FullReads

A maiden’s and a prophet’s and thy son’s.

It is lamentable that in his latest blank verse Swinburne should have made a trick and a manner of that most energetic device of his by which he leads the line at a rush from the first syllable to the tenth, and on to the first of the line succeeding, with a great recoil to follow, as though a rider brought a horse to his haunches. It is in the same boar hunt:

And fiery with invasive eyes,
And bristling with intolerable hair,
Plunged;–

Sometimes we may be troubled with a misgiving that Swinburne’s fine narrative, as well as his descriptive writing of other kinds, has a counterpart in the programme-music of some now bygone composers. It is even too descriptive, too imitative of things, and seems to out-run the province of words, somewhat as that did the province of notes. But, though this hunting, and checking, and floating, and flying in metre may be to strain the arts of prosody and diction, with how masterly a hand is the straining accomplished! The spear, the arrow, the attack, the charge, the footfall, the pinion, nay, the very stepping of the moon, the walk of the wind, are mimicked in this enchanting verse. Like to programme-music we must call it, but I wish the concert-platform had ever justified this slight perversion of aim, this excess–almost corruption–of one kind of skill, thus miraculously well.

Now, if Swinburne’s exceptional faculty of diction led him to immoderate expressiveness, to immodest sweetness, to a jugglery, and prestidigitation, and conjuring of words, to transformations and transmutations of sound–if, I say, his extraordinary gift of diction brought him to this exaggeration of the manner, what a part does it not play in the matter of his poetry! So overweening a place does it take in this man’s art that I believe the words to hold and use his meaning, rather than the meaning to compass and grasp and use the word. I believe that Swinburne’s thoughts have their source, their home, their origin, their authority and mission in those two places–his own vocabulary and the passion of other men. This is a grave charge.

First, then, in regard to the passion of other men. I have given to his own emotion the puniest name I could find for it; I have no nobler name for his intellect. But other men had thoughts, other men had passions; political, sexual, natural, noble, vile, ideal, gross, rebellious, agonising, imperial, republican, cruel, compassionate; and with these he fed his verses. Upon these and their life he sustained, he fattened, he enriched his poetry. Mazzini in Italy, Gautier and Baudelaire in France, Shelley in England, made for him a base of passionate and intellectual supplies. With them he kept the all-necessary line of communication. We cease, as we see their active hearts possess his active art, to think a question as to his sincerity seriously worth asking; what sincerity he has is so absorbed in the one excited act of receptivity. That, indeed, he performs with all the will, all the precipitation, all the rush, all the surrender, all the wholehearted weakness of his subservient and impetuous nature. I have not named the Greeks, nor the English Bible, nor Milton, as his inspirers. These he would claim; they are not his. He received too partial, too fragmentary, too arbitrary an inheritance of the Greek spirit, too illusory an idea of Milton, of the English Bible little more than a tone;–this poet of eager, open capacity, this poet who is little more, intellectually, than a too-ready, too-vacant capacity, for those three august seventies has not room enough.

Charged, then, with other men’s purposes–this man’s Italian patriotism; this man’s love of sin (by that name, for sin has been denied, as a fiction, but Swinburne, following Baudelaire, acknowledges it to love it); this man’s despite against the Third Empire or what not; this man’s cry for a political liberty granted or gained long ago–a cry grown vain; this man’s contempt for the Boers–nay, was it so much as a man, with a man’s evil to answer for, that furnished him here; was it not rather that less guilty judge, the crowd?–this man’s–nay, this boy’s–erotic sickness, or his cruelty–charged with all these, Swinburne’s poetry is primed; it explodes with thunder and fire. But such sharing is somewhat too familiar for dignity; such community of goods parodies the Franciscans. As one friar goes darned for another’s rending, having no property in cassock or cowl, so does many a poet, not in humility, but in a paradox of pride, boast of the past of others. And yet one might rather choose to make use of one’s fellow-men’s old shoes than to put their old secrets to usufruct, and dress poetry in a motley of shed passions, twice corrupt. Promiscuity of love we have heard of; Pope was accused, by Lord Hervey’s indignation and wit, of promiscuity of hatred, and of scattering his disfavours in the stews of an indiscriminate malignity; and here is another promiscuity–that of memories, and of a licence partaken.