of tyrants. He collected all these into his “Songs before Sunrise,” which constitute one of the bibles of liberty. When I meet an art-for-art’s-saker, I never fail to ask him if he has read Swinburne’s “Prelude,” in which the poet describes his conversion to the cause of human service.
Play then and sing; we too have played,
We likewise, in that subtle shade.
We too have twisted through our hair
Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear,
And heard what mirth the Mænads made.
Such has been the poet’s life; but now he has reformed, and taken up the duty of passing on the light of the intelligence to his fellows:
A little time that we may fill
Or with such good works or such ill
As loose the bonds or make them strong
Wherein all manhood suffers wrong.
And that leads us by a natural transition to the “Marching Song,” a battle-cry of the revolution:
Rise, ere the dawn be risen;
Come, and be all souls fed;
From field and street and prison
Come, for the feast is spread;
Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead.
“My other books are books,” Swinburne declared, “but ‘Songs before Sunrise’ is myself.” His respectable biographer, Edmund Gosse, is both puzzled and shocked by this, and points out how completely Swinburne’s hopes of republicanism have failed to be realized in the modern world. Yes; the poet failed to see that the lords of finance, the fat men of the bourgeoisie, would subsidize autocracy and subsidize superstition, as a means of riveting slavery upon the human mind and body for another century. But let Professor Gosse take care of his health for a few years more, and he may see that Daylight which was heralded in the “Songs before Sunrise.”
We have stepped ahead of our story and omitted to mention Swinburne’s earlier volume of miscellaneous work, “Poems and Ballads,” which was published shortly after “Atalanta,” and gave the Victorian age the worst shock of its existence. This was the time of Tennyson at his most mawkish, the time of “Maud” and “Enoch Arden”; literary England had not seen anything really indecent since Byron’s “Don Juan,” nearly half a century ago. But here came this young aristocrat—the son of an admiral, and therefore beyond prosecution for anything that he might do—throwing out upon the world an inspired glorification of sexual and alcoholic riot.
Swinburne was, of course, just as sincere in his praise of Venus and the vine as he was in his praise of liberty; more sincere, in fact, because he practiced what he preached in the former case, but he omitted to go off and die in the cause of liberty as Byron had done. Some of his licentious poetry is perfect from the technical point of view; but, on the other hand, “Poems and Ballads” contains the worst combination of words ever put into a poem: “the lilies and languors of virtue and the roses and raptures of vice.” It is pleasant to be able to record that Swinburne had the wit to ridicule his own habit of silly alliteration; see the parody called “Nephelidia”: “From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,” and so on.
In “Thus Spake Zarathustra” there is a doctrine of freedom, which is summed up: I ask you, not free from what, but free to what? And that is what I should like to point out to young poets who uncritically accept Swinburne as a god. It is possible to be entirely free to do what you please, and yet not please to do many silly and destructive things. Young poets are free to write as eloquent verses as they know how; and they may put into those verses a celebration of all things beautiful and just and noble in the world. On the other hand, they may put in a celebration of debauchery; and they may try it out for themselves, and fall slaves to alcohol and drugs, and end in the mad-house or a suicide’s or drunkard’s grave—like Baudelaire and Verlaine and Musset and Poe and Dowson, and that brilliant, unhappy genius whose story we have next to read.