THE LIFE OF SWINBURISTE.
[niter NOTICE.]
As a friend of thirty years' standing, a poet., and an accomplished critic and man of letters, Mr. Edmund Gosse * comes to his difficult task with an equipment which raises high expectations, largely fulfilled by the result. He has given us an extremely interesting and tikilful memoir of an extraordinary man, and though the limitations necessarily imposed on him prevent it from being a complete picture, it is not likely to be superseded for a good many years to come. These limitations are due to a regard for the living as well as the dead. Though Swinburne led in one sense a singularly uneventful life, he was constantly in the wars, and his biographer has to walk warily over ignes suppositos cineri doloso. Many episodes in Swinburne's life are treated, we do not say perfunctorily, but with a reticence which might be legitimately abandoned fifty years hence. Again, though the inconsistencies, the violence, and the extravagant profuseness of Swinbume's genius are subjected to a good deal of sound and discriminating criticism, Mr. Gorse's attitude, if it falls short of idolatry, cannot be regarded as altogether judicial. He is rather lavish of the epithet " superhuman," and his estimates of -certain poems singled out for especial praise will not commend themselves to all of Swinburne's admirers. For example, lie selects as " perhaps the very best parody. in existence " the imitation of Mrs. Browning in the Heptalogia, a piece which is not only marred by very dubious taste, but, from the point of view of technique, exhibits a facility and " slickness " to which Mrs. Browning rarely if ever attained. Again, Mr. Cease recounts some anecdotes which illustrate Swinburne's " impishness," his readiness at all costs to epater k bourgeois, with a gusto which borders on approval. And there is a good deal of talk about mid-Victorian prudery and Po d- isnappery which savours of the cant of anti-cant. It is hard to maintain the view that Swinburne's defence of his Poems and Ballads was substantially a " passionate appeal for a reasonable and manly liberty of utterance " which " struck a new note, or revived a forgotten note, of wholesome freedom, and permanently strengthened the hands of all those who profess to deal neither in poison nor in pap,' " when we consider the circumstances of the publication of that momentous volume—the long consultations with his literary friends and advisers ; the continuing influence of the famous notice in the Saturday Review, written by a distinguished man of letters, " later on one of Swinburne's closest friends and supporters, although he never distinctly withdrew his censure of the ' libidinous songs ' of 1866 " ; and above all Swinburne's own resolve to • keep up his character by publishing a further book " which I flatter myself will be more offensive and objectionable to Britannia than anything I have yet done." Mr. Gesso, who has
• The Life of Algernon Charks Swinburne. By Edmund Bosse, C.D. With i'ortraits and illustrations. London ; Macmillan and Co. [10s. Cid. net.]
seen this work, is of opinion that it ought never to be published. Swinburne never did publish it, for, as Mr. Gosse says, " he had braved public opinion, and he now shrank from an obloquy which he had courted, and the extent of which he exaggerated." The fact was that Swinburne, though physically courageous, was in- capable of acting on the maxim preen fortiter. As for his eliampion- ship of freedom of utterance, it is worth noticing that after welcoming Walt Whitman with rapture, in 1892 he compared Whitman's Muse to " a drunken apple-woman indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage of the gutter amid the rotten refuse of her overturned fruit-stalL" It is true that Mr. Cease attributes this palinode to " the slow tyranny exercised on Swinburne's judgment by the will of [Theodore] Watts," who hated Whitman most heartily ; but this is not the only instance of a radical reversal of judgment. The indiscreet publication in the Letters of Matthew Arnold of a slighting reference to himself as " a sort of Pseudo-Shelley " con- verted Swinburne's admiration for Arnold into gall and bitter- ness. So, again, his eminently appreciative estimate of Byron prefixed to the selection of that poet's lyrical work in 1866 gave place in later years to a pronounced and " excruciating prejudice:" As Mr. Gosse truly remarks, " almost all his literary convictions were formed while he was at school " ; the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, Victor Hugo, and Lander remained his idols in old age as in early boyhood, and he never outgrew his curious dislike of Horace, or his inability to enjoy Lucretius or Virgil—due in the latter instance to having to learn him by heart at Eton. " Catullus alone of the Latin classics gave him pleasure of an ecstatic kind." He greatly admired Aeschylus and Sophoclos, but hated Euripides, and harboured a lifelong passion for Sappho. The first novel he ever read was Dombey. and Son, and in the placid evening of his life at Putney he read through the whole of Dickens's novels every three years.
