Essays in Modernity: Criticisms and Dialogues/The Poetry and Criticism of Mr. Swinburne
THE POETRY AND CRITICISM OF MR. SWINBURNE
THE POETRY AND CRITICISM OF MR. SWINBURNE
I
'atalanta in calydon'—'poems and ballads,' first series—essay on blake
Mr. Swinburne's poetical career really opens with the production of Atalanta in Calydon. In Chastelard was to be found the luxuriant, the over-luxuriant, promise of lyric and epic, but not of dramatic, power. It is true that Atalanta is modelled on the Greek and not on the English drama, and that the two dramas are so different in character, that a complete comparison is wellnigh outside the limits of technical art. At the same time the dramatic spirit, the intense feeling of perfect parts in a perfect whole, is to be found as much, if not more, in the Agamemnon than in the King Lear. The music in the one case is simple, in the other complex, but the motif is identical. This dramatic spirit is felt but faintly in not only Chastelard and Atalanta, but all Mr. Swinburne's plays. They have not got it, they have got the effort after it, and in Atalanta the effort is strenuous; but effort is not achievement, and never will be. Follow up Mr. Swinburne's dramatic work to its culmination, and what do we find? Bothwell, the apotheosis of prolixity, the most tiresome alleged 'masterpiece' of the time. How to describe it? How to give it a place? How not to admit that it is nothing but a vast piece of perverted ingenuity? a poetical Great Eastern that is only good for splitting up into match-wood? Mr. Swinburne calls it a 'drame épique,' and with this label round its neck let it float away, a gorgeous cripple, into the realm of forgetfulness.
On Chastelard and Atalanta followed the Poems and Ballads, and on the Poems and Ballads followed the Notes thereon; and the lines on which Mr. Swinburne's work was to run were laid down. The Poems and Ballads are a wonderful and extensive insistence on the over-luxuriant promise of his lyric power. There is not one truly satisfactory poem in the book. It is the production of a 'marvellous boy,' but that is all. Mr. Swinburne from the start was cursed with a fatal facility. One of his early critics, the Morning Star, congratulated him on 'writing French chansons' in Chastelard, 'of which Chastelard or Ronsard might have been proud.' Alas! Mr. Swinburne had the gift of writing a good many other sorts of poems, of which their respective originals might, as the Morning Star would doubtless assert—if it did not happen just at present to be 'shining in death, the Evening Star among the departed'—might be proud. Those ladies, for instance, of whose virtue Boccaccio is so careful to assure us (for their innocent little tales had resulted, it seems, in a nickname for him which was not altogether a pleasant one), if permitted to listen with understanding ears, might indeed have been surprised to hear how skilfully yet another of their ballads was 'blown with boy's mouth in a reed,' pulled in a northern and Puritanic clime and after so many hundred years. But we should not seem to disparage this gift of Mr. Swinburne's. It has its value, but not a value great enough to justify the prominence assigned to it in his first collection of poems. Here it is often little short of a trick, and often altogether an affectation. Now, how good and excellent a thing it is, brethren, to have a 'Masque of Queen Bersabe,' a real 'miracle play,' accurate even to this charmingly verbal extent:
The transition to phraseology like the following has, however, not quite so 'fiery a fidelity,' as Mr. Swinburne says, to historical truth:
And so on. To tell the truth, it reads rather more like an adapted extract from a poem called 'Anactoria,' where the fidelity of historical truth is also not as fiery as it might be. Nor is this trick the sole one here. There is the detestable trick of pure word-play, from the thraldom of which Mr. Swinburne has never quite freed himself. Did he not write the Sestina in the second series of Poems and Ballads, stans pede in uno, in the presence of at least three credible witnesses?
