Shelburne Essays Part 5

No doubt you will find here in germ all that was to mar the poet's later work. The rhythm lacks resistance; there is no definite vision evoked out of the rapid flux of images; the thought has no sure control over the words. Dolores is almost in the same breath the queen of languors and raptures; she is pallid and rosy, and a hostile criticism might find in the stanzas a succession of contradictions. Compare the poem with the few lines in _Jenny_ where Rossetti has expressed the same idea of man's inveterate l.u.s.t:

Like a toad within a stone Seated while Time crumbles on; Which sits there since the earth was cursed For Man's transgression at the first--

and the difference is immediately apparent between that concentration of mind which sums up a thought in a single definite image and the fluctuating, impalpable vision of a poet carried away by the intoxication of words. All that is true, and yet, somehow, out of this poem of _Dolores_ there does arise in the end a very real and memorable mood--real after the fashion of a mood excited by music rather than by painting or sculpture.

The _Poems and Ballads_ are splendid but _malsain_; they are impressive and they have the strength, ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly or indirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body. The change on pa.s.sing to the _Songs Before Sunrise_ (published in 1871) is extraordinary.

During the five years that elapsed between these volumes the two master pa.s.sions of Swinburne's life laid hold on him with devastating effect--the pa.s.sion of Liberty and the pa.s.sion of the Sea. Henceforth the influence of Mazzini and Victor Hugo was to dominate him like an obsession. Now, heaven forbid that one should say or think anything in despite of Liberty! The mere name conjures up recollections of glory and pride, and in it the hopes of the future are involved. And yet the very magnitude of its content renders it peculiarly liable to misuse. To this man it means one thing, and to another another, and many might cry out in the end, as Brutus did over virtue: "Thou art a naked word, and I followed thee as though thou hadst been a substance!" Certainly nothing is more dangerous for a poet than to fall into the habit of mouthing those great words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, and the like, abstracted of very definite events and very precise imagery. To Swinburne the sound of liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind of frothing mania. It is true that one or two of the poems on this theme are lifted up with a superb and genuine lyric enthusiasm. The _Eve of Revolution_, for instance, with which the _Songs Before Sunrise_ open, rings with the stirring noise of trumpets:

I hear the midnight on the mountains cry With many tongues of thunders, and I hear Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer, And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly, Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear....

But even here the reverberation of the words begins to conceal their meaning, and such abstractions as "the roar of the hours" lead into the worst of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longer hymns to liberty are nearly unreadable--at least if any one can endure to the end of _A Song of Italy_, it is not I. And as one goes through these rhapsodies that came out year after year, one begins to feel that Swinburne's notion of liberty, when it is not empty of meaning, is something even worse. Too often it is Kipling's gross idolatry of England uttered in a kind of hysterical falsetto. It was not pretty at a time of estrangement between England and France to speak of "French hounds whose necks are aching Still from the chain they crave"; and one needed not to sympathise with the Boers in the South African war to feel something like disgust at Swinburne's abuse:

....... the truth whose witness now draws near To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam, Down out of life.

Probably the poet thought he was giving voice to a righteous and Miltonic indignation. The best criticism of such a sonnet is to turn to Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints."

I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne's driving up late to a dinner and entering into a violent altercation with the cabman, to the vast amus.e.m.e.nt of the waiting guests within the house. That incorrigible wag and hanger-on of genius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the party and acted as chorus to the dialogue outside. "The poet's got the best of it, as usual," drawls the chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel in c.o.c.kspur Street, and never goes anywhere except in hansoms, which, whatever the distance, he invariably remunerates with one shilling.

Consequently, when, as to-day, it's a case of two miles beyond the radius, there's the devil's own row; but in the matter of imprecation the poet is more than a match for cabby, who, after five minutes of it, gallops off as though he had been rated by Beelzebub himself." Really, 'tis a bit of gossip which may be taken as a comment on not a few of Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty.

