THE LIFE OF SWINBURNE.* [CONCLVD1EG NOTICE.]
Taman Swinburne outlived man's allotted span, his health until middle age was a constant source of anxiety to his family and friends. Ho was liable to sudden and alarming seizures of an epi- leptiform nature, from which, however, ho recovered with magical rapidity. Ho never could live long in London without a break- down, and he was constantly on the move in these years, carried off by his family to recruit in Northumberland, or at his father's new home near Henley, or abroad. Atalanta in Calydon, his first resonnding success, was the fruit of a visit to Cornwall, where he spent some time at Tintagel in the serene companionship of his friend Inchbold, the artist, and a winter in the Isle of Wight, where he stayed with his cousins tho Cordons. On the completion of his drama in February, 1864, he joined his family at Geneva, and soon after, armed with an introduction from Monekton Mines, called on Lander at Florence. This episode, which began disas- trously owing to Swinburno's impulsiveness but ended in mutual transports, is described with considerable humour by Mr. Gosse- Lander insisted on commemorating the event by presenting his admirer with what he believed to be a Correggio, but which was in reality a worthless daub. At Florence he found congenial companions in Mrs. Gaskell and Kirkup, the friend of Blake ; but Siena was the city which appealed to him most of all. On his return to England the Chelsea joint-housekeeping experiment broke up in Pandemonium, and his friendship with Meredith, never fully reciprocated, turned to semi-estrangement for many years. Ho regained health and tranquillity with Jewett in an autumn holiday at Ksauince Cove ; and in 1865 Atalanta was greeted with a chorus of acclamation, a result due primarily to the intrinsic beauty of what is the most popular of all his works, but also pre- pared and assisted by Lord Houghton's careful chaperonage. Mr. 03330 has some enlightening comments on Houghton's methods, notably his adroit enlistment of the interest of Thirlwall, who curiously misread the theological purport of the poem. Mr. Gosse sums up the controversial tendency of Swinburne's poetry in regard to religion in a neat epigram : "The poet is not a lotus-eater who has never known the Gospel, but an evangelist turned inside out." It is only right to say that a different and far gentler attitude to religion is revealed in the letters to his mother printed in Mrs. Disney Leith's volume.t The years 180 and 16366 brought Swinburno to the zenith of his fame, popularity, and notoriety. Chasidard, on which he had been engaged for seven years, was ready for the press in July, 1865, and in the same year he met and fell under the spell of Richard Burton. On this friendship Mr. Gosse comments in no uncertain terms, as an association which was not good for Swinburne, intellect- ually or physically. "Burton, a giant of endurance, and possessed at times with a kind of Dionysiac frenzy, was no fortunate company for a nervous and high-spirited man like Swinburne." But even Burton had doubts whether the British public would tolerate the paganisan of Poems and Ballads. The campaign of preparation was conducted by Lord Houghton with remarkable skill ; councils of war were held at which various literary experts were consulted, and Houghton, as chairman of the Literary Fund dinner, brought off a great coup by insisting that Swinburno should be chosen to reply for literature with Charles Kingsley. The speech—Swinburne's solitary effort in public—was a failtirelrem its monotonous delivery, but, as containing his literary creed, it is an interesting document. A couple of months later Poems and Ballads—for a parallel to which one has to go back to Byron's Don Juan—was exploded On the public. The genius of the writer was beyond doubt, but as Swinburne's own father said of him : "God has endowed my son with genius, but Ho has not vouchsafed to grant him sell-control." His friends defended him gallantly, but the wisest and sanest of them deplored the excesses which marred his work ; his whole-hearted apologists did not carry such heavy guns as those who denounced it, and it is at least significant that the author of the moat scarifying of all the reviews, who never recanted the censure of Poems and
Ballads, was a great admirer of the author, and later on became one -of his closest friends and supporters. Swinburne published a vigorous defence, and threatened further onslaughts on the dove- cotes of propriety, but failed to make good his threat. The exotic morality of Chastelard was not calculated to allay the resentment