There is not a truly satisfactory poem in the book. It might easily be retorted that no one claimed that there was: that this is in reality only a first book, and that it is foolish to be emphatic about it. All this would be true enough if one were not ready to follow up Mr. Swinburne's lyric work and point out that, of the vast number of his poems, those which are truly satisfactory can be counted on the fingers, and perhaps on the fingers of one hand. It is all, or almost all, over-luxuriant promise and over-luxuriant fulfilment. There are verses and snatches in this first book that are lovely beyond words; but a verse or a snatch does not make a poem. Take four lines like these:
Or the opening verse of 'A Leave-taking,' or of 'Itylus,' or of 'Fragoletta,' or of 'A Match,' or one or two of the verses in memory of Landor: all are of the purest note—we have none purer—but all are, as it were, throttled by their surroundings. Hugo's Muse reminded Heine of a pretty woman with two left hands: Mr. Swinburne's has four, and they all pile up materials at once! He justly calls his first book a 'revel of rhymes.' But unhappily the revel has continued. 'Laus Veneris,' the poem from which the first quotation is taken, has a hundred and six verses! Heine would have done it in under fifty. But Heine makes ornaments of his gold, while Mr. Swinburne uses it all up for goldbeater's skin. Let us pass for a moment to the book which contains Mr. Swinburne's highest lyrical efforts—Songs before Sunrise. The 'Halt before Rome' has forty-six verses: twenty-three, or even eleven, would have done. 'Before a Crucifix' might have found full expression in sixteen verses instead of thirty-three. In the second series of the Poems and Ballads he reaches his zenith in pure style and execution. But 'In the Bay' has forty verses instead of the quite sufficient twenty. His want of mastery over style, in Schiller's sense of the knowledge not of what to write but of what to omit, is simply dreadful. He seems to think that he will achieve immortality as, we are told on such excellent authority, the heathen thought to achieve a divine hearing, by much speaking. What a fundamental ignoring (for in his case it cannot quite be called ignorance) of the Art to which his life has been devoted! The world is full of experience, and very weary, and the sole vice for which it has no tolerance is the vice of tiresomeness. This is its one condemnation. Be tiresome, and your chance of survival is as the writer of a song, a snatch, a line. For tiresomeness is the everyday word for the factitious and the untrue, and neither perverted skill nor bungling shall endure.
It is, then, just this particular epithet, tiresome, that has to be applied to so much of Mr. Swinburne's work. Take a poem like 'Anactoria'; the alleged evolution of which he has himself been at pains to point out in his Notes on Poems and Ballads. In reality this evolution is quite fanciful. The whole poem is one long, sterile insistence. The most remarkable fact about it is that a man of real power could be found who should sit down at the poetical piano and play a few chords so many, many times in succession. Young men and women, enamoured of the last waltz or patter song, will do this sort of thing and escape alive, but that is only because centuries of purposeless torture and death have taught us the supreme value of patience. Furthermore, speaking of 'Anactoria' and that poor Sappho whose 'supreme head of song' Mr. Swinburne has 'vexed' so endlessly in both poetry and prose, one has to notice that his poetical insistence has not the effect of emphasis but quite the reverse. In poetry, if anywhere, the part is greater than the whole. An extract from 'Anactoria' and its fellow-sinners (and what extracts one can make!) is worth more than the poem in its entirety, which is all but unreadable. Indeed, from no writer of our time can such appetising extracts be made as from Mr. Swinburne. If he were to be judged by these alone, his place would be with our highest; but the memory of a man's beauty is not perpetuated by the fact that he had a superb knuckle or an irreproachable calf.
It is the same with Mr. Swinburne's criticism, so inchoate and unsatisfactory as a whole. When he begins to generalise he is lost. So long as he confines himself to individual poems with which he is in accord, he is more than worth listening to; but let him touch on individual poems with which he is not, and still more on personal comparisons, and we shall get nothing further from him than the rhodomontade of his loves and hates. In this first section we have only to deal with his first outburst, although it is possible enough that, chronologically speaking, this outburst does not exist within any well-defined limits. None the less his work, as it seems, can be divided off into three parts, each with its fairly distinctive and specialised quality.
Two powers have perpetually struggled for him, self-abandonment and self-restraint, and this struggle has been carried into every branch of it. What is most admirable in Atalanta is just this—the effort after artistic self-restraint. He joins a perception of Æschylus and Euripides to a perception of Sophokles, of Sophokles who 'saw life steadily and saw it whole.' In the same way his criticism then felt the (to him) sanitary influence of Matthew Arnold, and the 'haute critique qui part d'enthousiasme' of the author of William Shakespeare was not despotic. What has just been called Mr. Swinburne's first outburst is that portion of his work which we have already been considering, its final poetical and critical outcomes being the first Poems and Ballads and the essay on Blake. From this we pass to the second part, where the better influences of his temperament bear fruit, and all, or almost all, of his best work is to be found.
