Algernon Charles Swinburne

DURING the fifteen years from 1882, when Rossetti died, to 1896, when Morris died, English literature lost five of the six great poets that had made the latter half of the century memorable. The close of the nineteenth century found only one poet of the first rank left alive among the English-speaking peoples; it is hardly too much to say among all the peoples of the world. The solitary preeminence thus bestowed upon Swinburne is almost unparalleled in the history of modern literature. Neither in France nor in Germany is there any poet now living who may be brought into serious comparison with him, and even the great poet of modern Italy, who with him survived the century of their common birth, has now passed away. The England of the present day, rich as it is in accomplished writers of verse, can hardly be said to possess another poet entitled either by gift or achievement to dispute with Swinburne his sovereignty over the realms of song. Yet this sovereignty, which is not questioned, as far as I know, by any well-informed and serious critic, is far from being clearly recognised by the masses of readers. The poet certainly does not sway them as they were swayed by Byron and Wordsworth and Tennyson,

the phrases of his mintage have not passed into general currency; the winged words of his song have not become domesticated as household words except to a very limited extent. There is a twofold explanation of this fact. It is explained in part by the nature of his subject-matter, which has been far removed from men's everyday interests. Aside from his lovely verses in praise of childhood, there is no considerable group of his poems that appeals to the common instincts of domestic life. He has written nothing of the type of "Maud" or "Enoch Arden" or "The Princess." Although the passion of love counts for much in his work, it is not the form of love that Browning's "Men and Women" brings into such intimate relations with our own most vivid personal experiences; it is rather the form that is coupled with high endeavour and heroic energy, with fateful oldworld histories, with Tristram and Yseult, with the Queen of Scots, with the English and the Lombard Rosamunds. This choice of themes, combined with a treatment that allows almost nothing for sentiment, that is both abstract and austere, is not calculated to bring the generality of readers into intimacy with his work; it requires a certain strenuousness of temper, a certain detachment from the habitual plane of life, to catch the contagion of his spirit, to participate in his pursuit of lofty and remote ideals. The other part of the explanation is found in the simple fact that the general public has never had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with

the bulk of Swinburne's writings. He seems to have shrunk from popular applause, much as Landor did, and his books have been produced in an expensive form, in numerous slender volumes instead of a few comprehensive ones. The reader who has wished to add Swinburne's complete writings to his library has been required, until recently, to purchase upwards of twenty volumes of the poems alone, and at least ten volumes more of the prose, at a price that has been practically prohibitive. We do not need to go beyond this fact to understand why he has never had his due of popular appreciation; he has been handicapped all the time by an impediment of his own making. Until the public is offered a compact edition of his poems, at least, in not more than two or three volumes, his reputation will never become at all commensurate with his deserts.

The manner of his introduction to the larger public was peculiarly unfortunate; the succès d'estime of his earlier books was followed by the succès de scandale of the first collection of "Poems and Ballads." When that startling volume was given to the world, he had already attracted the attention of the discerning, and won the applause of the judicious, by the first four of his dramatic poems. "Rosamond" and "The Queen Mother" had appeared in 1860, "Atalanta in Calydon" and "Chastelard" in 1865. But these extraordinary books had found their way to no very wide circle of readers. A year later, the name of the poet was upon the lips of every reader

who took any interest whatever in poetry, and Swinburne had become, if not the most popular, certainly the most notorious, of living poets. There had been no such sensation in English poetry since the appearance of the first two books of "Childe Harold" as was occasioned by this famous first volume of "Poems and Ballads," and there has been no such sensation since. Thousands of young men got the poems by heart and declaimed them to each other upon every possible occasion. The reviewers pounced upon the volume and waxed unusually virtuous in their solemn deliberations. The newspapers took up the chorus and brought word of the new poet into the remotest regions. This sudden and extraordinary vogue was the result, of course, not of the magnificent merits of the volume as a whole, but rather of the license of a few-a very few-of the pieces which it contained. These half-dozen pieces, more or less, were singled out by the unerring instinct of journalism for sensational effects, and the hapless poet was assailed with every form of denunciation and vituperation in the arsenal of the newspaper custodians of morality. The animus and the persistence of this outcry were such that its echoes have not yet died away. Even at the present day, there are thousands of worthy and wellmeaning people whose only notion of Swinburne's poetry is a reflection of the feeling aroused a full generation ago by a few poems full of the recklessness of boyhood, poems which are the least typical and characteristic of all his writings. To these

people the poet of "Thalassius" and the "Songs before Sunrise" still remains the poet of morbid sensualism, to these the poet who almost more than any of his fellow-singers exalts spirit above sense, and transports his readers to an atmosphere almost too rarefied for ordinary mortals to breathe, remains the poet of unregulated passion and defiance of the most universally accepted eithical sanctions. Of course there were many critics-to the honour of our own country Richard Grant White and Edmund Clarence Stedman among them-who took a rational view of the "Poems and Ballads," who judged the volume upon its merits instead of singling out its defects, and who recognised the patent fact that here indeed was a new poet in the true sense, a veritable singer arisen among men in an age fast lapsing into the prosaic. Even the severest of Swinburne's early critics could not deny that he had the gift of melody, that he played upon English speech as a virtuoso plays upon his instrument, that he evoked from our language wonderful new rhythmical effects and hitherto unsuspected possibilities of harmony. It would have been a dull ear indeed that could remain deaf to the music of "Hesperia" and the "Hymn to Proserpine."

"Out of the golden remote wild west where the sea without shore is,

Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fulness of

joy,

As a wind sets in with the autumn that blows from the region

of stories,