Not less n.o.ble in significance is that other word, the sea, which Swinburne now uses with endless reiteration. In his reverence for the weltering ocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom, he does of course only follow the best traditions of English poetry from _Beowulf_ to _The Seven Seas_ of Kipling, who is again in this his imitator. Nor is it the world of water alone that dominates his imagination, but with it the winds and the panorama of the sky ever rolling above. Already in the _Poems and Ballads_ there is a hint of the sympathy between the poet and this realm of water and air. One of the finest pa.s.sages in _The Triumph of Time_ is that which begins:

I will go back to the great sweet mother, Mother and lover of men, the sea.

I will go down to her, I and none other, Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me.

But for the most part the atmosphere of those poems was too sultry for the salt spray of ocean, and it is only with the _Songs Before Sunrise_, with the obsession of the idea of liberty, that we are carried to the wide sea "that makes immortal motion to and fro," and to the "shrill, fierce climes of inconsolable air." Thenceforth the reader is like some wave-tossed mariner who should take refuge in the cave of aeolus; at least he is forced to admire the genius that presides over the gusty concourse:

Hic vasto rex aeolus antro Luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras Imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat.

Illi indignantes magno c.u.m murmure montis Circ.u.m claustra fremunt.

The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might seem. There is a picture of Swinburne in the _Recollections_ of the late Henry Treffry Dunn which almost personifies him as the storm-king:

It had been a very sultry day, and with the advancing twilight, heavy thunder-clouds were rolling up. The door opened and Swinburne entered. He appeared in an abstracted state, and for a few minutes sat silent. Soon, something I had said anent his last poem set his thoughts loose. Like the storm that had just broken, so he began in low tones to utter lines of poetry. As the storm increased, he got more and more excited and carried away by the impulse of his thoughts, bursting into a torrent of splendid verse that seemed like some grand air with the distant peals of thunder as an intermittent accompaniment. And still the storm waxed more violent, and the vivid flashes of lightning became more frequent.

But Swinburne seemed unconscious of it all, and whilst he paced up and down the room, pouring out bursts of pa.s.sionate declamation, faint electric sparks played round the wavy ma.s.ses of his luxuriant hair.... Amidst the rattle of the thunder he still continued to pour out his thoughts, his voice now sinking low and sad, now waxing louder as the storm listed.

The scattered poems in his later books that rise above the _Poems and Ballads_ with a kind of grandiose suggestiveness are for the most part filled with echoes of wind and water. That haunting picture of crumbling desolation, _A Forsaken Garden_, lies "at the sea-down's edge between windward and lee." One of the few poems that seem to contain the cry of a real experience, _At a Month's End_, combines this aspect of nature admirably with human emotion:

Silent we went an hour together, Under grey skies by waters white.

_Our hearts were full of windy weather, Clouds and blown stars and broken light._

And the sensation left from a reading of _Tristram of Lyonesse_ is of a vast phantasmagoria, in which the beating of waves and the noise of winds, the light of dawns breaking on the water, and the floating web of stars, are jumbled together in splendid but inextricable confusion. So the coming of love upon Iseult, as she sails over the sea with Tristram, takes this magnificent comparison:

And as the august great blossom of the dawn Burst, and the full sun scarce from sea withdrawn Seemed on the fiery water a flower afloat, So as a fire the mighty morning smote Throughout her, and incensed with the influent hour Her whole soul's one great mystical red flower Burst....

Further on the long confession of her pa.s.sion at Tintagel, while Tristram has gone over-sea to that other Iseult, will be broken by those thundering couplets:

And swordlike was the sound of the iron wind, And as a breaking battle was the sea.