The Songs before Sunrise have been spoken of as Mr. Swinburne's highest lyrical achievement, and the second Poems and Ballads as his highest achievement in pure style and execution. His highest achievement in criticism is indisputably the Essays and Studies. But in all of them we are soon forced to feel the disquieting element of the transitional. He will not rest and give completion to his work. He is the Prodigal Son of our poets. If he has thrown away a pound to-day, why, what more does that mean than that he will throw away a hundred to-morrow? And with all this is the recurrent perception of the beauty of scholarship. Mr. William Rossetti speaks once of his friend's 'usual exquisite tact of diction, corresponding to a clear intellectual perception,' and calls him 'a perfect Hellenist.' This is what Mr. Swinburne likes. He protests over and over again that he is 'a student,' nay, a 'rational student.' It is quite comic! If it were not that the problematical joke about the Revue des deux Mondes reviewers remained the sole piece of fun that is to be found in his writings, one would suppose that his protests of spiritual super-sanity in his last attacks on Matthew Arnold[1] were not serious. And yet he really does perceive the beauty and strength of scholarship, and in some of these essays we find an effort after their perfection which is strenuous and almost successful. The essays on Byron, Coleridge, and Ford are the only criticisms of his that give the impression of anything like harmonious wholes. Those on Rossetti and Arnold are, in some ways, a step forward, but a step that is less sure. When we get to the review of L'Année Terrible we have reached the connecting link between the second part of his work and the last. The self-abandonment has begun. 'These divers waifs of tentative criticism,' he says, with an oblique look at lost harmonious wholes. 'The one object,' he says again, 'which gives to this book whatever it may have of unity, is the study of art in its imaginative aspects.' Yet the book is a noteworthy one. It is full of scraps of really valuable criticism. And more. The intuition which as early as '67 saw that Arnold 'if justly judged must be judged by his verse and not by his prose' was a fine one. The remark is somewhat excessive. Arnold, for good or for evil, is to be judged by both; but, in the face of a really extraordinary insistence on all sides that the prose was all and the poetry next to nothing, it says something for the critical intuition of the man who could flatly deny this. This judgment on Arnold is not taken as a solitary example. Mr. Swinburne has rarely failed to recognise high fellow-workmen, and his recognition has been followed by praise, if sometimes forced, almost always generous. In his pet affections as in his pet aversions (to have spoken ill of the former is at once and for ever to make a man one of the latter) he has been extreme; but, on the whole he has been loyal to his perception of high fellow-work, if not of high fellow-workers, and that, for a man of letters, is something—nay, it is much. Let us take some samples of his criticism of individual poems.
Here is Arnold's little poem, 'Requiescat.' 'Without show of beauty or any thought or fancy, it leaves long upon the ear an impression of simple, of earnest, of weary melody wound up into a sense of rest' How admirable! Again: Rossetti's 'song of the sea-beach, called "Even So," which dies out with a suppressed sigh like the last breath or heart-beat of a yearning, weak-winged wind.' (There is a little touch of 'preciousness' here, but that is nothing.) And critical scraps like these are to be found passim. Add, then, that same unerring intuition which recognised and bore unflinching witness to the high work of contemporary men not yet properly recognised—Hugo and Arnold as poets, and Rossetti and Morris (to speak only of this book of Essays and Studies)—and we must be ready to admit the debt of gratitude we owe to him for his powerful and fearless exposition.