• The Life of 41 it Charles Swinburne. By Edmund Costs, C.B. With Portraits and Il1usttalonL London : Marmillan and Co. (10s. (M. net.) t The Boyhood of Akerson Charles Becitiburae. Personal Recollections by his Cousin, Mrs. Disney Leith, with Extracts from semi of his private Lcttcrs. London : Chatto and Mud's. [es. uct.1 excited by Poems and Beads ; but Cdhastdarcf, as we have' seen, was not a manifesto of impenitence; it belonged to tile same period as the incriminated lyrics and had been completed a year before they appeared. Anyhow, Mr. Gesso has no doubt of the up- setting effect of the mingled reception of Poems and Ballads. Swin. ,burne had courage, but neither fortitude nor equanimity, and his biographer salutes as a happy thought Jowett's encouragement of his poetical campaign on behalf of Italy's struggle for independence as a diversion of his energies into nobler channels. Swinburne's enthusiasm was farther stimulated by his personal relations Stith Mazzini,tor whom he conceived an admiration equal to that which he felt for Hugo. He habitually alludes to him in his letters as his "chief," and regarded him with a reverence which—as also with Hugo—was not in the least impaired by their radical divergence on religious questions. The poems and rhapsodies of the next few years, collected in 1871 in the Songs before Sunrise, were largely devoted to the glorification of republican ideals, treated sometimes in a mystical or philosophical vein, sometimes in the form of fierce personal attacks on Louis Napoleon. Swinburno regarded this volume, Mr. Gesso assures us, as containing "the most intimate, the most sincere, and the most important of all his writings," and Mr. Gosse himself pronounces it as "probably—from a point of view detached from the attractiveness of the subject—Swinburne's cardinal and crowning work." He finds him hero at the high-water mark of his achievement as a lyrist. "His muse had been 'con. vertod ' ; it was no longer in the service of sensual pleasure and of sloth ; it repudiated the gardens of Artaid.a." But he points out that though generous, solemn, and elevated in tone, these visions of "the serene Republic of a world made white" were pre- mature and chimerical, and that "at the very outset the Franco- German War disturbed the scheme of the poet and made bankrupt his golden rapture."
Swinburno was too highly charged with emotion to be judicial and his politics wore puzzling. His whito-hot Republicanism was compatible with a lifelong enthusiasm for Mary Queen of Scots;• "there is not," observes Mr. Gesso, "in all the voluminous writings of Swinburno a single line in which the English constitution or the Monarchy is attacked. . . . Ho adored his own country to the verge of Jingoism, and resented with what appeared to Strangers incon- sistent violence the slightest criticism of Queen Victoria." In what Mr. Gosse calls "the middle years "-1870-1879—his greatest literary achievement was Bothwell, the huge drama in which ho brought his studies of Mary Queen of Scots to their culminating point. The strange dualism of sweetness and ferocity became more than ever noticeable in these years, and led to many estrange- ments, ruptures, and controversies. In London his habits were extravagant and disconcerting, in the country he was "a perfectly courteous little gentleman." But while many of his frienslehipa cooled, Jewett still continued to exorcise a "serenely beneficial influence," and "in their long walks and talks—at Oxford, in Scot- land, or in Cornwall—all came out that was best in this cddly assorted pair." In 1872 he mado the acquaintance of Theodore Watts, and on the advice of Madox Brown placed his business in the "faithful and competent hands" of that devoted friend. Ho had already become a frequent contributor to the Fortnightly Review, then edited by Mr. John Morley, and was immersed in his studies' of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, which occupied him intermittently to the close of his life. To this period also belong his Erechtheus and his controversial Note on Charlotte Bronti- aimed at undermining George Eliot's reputation quite as much as at exalting that of the author of Jane Eyre. His second series of Poems and Ballads in 1878, if marked by less ardour and passion than its predecessor, shows his genius for friendship in a most engaging guise and contains some of his finest elegiac verse. But his health grow steadily worse, until, "when he seemed actually at the gates of death [in September, 1879]. Theodore Watts, with the approval of the distressed and bewildered Lady Jane Swinburne, arrived early one morning and carried the poet by force to his own rooms" close by, and thence soon after to Putney. The dominating influence exerted by Watts was resented by some of the poet's friends, but his devoted if exacting care gave