But even to allude to all the pa.s.sages of this kind in the poem--the swimming of Tristram, his rowing, and the other scenes--would fill an essay. In the end it must be confessed that this monotony of tone grows fatiguing. The rhythmic grace of the metre is like a bubble blown into the air, floating before our eyes with gorgeous iridescence--but when it touches earth, it bursts. There lies the fatal weakness of all this frenzy over liberty and this hymeneal chanting of sky and ocean; it has no basis in the homely facts of the heart. Read the account of Tristram and Iseult in the wilderness bower; it is all very beautiful, but you wonder why it leaves you so cold. There is not a single detail to fix an image of the place in the mind, not a word to denote that we are dealing with the pa.s.sion of individual human beings. Then turn to the same episode in the old poem of Gottfried von Stra.s.sburg; read the scene where the forsaken King Mark, through a window of their forest grotto, beholds the lovers lying asleep with the sword of Tristram stretched between them:

He gazed on his heart's delight, Iseult, and deemed that never before had he seen her so fair. She lay sleeping, with a flush as of mingled roses on her cheek, and her red and glowing lips apart; a little heated by her morning wandering in the dewy meadow and by the spring. On her head was a chaplet woven of clover. A ray of sunlight from the little window fell upon her face, and as Mark looked upon her he longed to kiss her, for never had she seemed so fair and so lovable as now. And when he saw how the sunlight fell upon her he feared lest it harm her, or awaken her, so he took gra.s.s and leaves and flowers, and covered the window therewith, and spake a blessing on his love and commended her to G.o.d, and went his way, weeping.

It is good to walk with head lifted to the stars, but it is good also to have the feet well planted on earth. If another example of Swinburne's abstraction from human interest were desired, one might take that rhapsody of the wind-beaten waters and "land that is lonelier than ruin," called _By the North Sea_. The picture of desolate and barren waste is one of the most powerful creations in his later works (it was published in 1880), yet there is still something wanting to stamp the impression into the mind. You turn from it, perhaps, to Browning's similar description in _Childe Roland_ and the reason is at once clear.

You come upon the line: "One stiff, blind horse, his every bone a-stare," and pause. There is in Swinburne's poem no single touch which arrests the attention in this way, concentrating the effect, as it were, to a burning point, and bringing out the symbolic relation to human life. Yet I cannot pa.s.s from this subject without noticing what may appear a paradoxical phase of Swinburne's character. Only when he lowers his gaze from the furies and ecstasies of man's ambition to the instinctive ways of little children does his art become purely human. It would be easy to select a full dozen of the poems dealing with child-life and the tender love inspired by a child that touch the heart with their pure and chastened beauty. I should feel that an essential element of his art were left unremarked if I failed to quote some such examples as these two roundels on _First Footsteps_ and a _A Baby's Death_:

A little way, more soft and sweet Than fields aflower with May, A babe's feet, venturing, scarce complete A little way.

Eyes full of dawning day Look up for mother's eyes to meet, Too blithe for song to say.

Glad as the golden spring to greet Its first live leaflet's play, Love, laughing, leads the little feet A little way.

The little feet that never trod Earth, never strayed in field or street, What hand leads upward back to G.o.d The little feet?

A rose in June's most honied heat, When life makes keen the kindling sod, Was not more soft and warm and sweet.

Their pilgrimage's period A few swift moons have seen complete Since mother's hands first clasped and shod The little feet.

Despite the artificiality of the French form and a kind of revolving dizziness of movement, one catches in these child-lyrics a simplicity of feeling not unlike Longfellow's cry, "O little feet! that such long years." Swinburne himself might not relish the comparison, which is none the less just.

It is not often safe to attempt to sum up a large body of work in a phrase, yet with Swinburne we shall scarcely go astray if we seek such a characterisation in the one word _motion_. Both the beauty and the fault of his extraordinary rhythms are exposed in that term, and certainly his first claim to originality lies in his rhythmical innovations. There had been nothing in English comparable to the steady swell, like the waves of a subsiding sea, in the lines of _Atalanta_ and the _Poems and Ballads_. They brought a new sensuous pleasure into our poetry. But with time this cadenced movement developed into a kind of giddy race which too often left the reader belated and breathless. Little tricks of composition, such as a repeated caesura after the seventh syllable of the pentameter, were employed to heighten the speed. Moreover, the longer lines in many of the poems are not organic, but consist of two or more short lines huddled together, the effect being to eliminate the natural resting-places afforded by the sense. And occasionally his metre is merely wanton. He uses one verse, for example, which with its combination of gliding motion and internal jingles is uncommonly irritating:

Hills and _valleys_ where April _rallies_ his radiant squadron of flowers and _birds_, Steep strange _beaches_ and l.u.s.trous _reaches_ of fluctuant sea that the land _engirds_, Fields and _downs_ that the sunrise _crowns_ with life diviner than lives in _words_,--

a page of this sets the nerves all a-jangle.