Turn now to the accompanying poetical work—the recent Poems and Ballads and the Songs before Sunrise. Enough, and perhaps more than enough, has been said of the faulty elements in them. But no work of Mr. Swinburne's is as satisfactory as this; to no work can we return again and again with equal pleasure. 'A Forsaken Garden,' despite a memory of the poetical method of Browning, has already won its place as a possession of all poetry readers, and that is a fact of more significance than the superfine young critics are wont to admit. Browning, again, has a finger in 'At a Month's End,' and the poem is over long; but it is not tiresome, and that allows one to see that it is fine. 'A Wasted Vigil' appears as the best expression of one of Mr. Swinburne's not too numerous poetical moods, which he is only too frequently repeating, and is fine also. But when we get to 'Ave atque Vale,' we get to something very like that rara avis in terris—a masterpiece. What a fortunate hour was that in which the essentials in him all met together and, calmed by death, spoke with sincerity! Mr. Swinburne has praised 'Thyrsis' generously and well, and here he has written its fellow. Forgetting an occasional verbal flaw, this poem passes into the company of Lycidas. The reasons why Mr. Swinburne's masterpiece should be found in an elegy, and in an elegy on Charles Baudelaire, are not far enough to seek to need expressing here. It suffices to remark that the poem is (let us, then, say it) flawless, perfect, and that its equals in our time are to be counted on the fingers of one hand. Our modern paganism has found its final expression, if not of life, then of death. Our Catullus has journeyed over many lands and seas, dark with doubt and despair, to tell us of whatsoever of good and sweet death has for us, death that is and death that will be.
'Nous reconnaissons, courbés vers la terre,
Que c'est la splendeur de ta face austère
Qui dore la nuit de nos longs malheurs;
Que la vie ailée aux mille couleurs,
Dont tu n'es que l'âme,
Refait par tes mains les prés et les fleurs.
La rose et la femme.'
It is Gautier, it is Baudelaire himself, transfigured, passing from the shadow of life and death into the sunshine of perpetuity, that speak to us in their own tongue this sweet and magnificent trust!
And there are other poems in this book which, if they do not reach to the high level of this one, are yet distinctly admirable. Such are the verses 'In Memory of Barry Cornwall,' 'Inferiæ,' 'A Ballad of François Villon,' 'Song,' 'Choriambics,' 'At Parting,' and the 'Dedication.' But even in these the old complaint has to be made of want of artistic self-restraint, want of the sense of perfect parts in a perfect whole. There is scarcely a poem in the book from which some lovely or splendid snatch of song cannot be taken, but the nucleus inspiration is so often lost in a side-play of colour, scent, and sound. Take 'A Ballad of Dreamland,' for instance: the first verse so beautiful, the others all beaten out, till high pleasure is swallowed up in vague disappointment. The translations from Villon are excellent. But the fatal facility comes out in the French and Latin poetry and the sonnets. It is the fashion at present to praise Mr. Swinburne's sonnets, but they are not the real thing. They are brilliant and hard, intense and artificial, mere tours de force, without genuine vitality or permanence. And the same must be said of almost all his French efforts. He declares once of Gautier that 'sa parole de marbre et d'or avait le son.' Something of the same sort of thing has happened here. Charming, however, is such verse as that 'Ad Catullum,' and sweet such verse as this from the 'Nocturne':
'La nuit écoute et se penche sur l'onde
Pour y cueillir rien qu'un souffle d'amour;
Pas de lueur, pas de musique au monde,
Pas de sommeil pour moi ni de séjour.
O mère, ô nuit, de ta source profonde
Verse-nous, verse enfin l'oubli du jour.'
Is there any French poet who would be ashamed to sign it?
When we come to the Songs before Sunrise we come to what Mr. Swinburne evidently looks upon as an important spiritual development in himself. In a Prelude which is often as singularly suggestive of the letter as of the spirit of Arnold's wonderful 'New Sirens,' he draws attention to this. The sincerity and inevitability of the development are rather problematical. 'Love's passion is played out, let us then take to the passion of politics,' is the burden of it. But how, Mr. Swinburne would say, can you be troubling about the sincerity or inevitability of the thing when it is expressed to you in music such as this is? But Mr. Swinburne, with his pretty theory that 'the excellence of verse justifies its injustice,' loses sight of the fact that the spiritual element enters into the very texture of its actual expression, and, if this spiritual element is wanting in a certain quality, the actual expression of it will be wanting also. When, and only when, in Mr. Swinburne his essential qualities all meet together and, made clear by some absorbing cause, speak with simplicity, is the result something like a masterpiece, a poem flawless in detail, perfect in conception. It wants all this to restrain his vagabond imagination. Then, too, in poetry such as most of these songs are, he has the temptation of his imperfect sense of melody. Here, more than anywhere else, he makes apparent the gift which as a worker he has done so much to give to our poetry—movement, rapidity, speed; and here, too, more than anywhere else, is apparent the want of both delicacy and variety in his music. His sense of regular rhythms and metres is splendid; his sense of melody was never even remarkable. His blank verse is often brilliant, never sovereign. He must have a brass-band or nothing. Then there is his alliterative trick, which ends in positive disgust. Could parody go further than a line like
'Spy, smirk, scoff, snap, snort, snivel, snarl and sneer'?