Swinburne a new and long lease of life. Mr. Gosse describes these thirty years in a felicitous phrase as "the happy and shrouded remainder of Swinburne's life." He was relieved of all business worries, and divided his days with an almost mechanical precision between exercise and study. "His health became perfect ; he developed into a sturdy • little old man, without an ache or pain ; and he who had suffered so long in London from absence of appetite and insomnia, for the last thirty years of his life ate like a caterpillar and slept like a dor- mouse." His industry was amazing, and book after book flowed from his pen, ranging from Mary Stuart and his epic of Tristram of ,Lyonesse to the flepkilogia,-a budget of parodies of his contempor- aries. Nor did the placidity of his surroundings prevent him from plunging at times into ferocious controversy, witness the unedifying contest in Billingagate with Furnivall, the onslaught on the House of Lords d propos of Tennyson's peetage, and the attacks on Emerson, 'Whistler, and Whitman. Mr. Gosse notes a progressive exaggera- tion-of the defects of his qualities in his latter work-, but makes an exception in favour of The Tale of Bolen, which is certainly a won- derfulenetrio tour dejorce and something more. Growing deafness,
from which he had long suffered, cut him off from conversation, and he lived more and more in the company of his hooks. The death of his mother in 1896, which overwhelmed him with grief, was tbe last crisis of his life, and though he lived for thirteen years more, wrote a good many poems, and published •a few more books, "it could hardly be said that ho held a place any longer in the ordinary world around him." He recovered from a severe illness in 1903, and enjoyed good health until a fortnight before his death on April 1003, 1909.
Mrs. Disney Leith's reminiscences of Swinburne in boyhood, end the letters to his mother and sisters extending over a period of nearly fifty years, form a moat valuable supplement, and to a certain extent a corrective, to Mr. Geese's Memoir. To take ono example, Mr. (lease's positive statement that Swinburne had no gift or appre- ciation for music, was totally devoid of ear, and was driven "wild with petulance and impatience" when listening to" a performance on any instrument," is hard to reconcile with his later reference to the delight he took in Mrs. Sartorisa singing, still harder with the enthusiasm he expresses for the music of Handel when played on the organ—" I can hardly belave for delight at some of the choruses," he writes to his eldest sister in 1863—or his tribute to the pre- eminence of German music—" the one good thing the German can do "—in the letter to his mother in the early "seventies." But these and other discrepancies—such as the dates of his Oxford career (pp. 52-57), which cannot be squared with those given in Mr. Gosse's Life—are minor matters. In Mrs. Disney Leith's pages we see the best of Swinburne the man the charming playmate, the lover of animals, of nonsense; and above all of children, the perfect kinsman and the devoted son. "The greatest and most Precious compliment " he ever received for any of his writings was when his father told him "of the unbroken interest with which he had read right through my huge play of Bothwell." His veneration for his mother runs through every one of his letters to her. When Mazzipi, the man whom he "most loved and honoured of all men on earth," wrote him a letter of thanks, Swinburne told him that he felt that " there was but one person on earth to turn to and tell of this great honour and delight, and that of course was ray mother." And in relating the incident to his mother he adds : "I think it pleased him. I know he was very fond of his mother. But though she had agreater and better son, I don't. think she had one more fond of her." To him the divinest of all divine words was that "of such is the Kingdom of Heaven," and nothing on earth—" except ago in its brightest beauty of goodness and sweetness and kindness "—was so adorable as a little child. Mrs. Disney Leith gives many delightful illustrations of hia "love of kindred and of horse," as shown in his punctilious remembrance of birthdays and family anniversaries and in many other quaint and engaging ways, of his tender-hearted- nese and courtesy and condescension, the reverence he displayed for goodness, innocence, and faith. Hero, in fine, we have, not the eccentric, wayward genius, but "the perfectly courteous little gentleman" of whom his cousin writes : "To us who know him he will ever be less the brilliant and epoch-making genius than the affectionate, loyal-hearted kinsman whom to know was to love."
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