And if Swinburne is one of the obscurest of English poets, it is due in large part to this same element of motion. A poem may move swiftly and still be perfectly easy to follow, so long as the thought is simple and concrete; witness the works of Longfellow. Or, on the other hand, the thought may be tortuous and still invite reflection, so long as the metre forces a continual pause in the reading; witness Browning. Now, no one will accuse Swinburne of overloading his pages with thought; it is not there the obscurity lies. The difficulty is with the number and the peculiarly vague quality of his metaphors. Let me ill.u.s.trate what I mean by this vagueness. I open one of the volumes at random and my eye rests on this line in _A Channel Pa.s.sage_:

As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life or of sleep.

If one were reading the poem and tried to evoke this image before his mind, he would certainly need to pause for a moment. Or I open to _Walter Savage Landor_ and find this pa.s.sage marked:

High from his throne in heaven Simonides, Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tears That the everlasting sun of all time sees All golden, molten from the forge of years.

The sentiment is simple enough, and it might be sufficient to feel the force of this in a general way, were it not that the metaphorical expression almost compels one to pause and form an image of the whole before proceeding. Such an image is, no doubt, possible; but the mingling of abstract and concrete terms makes the act of visualisation slow and painful. At the same time the rhythm is swift and continuous, so that any pause in the reading demands a deliberate effort of the will. The result is a form of obscurity which in many of the poems is almost prohibitive for an indolent man--and are not the best readers always a little indolent? And there is another habit--trick, one might say--which increases this vagueness of metaphor in a curious manner.

Constantly he uses a word in its ordinary, direct sense and then repeats it as an abstract personification. I find an example to hand in the stanzas written _At a Dog's Grave_:

The shadow shed round those we love shines bright As _love's_ own face.

It is only a mannerism such as another, but it recurs with sufficient frequency to have an appreciable effect on the mind.

Indeed, if this vagueness of imagery were only an occasional appearance, the difficulty would be slight. As a matter of fact, no inconsiderable portion of Swinburne's work is made up of a stream of half-visualised abstractions that crowd upon one another with the motion of clouds driven below the moon. He is more like Walt Whitman in this respect than any other poet in the language. Whitman is concrete and human and very earthly, but, with this difference, there is in both writers the same thronging procession of images which flit by without allowing the reader to concentrate his attention upon a single impression; they are both poets of vast and confused motion. Swinburne is notable for his want of humour, yet he is keen enough to see how close this flux of high-sounding words lies to the absurd. In the present collected edition of his poems he has included _The Heptalogia, or Seven against Sense_, a series of parodies which does not spare his own mannerisms. Some scandalised Philistines, I doubt, might even need to be told that _Nephelidia_ was a parody:

Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror, Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death: Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error, Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beat.i.tude's breath.

Pretty much all the traits of Swinburne's style are there--the long breathless lines with their flowing dactyls or anapaests, the unabashed alliteration, the stream of half-visualised images, the trick of following an epithet with its own abstract substantive, the sense of motion, and above all the acc.u.mulation of words. Of this last trait of verbosity I have said nothing, for the reason that it is too notorious to need mentioning. It may not, however, be superfluous to point out a little more precisely the special form his tautology a.s.sumes. He is never more graphic and nearer to nature than when he describes the ecstasy of swimming at sea. He is himself pa.s.sionately fond of the exercise, and once at least was almost drowned in the Channel. Let us take, then, a stanza from _A Swimmer's Dream_:

All the strength of the waves that perish Swells beneath me and laughs and sighs, Sighs for love of the life they cherish, Laughs to know that it lives and dies, Dies for joy of its life, and lives Thrilled with joy that its brief death gives-- Death whose laugh or whose breath forgives Change that bids it subside and rise.