Or, to take an example from the Songs, how ineffective are lines like this:
'Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear'!
It is something very like balderdash.
There is still more to say. Mr. Swinburne's democracy has not the genuine ring. The trail of the amateur-enthusiast is over it all. What democracy is, what it means, and what it wants, is wholly outside his view, as indeed it is, with perhaps one or two exceptions, outside the view of every well-known writer of our time. Indeed, this pseudo-democracy, this apotheosis by light-headed schoolboys of the 'People, the gray-grown, speechless Christ,' is, unless viewed as a merely poetical exercise, rather disgusting. It is one thing to sing of Socialism, the Socialism of the Italian Unionists, of the French Anti-Imperialists, of the Russian Nihilists: these are for the most part men and women of education, or, in the usual terms, gentlemen and ladies; and the enthusiastic lady or gentleman poet can enter into their point of view; but it is quite another thing to sing of the peasants and mechanics, labourers and trades-unionists, whose aims, whether for ultimate good or evil, are not in the least grasped and understood. This makes it that, of the democracy sung of in these Songs, only that part which has to do with the individuals who are not real democrats can for a moment be viewed seriously.
Let us now take a glance at the Songs themselves. Everywhere in them will be found—and to a really remarkable extent—evidences of the old, the irrepressible, the fatal facility. The poverty of thought in them is terrible. Take such a poem as the 'Hymn of Man.' Not all the prodigality of music and imagery in it can hide the want of real, not to say sovereign, thought. It is brilliant, it is ingenious, but it is not great. Again, take 'Hertha,' a poem which has some superb snatches in it: the same remark has to be made. Professor Clifford, indeed, eager to show that the mathematical mind could appreciate the fine flow of poesy, took the thing au pied de la lettre and discoursed on its 'cosmic emotion.' Perhaps it was encouragement from some such unexpected source that induced Mr. Swinburne to say to himself, 'Go to, I will also write a poem on "Genesis,"' and the precious poem on 'Genesis' was the result. It would be interesting to have the opinion of the fiery but grim scientific realist, Herr Häckel, upon its scientific value—Herr Häckel, who has knocked together the heads of poet and teleologist with an admirable impartiality. He could not have a finer example of 'the painter in glowing colours of the wonderful mystery' to be derived from a few popular scientific text-books than our English poet. He has very few ideas, and those he does to death, sometimes amazingly so. For instance, there is his ceaseless phrase, 'spirit of sense.' It or its equivalent occurs at least four times in the Songs, three times in the second Poems and Ballads, five times in the Essays and Studies, and elsewhere. The origin of it is Shakespeare's Troilus, the Keats of Shakespeare (according to Mr. Swinburne); and Lord Tennyson has it too in the shape of 'sense and soul,' and Mr. Browning as 'spirit-sense,' as probably every poet in some shape or other. To Mr. Swinburne it gives an explanation of all individual psychology.