Though the first scholar or poet who had arisen in the families of his father or his mother (an Ashburnham), Swinburne owed much to his lineage. His grandfather, a Northumbrian Baronet born in 1760, came of a stock continuously Jacobite in its adhesions, was born and bred in France, had been the friend of Mirabeau, professed ultra-Liberal views, which he encouraged his grandson to adopt, and was for the rest a man of volcanic temper, a patron of the arts, and a hard rider. Swinburne's father was an Admiral, from whom he inherited his passion for the sea ; his mother taught him French and Italian, history and religion. The atmosphere of his home life in boyhood was Anglican, and the four tutors with. whom he read as a boy and undergraduate were all clergymen, two of them becoming Bishops—Woodford. of Ely and Stubbs of Oxford. His childhood, of which we find a charming account in the recollec- tions of his cousin, Mrs. Disney Leith,* was spent either in the Isle of Wight, where his father rented a house near Bonchurch, or at Capheaton, his grandfather's place in Northumberland. He was happy in both surroundings, and happy, too, at Eton, though his strange elfin appearance, with a great shock of red hair, his entire abstinence from all games, and his addiction to Elizabethan litera- ture isolated him from most of his companions. The late Lord St. Aldwyn thought him a " horrid little boy " ; but Lord Redesdale and others found him a stimulating and attractive companion. Though he was a " freak " and fragile in build, there was a noli nee tangere air about him which kept bullies at a distance. He did not lack courage, and was a bold swimmer and a daring rider and climber. His literary predilections have already been mentioned ; he showed marked, if imitative, talent for classical verse composition and gained a school prize for French and Italian. But he proved unamenable to school discipline, and was removed early in his seventeenth year before reaching the Head-Master's division. Ho had already begun to write poetry, but the only effort that survived was a formal ode celebrating the visit of Queen Victoria. His desire to enter the Cavalry was repressed by his parents, and his career at Oxford, which he entered two and a half years later, was chequered and disastrous, academically speating, though indirectly fraught with influences of the utmost value. He found a lifelong friend and wise adviser in Jewett, lie reckoned amongst his under- graduate friends several of the ablest and most intellectual of his contemporaries, and he made the acquaintance, which soon ripened into intimacy, of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and William Morris. Ho gained the Taylorian scholarship for Italian, but that was his solo academic success. He stood aloof from the ordinary undergraduates, who regarded him as an impossible person and his poetry as ridiculous ; the Master (Scott) and the dons resented his irregu- larities, and even his friends were tired by his extravagant idolatry of Mazzini and Orsini. Mr. Come is inclined to regard his failure to secure the Newdigate by a really fine poem as the culminating stage in his gradual distaste for Oxford. Anyhow, after a few months' absence spent nominally reading history with Stubbs, he returned in a more insubordinate frame of mind than ever, and finally left without a degree, cherishing for the rest of his life an implacable enmity against Oxford. Migrating to London with an allowance * The Boyhood of Algernon Charks Steinburne. Personal Recollections by bin C4MISill, Mrs. Disney Leith, with. Extracts from some of hls private Letters. Loudon: Chatto and Windus. [Gs. net.] of £400 a year, he at once resumed the most friendly relations with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, amongst whom Rossetti, according to Mr. Gosse, exercised a more restraining and stimulating influence upon him than any one else, and made the acquaintance of Monckton Mihaes, who during the next few years was " infinitely serviceable " to Swinburne. Meanwhile his literary baggage was steadily growing. He was already at work on Chastelard, and had written the two dramas, The Queen Mother and Rosamond, published in December, 1860—" of all still-born books the stillest," in his own phrase. He had many other schemes on the stocks in prose and verse, and was happy in his life, spending most of the year away from London in the Isle of Wight or in Northumberland; riding, climbing, and swimming to his heart's content. This happy period, however, was suddenly clouded by a bitter disappointment and a tragedy—the rejection of his suit by the only woman whom he over asked to marry him, and the painfully sudden death of Mrs. Rossetti, which led to the joint housekeeping experiment at Tudor House, Chelsea, with the brothers Rossetti and Meredith. In the same year (1862) Monckton Manes introduced Swinburne to Richard Hutton, with the result that ho became for a while a frequent contributor in proso and verse to the Spectator. His contributions included five long articles on Les Miserables, the later pages of which Mr. Gosse regards as among tho best and sanest criticisms Swinburne ever wrote ; a study of Baudelairo's Figura du Mal ; and in verse Faustinc, A Son3 in Time of Revolution, and The .Sundetv. This con- nexion was severed towards the end of the year. A hostile review of the poems of Meredith, for whom Swinburno took up the cudgels, marked the first stage in the estrangement, but the severance was precipitated by Swinburno's wayward interpretation of the rights of a contributor, and Mr. Gosse evidently, if somewhat reluctantly, admits that no blame attaches to the editor, who had indeed shown a remarkable liberality of view by the admission of articles and poems which must have startled not a few of his readers.
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