MR. SWINBURNE'S BIRTHDAY.

IN his preface to the second series of that most admirable of anthologies, the "Golden Treasury," Mr. Francis Palgrave expresses his deep regret, and anticipates the regret of his readers, that he is not able to adorn his pages with specimens of the brilliant lyrical gifts of Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne. His regret that he could not make his anthology complete or representative in the full sense of the era in which lived so many of the poets from whom he has quoted has been shared by a large number of readers; but it is a regret which is balanced by an equal feeling of gratitude. Mr. Swinburne could not be included in Mr. Palgrave's "Golden Treasury," and Mr. Palgrave, apart from the purposes of his task, was no doubt happy in excluding him, because the " Treasury" is confined to poets who are no longer with us. Mr. Swinburne, fortunately, is with us still. He was seventy years old on Friday, April 5th, and not only those who admired his work when first he "swam into the ken" of mid-Victorian critics, but those also who have learned to admire and delight in his genius since, will offer him their hearty felicitations on so lengthened a career of fine work, and will wish him many more years of strength of body and mind, possibly to add other works to those with which be has enriched ouc national bookshelves. It is, indeed, difficult to realise that Mr. Swinburne is actually seventy. He has never looked like seventy on paper, which cannot be said of several poets whose work ended at a much earlier age than his. It is only, perhaps, when he is definitely placed in the setting of his youth, with Rossetti, Burne-Jones, William Morris, and the others, that it becomes easy to realise how much has been written since first "Atalanta in Calydon" showed that the almost unrecognised author of "Rosa- mund" and "The Queen Mother" had suddenly glowed into a maker of new and wonderful lyric verse. Perhaps the slow changing of periods since 1865 was better marked by an accident of the day before Mr. Swinburne's birthday than by the chorus of congratulation of the day itself. On April 4th there was a revival of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience, and one of the characters was described on the programme, owing to a misprint, as "a fleshy poet." Imagine such a possibility as that in the days when "Thomas Maitland" was attacking the "fleshly school of poetry "—principally, of course, Rossetti—in the Contemporary Beview The beginnings of the school of the Rossettis and Swinburne —if "school" is a possible word for thought born of rebellion— were no doubt followed at first with intense dislike. Mr. William Rossetti has described something of "the amount of noise, the frenzied abuse and indiscriminate anathemas," which "were such as could only be forthcoming in a land of scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. Anglo-Saxons," he writes, "on both sides of the Atlantic were capable of this : I do not imagine that any other race under the sun would have been equally capable." He would have modified that criticism, perhaps, if he had realised bow essentially contrary to the current of British thought, and the trend of British prefer- ences, the way of Mr. Swinburne's genius ran, as expressed in "

Atalanta" or the "Poems and Ballads." He does not measure properly the powerful grip which Tennyson then had, and rightly had, of the mind of the public. Tennyson had for a time slowed down to an easy gait, and in the early "sixties" had succeeded in leading the great mass of the

reading public into fastnesses of quiet grace and gentle melody, from which they were loth to be led forth. Yet it was right that they should be led forth, for in literature, as in religion, we must be on our guard "lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Both poets, the one perhaps unconsciously and the other intentionally, had taken the national mind so far from what, for want of a better word, we must call Byroniam that there was a risk of believing what was distant to be for that reason dangerous. It was forgotten even that Tennyson, the author of the "Idylls," had once struck his own new note in " Maud" ; it was forgotten how magnificent Tennyson could be as a lyric poet ; it was only realised that he had put it in the power of twenty others to sing like him, even if the likeness to his great poetry was only slight. Suddenly what had seemed distant became intensely near. It was not Byronism, for there was nothing cynical in it; but it belonged, as the public saw it, to an age distant from the level melodies of the Laureate not only in form, but in spirit. It is difficult to judge the full effect of the contrast at an interval of forty years, but it might possibly be suggested by a prolonged tasting of the concrete honey of the last of the "Idylls," and then the sudden change to a strophe from "Atalanta" :— "Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time, with a gift of tears;

Grief, with a glass that ran; Pleasure, with pain for leaven; Summer, with flowers that fell ; Remembrance fallen from heaven, And madness risen from hell; Strength without hands to smite ; Love that endures for a breath ; Night, the shadow of light, And life, the shadow of death."

Or this :— " The ivy falls with the Bacchanal's hair Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes; The wild vine slipping down leaves bare Her bright breast shortening into sighs; The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves, But the berried ivy catches and cleaves To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies."

The beauty and power of such verse, and of much else of the new poet's work not Bo easy of quotation, could be generally appreciated only after a lapse of years. It was a beauty which hurt, because it was different from the beauty expected. Only for younger men, or for older men after doubt and time, was it easy to recognise the essential genius of Mr. S winburne's lyrics, or for those who had become thoroughly used to, and pleased with, the concrete in mid- Victorian poetry to find pleasure in such abstract thought as that of the "Ave atque Vale" to Baudelaire :— "Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow,

Far too far off for thought or any prayer.

What ails us with thee, who art wind and air?

What ails us gazing where all seen is hollow Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire,

Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire,

Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find.

Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies,

The low light fails us in elusive skies, Still the foird earnest ear is deaf, and blind Are still the eluded eyes."

But we are not here engaged upon a critical estimate of Mr. Swinburne's work as a whole. A birthday greeting may be all the better for being short. It is a pleasure to quote, but quotation to be adequate ought not to consist of nothing but what is admirable, and Mr. Swinburne, having written much, has, with other great poets who have written less, fallen at intervals; he has even unconsciously caricatured his own weaknesses, as in such lines as- " Prom the lilies and languor of virtue To the raptures and roses of vice."

But no other living Englishman equals him in the power and volume, or in the splendour of the general achievement, of his poetry. He belongs, too, not only to the great poets, but to the great critics, and great not because we think him always right. He was often wrong, as when be wrote of Clough :— " The public, though dull,

Has not quite such a skull

As belongs to believers in Clough."

He has often, too, been inclined to overpraise. He has writtui of too many pieces of verse that there is nothing like them in English. There is "nothing comparable with it in the language," be wrote of Landor's quatrain :----

"Stand close around, ye Stygian set,

With Dirce in one boat conveyed! Or Charon, seeing, may forget That he is old and she a shade."

It could not well be better ; but we may think the criticism high.flown. Still, the sheer generosity of the overstrained praise belongs to greatness. There was, indeed, never a more uncompromising champion. Mr. Swinburne has always been, like Alan Breck, "a bonny fighter." Beside the speed and glory of his verse, he has been able to command in his prose criticisms a language of superb disdain, of slashing vigour, and, when he chose, of the most admirable and uproarious ridicule ; yet if his sincerity has always sharpened his rapier into brightness, his honesty has always kept it clean. We may not be able to like all his rhetorical artifices, and we may be forced to condemn strongly a portion of his verse, but even so Mr. Swinburne must be judged as worthy of a high place even in a poetic literature so splendid as our own. If he had done nothing else, his enrichment of the metrical resources of our language would keep his memory green throughout the ages.