What a relief it is to turn from clever, 'vamped-up,' and improperly digested work like this to such pure and lovely poems as 'The Pilgrims' or the 'Dedication to Mazzini'! Perhaps no more gorgeous and ringing burst of passionate song is to be found in our literature than the last sixteen verses of the 'Mater Triumphalis.' Take verse like this as an example of the genuine political sincerity ('The Halt before Rome'):
'Surely the day is on our side,
And heaven and the sacred sun;
Surely the stars and the bright
Immemorial inscrutable night';
or the song-burst of the three verses further on, beginning 'The blind and the people in prison.' The poem, however, has rather poor stuff in it (the seven verses beginning 'Whose hand is stretched forth upon her?'), and is too long, which is really irritating where parts are so fine. The opening of the 'Quia multum amavit,' a poem of the same order but a better example, has a varied music too rare in this master of regular and rhymed rhythms and only regular and rhymed rhythms. Everywhere there are fine lines and snatches of songs sweet or impassioned (the first two verses of 'To Walt Whitman in America,' or the first verse of 'The Oblation,' for instance, or others from the 'Mater Dolorosa' or 'A Marching Song'). The studied work, set pieces like 'Siena' and 'Tiresias,' have in them the taint of over-deliberation, a taint curiously demonstrable by the exceedingly fine extracts that can (as usual) be made from both. This is once more a case of the extract giving too high a notion of the whole. Verse like
'... Her palace stands
In the mid city, where the strong
Bells turn the sunset air to song,
And the towers throng,'
is very lovely. The quiet insight that we feel in much of the monologue of 'Tiresias' is as pleasant as it is unexpected. Here and there it is like Keats, the Keats of Hyperion:
'I am as Time's self in mine own wearied mind.'
Or again, with a richer and more individual colour:
'Ye forces without form and viewless powers
That have the keys of all our years in hold,
That prophesy too late with tongues of gold,
In a strange speech whose words are perished hours.'
One is set wondering whether verse like this will not after all be able to carry on such a poem unshattered down the stream of time. The final poems have several of high quality. Such are 'An Appeal,' or the first ten stanzas of the 'Epilogue,' which have loveliness—loveliness coloured and animated with 'the patience of passion.'
III
subsequent work
It is not necessary to criticise in detail the third portion, the subsequent work of Mr. Swinburne. There is positively no sign in it of any new development except for the worse. Indeed, if we omit that slight tendency to greater excellence in workmanship which marks the second period, there has been, as we see, no new development from the beginning. He began as a 'marvellous boy,' just as his master, 'our sovereign poet,' 'our supreme poet,' 'the great tragic and prophetic poet of our age,' and so on, began as a 'sublime infant.' The 'sublime infant' died a 'sublime infant' at the mature age of eighty odd; and the 'marvellous boy' is no less a 'marvellous boy' as the author of A Century of Roundels than of the first Poems and Ballads. Verily, these men have the unreflective gift of perpetual youth, an enviable gift indeed in a time which is nothing if not repressed and broken with the weight of analytical age. Mr. Swinburne's freedom from the restraint of anything but his own personality has rapidly increased with years. For, being one of these happy souls to whom thought is not a necessity but rather a nuisance, he has grown less and less to care for such an absurd thing as balance. His ravenous emotions have made an end of him at last. Like his master, he has caught up a few poor ideas from here and there, and used them as a peg on which to hang the gorgeous vesture of his work, and been satisfied. Writers of 'leaders' in our newspapers understand this operation best, perhaps; but the poets have often run them close.
What, then, remains of value in the man's work? Just those parts of it, we say, of which he probably takes least heed—a line, a snatch, a verse, a song, scarcely any of them containing the qualities on which he would insist as his most peculiar excellence.
To have to repeat all this in detail, in considering his later work, would be as wearisome as it would be stupid. It would also be both ungrateful and ungracious. The fortunate hours have come less and less frequently with the poet as success and authority have loosened the bonds of self-restraint, until at last he has gone far towards turning his lyre into a barrel-organ. One puts down a book like A Midsummer's Holiday or the Sisters with the weary sense that there was little reason any of it should have been written, and none at all that it should have been published. It is far pleasanter, and indeed juster, to look back upon what is really satisfactory in the work of this erratic, factitious, passionate, myopic, but most real poet of ours, the inspired schoolboy of Parnassus.
Let us recall the power and fearlessness of his exposition; the instinct which has so often put its finger onto vague artistic notions floating about in the critical atmosphere, and made their actual truths perceptible to us ail; the special scraps of criticism really valuable. Let us recall the snatches of incomparable song, the wonders and splendours of rushing rhyme, the incomparable, gorgeous glimpses of face and form which we have had in our progress through the tropical jungle of his poetry. Then let us pause a moment in front of the shrine of a masterpiece! that rarest of terrestrial gifts, dipping our fingers in the holy shell, bending our heads to the wonderful image of Life and Death and Beauty which has made the three names of Baudelaire and Swinburne and Immortality sound as one.
- ↑ Essays and Studies, 2nd edition, p. 170.