<h3><b><SPAN name="2._Genius_without_Eyes"></SPAN>2. Genius without Eyes</b></h3>
<p>Swinburne, says Mr. Gosse, "was not quite like a human being." That
is
chiefly what is the matter with his poetry. He did not write quite like
a human being. He wrote like a musical instrument. There are few poets
whose work is less expressive of personal passions. He was much given
to
ecstasies, but it is remarkable that most of these were echoes of other
people's ecstasies. He sought after rapture both in politics and
poetry,
and he took as his masters Mazzini in the one and Victor Hugo in the
other. He has been described as one who, while conversing, even in his
later years, kept "bobbing all the while like a cork on the sea of his
enthusiasms." And, in a great deal of his rapture, there is much of the
levity as well as the "bobbing" quality of the cork. He who sang the
hymns of the Republic in his youth, ended his life as
rhetorician-in-chief of the Jingoes against the Irish and the Boers.
Nor
does one feel that there was any philosophic basis for the change in
his
attitude as there was for a similar change in the attitude of Burke and
Wordsworth in their later years. He was influenced more by persons than
by principles. One does not find any real vision of a Republic in his
work as one finds it in the work of Shelley. He had little of the
saintliness of spirit which marks the true Republican and which turns
politics into music in <i>The Masque of Anarchy</i>. His was not one
of those
tortured souls, like Francis Adams's, which desire the pulling-down of
the pillars of the old, bad world more than love or fame. There is no
utterance of the spirit in such lines as:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Let our flag run out straight in the wind!<br/>
</span><span class="i2">The old red shall be floated again<br/>
</span><span>When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">When the names that are twenty are ten;<br/>
</span></div>
<div class="stanza"><span>When the devil's riddle is mastered<br/>
</span><span class="i2">And the galley-bench creaks with a Pope,<br/>
</span><span>We shall see Buonaparte the bastard<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Kick heels with his throat in a rope.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>It is possible for those who agree with the sentiments to derive a
certain satisfaction from verse of this sort as from a vehement leading
article. But there is nothing here beyond the rhetoric of the hot fit.
There is nothing to call back the hot fit in anybody older than a boy.</p>
<p>Even when Swinburne was writing out of his personal experience, he
contrived somehow to empty his verse of personality and to put
sentimentalism and rhetoric in its place. We have an instance of this
in
the story of the love-affair recorded by Mr. Gosse. Swinburne, at the
age of twenty-five, fell in love with a kinswoman of Sir John Simon,
the
pathologist. "She gave him roses, she played and sang to him, and he
conceived from her gracious ways an encouragement which she was far
from
seriously intending." Swinburne proposed to her, and, possibly from
nervousness, she burst out laughing. He was only human in feeling
bitterly offended, and "they parted on the worst of terms." He went off
to Northumberland to escape from his wretchedness, and there he wrote
<i>The Triumph of Time</i>, which Mr. Gosse maintains is "the most
profound
and the most touching of all his personal poems." He assured Mr. Gosse,
fourteen years afterwards, that "the stanzas of this wonderful lyric
represented with the exactest fidelity the emotions which passed
through
his mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but
the
infinite pity and the pain." Beautiful though the poem intermittently
is, however, it seems to me to lack that radiance of personal emotion
which we find in the great love poems. There is much decoration of
music
of a kind of which Swinburne and Poe alone possessed the secret, as in
the verse beginning:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>There lived in France a singer of old<br/>
</span><span class="i2">By the tideless, dolorous, midland sea.<br/>
</span><span>In a land of sand and ruin and gold<br/>
</span><span class="i2">There shone one woman and none but she.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>But is there more than the decoration of music in the verses which
express the poet's last farewell to his passion?</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Fill the days of my daily breath<br/>
</span><span>With fugitive things not good to treasure,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Do as the world doth, say as it saith;<br/>
</span><span>But if we had loved each other—O sweet,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Had you felt, lying under the palms of your
feet,<br/>
</span><span>The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">To feel you tread it to dust and death—<br/>
</span></div>
<div class="stanza"><span>Ah, had I not taken my life up and given<br/>
</span><span class="i2">All that life gives and the years let go,<br/>
</span><span>The wine and honey, the balm and leaven,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">The dreams reared high and the hopes brought
low?<br/>
</span><span>Come life, come death, not a word be said;<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Should I lose you living, and vex you dead?<br/>
</span><span>I shall never tell you on earth, and in heaven,<br/>
</span><span>If I cry to you then, will you care to know?<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>Browning, unquestionably, could have expressed Swinburne's passion
better than Swinburne did it himself. He would not have been content
with a sequence of vague phrases that made music. With him each phrase
would have been dramatic and charged with a personal image or a
personal
memory.</p>
<p>Swinburne, however, was a great musician in verse and beyond
belittlement in this regard. It would be incongruous to attempt a close
comparison between him and Longfellow, but he was like Longfellow in
having a sense of music out of all proportion to the imaginative
content
of his verse. There was never a distinguished poet whose work endures
logical analysis so badly. Mr. Arthur Symons, in a recent essay, refers
scornfully to those who say that "the dazzling brilliance of
Swinburne's
form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance."
But
he produces no evidence on the other side. He merely calls on us to
observe the way in which Swinburne scatters phrases and epithets of
"imaginative subtlety" by the way, while most poets "present us with
their best effects deliberately." It seems to me, on the contrary, that
Swinburne's phrasing is far from subtle. He induces moods of excitement
and sadness by his musical scheme rather than by individual phrases.
Who
can resist, for example, the spell of the opening verses of <i>Before
the
Mirror</i>, the poem of enchantment addressed to Whistler's <i>Little
White
Girl?</i> One hesitates to quote again lines so well known. But it is
as
good an example as one can find of the pleasure-giving qualities of
Swinburne's music, apart from his phrases and images:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>White rose in red rose-garden<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Is not so white;<br/>
</span><span>Snowdrops that plead for pardon<br/>
</span><span class="i2">And pine from fright,<br/>
</span><span>Because the hard East blows<br/>
</span><span>Over their maiden rows,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Grow not as thy face grows from pale to bright.<br/>
</span><span>Behind the veil, forbidden,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Shut up from sight,<br/>
</span><span>Love, is there sorrow hidden,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Is there delight?<br/>
</span><span>Is joy thy dower or grief,<br/>
</span><span>White rose of weary leaf,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Late rose whose life is brief, whose loves are
light?<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>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:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<p>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. <i>The
Garden of Proserpine</i> 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 <i>Atalanta in Calydon.</i> 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.</p>
<p>The first series of <i>Poems and Ballads</i>, 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 <i>Poems and Ballads</i> 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 <i>Lesbia
Brandon</i>, which he never published; but at heart he never freed
himself
from the Hebrew awe in presence of good and evil. His <i>Aholibah</i>
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 <i>Poems and Ballads.</i> Those who
praise him
as a thinker quote <i>Hertha</i> 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."</p>
<p>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 <i>Anactoria</i> as a child going
about
with Bowdler's Shakespeare under his arm and, in later years, assisting
Jowett in the preparation of a <i>Child's Bible.</i></p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />