La Jeunesse
de Swinburne La Jeunesse de Swinburne. Par Georges Lafourcade. 2 Vols. (Strasbourg : Publications de la Faculte des Lettres L'Universite. 1928.) SWINBURNE was one of those citizens of fairy-land who become legends in their lifetime. His extraordinary physical appearance, his Puck-like whims, sometimes of the most embarrassing sort, his luminous epiphany, a star of the ' first magnitude in the very zenith of the lyrical heavens on the publication of Atalanta, followed by Poems and Ballads, the storm of execration with which the Press greeted the latter, out-howling even the private shrieks of Mrs. Grundy, his savage wit, his lambent genius, his elf-like raptures and 'excitements and excesses, his quarrels, his devotions and, finally, while still in early middle-age, his internment by Mr. Watts-Dunton in a suburban villa, where for thirty years he lived, a prisoner at Putney, with his volcanic fires damped down, yet still fiercely glowing below : these were
more than enough to make him a legendary figure among perilous mists and celestial gleams.
Into these mists and into the quality of his shining M. Georges Lafourcade has cast a lucid .and penetrating ray, and his two volumes on La Jeunesse de Swinburne must receive the warmest welcome from all students and admirers of the poet. M. Lafourcade would be the last to claim that he has written a biography of these thirty years with which he deals : rather, he has worked a mine, and has brought up from the galleries which so industriously follow the lode a mass of valuable ore. It was known that a large qUantity of Swinburne manuscripts were in existence and yet unpub- lished, and from those in the possession of Mr. T. a: Wise,
r,
of the British Museum, and of many private owners, he 'has delved an immense store of enlightening information, pitting it forth in the manner of a scholar rather than a biographer with much discerning criticism, thereby clearing up many of the debated points in the legend. To this legend Swin- burne himself contributed and supplied some completely erroneous matter concerning his life. Sir Edmund Gosse had already told us how he represented himself as being three years younger than he really was, and how he claimed French descent on his father's side, and now M. Lafourcade has similarly disposed of Swinburne's assertion that at the age of eighteen he destroyed all the manuscripts of his youth, by copious extracts from The Unhappy Revenge and other poems which were indubitably written before that date, and in so doing has confirmed the contradictory statement in the dedication to Poems and Ballads, that some of these poems were the work of a boy. Throughout M. Lafourcade deals with his sources most judicially, with the one exception that he seems to treat as reliable Mr. Oscar Browning's truly astonishing recol- lections of the poet at Eton. The veracity of these had already been disproved by Lord Redesdale in an appendix to Sir Edmund Gosse's life of Swinburne, and he pointed out that the famous schoolboy race between Swinburne and Mr. Browning to secure the first copy of Tennyson's Maud could scarcely be accepted, since Maud appeared two years after Swinburne had left Eton.
Swinburne, during the more riotous and lyrical years of his life, was intimate with the members of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. and their circle : the bond between them was no doubt the sympathy of rebels. Like him, though in more decorous fashion, they were in revolt against accepted standards, and one of the few lasting friendships of Swin- burne's life was his sunny and unclouded intimacy with Sir Edward Burne-Jones, to whom he dedicated .Poems and Ballads. The two were in constant companionship and correspondence, and we cannot help bitterly regretting that in 1890 Mime-Jones thought good to burn quantities of SWinbinne's letters. No doubt the poet showed him his 'Worst as well as his best, but so final a proceeding was truly tragical. But it is worth while to record, by way of disposing of the legend that Swinburne was ever a dipsomaniac, that Burne-Jones definitely stated that when Swinburne was already intoxicated with poetry, a half-glass of claret would make him physically tipsy. With others of ' the circle his relations were not so happy : he and Meredith had scant use for each other, to Meredith Swinburne was " not subtle," to Swinburne Meredith was a frank Philistine, and an irreparable rupture occurred when dining together at the Garrick Club. Swinburne asked Meredith why he had sent him £10 for a poem in the 'Fortnightly Review ; Meredith's reply, that this was as much as he got himself for a poem, infUriated Swinburne, who rose and slapped his face. Swinburne, of course, was incomparably the greater poet, but we cannot agree with M. Lafourcade when he says that Lady 11fidhurst; in Swinburne's iomance; A Year's Letters,
is a far finer creation than any character of Meredith's. The tno probably did not meet at all constantly, for Meredith Stated to Holman Hunt that he never slept a night at Tudor House. To the quarrel with Whistler, M. Lafourcade has a delicious contribution, entirely new, which gives Swinburne the last word. Early in their friendship Swinburne had written a noble appreciation of Whistler's " Little White Girl " in Poems and Ballads, but when the storm over that publica- tion burst, 'Whistler made no signal of sympathy. Swinburne resented this : intimacy lapsed into long coolness, and more than twenty years afterwards, at the ill-judged instigation of Watts-Dunton, he violently attacked Whistler in the Fortnightly Review. Whistler replied with his famous letter to the World, in which he called Swinburne " an outsider —Putney," and there, as far as the public ever knew, was the end. But now M. Lafourcade has unearthed Swinburne's reply to this, which for " careful exasperation " beat Whistler off the field :-
" Fly away, butterfly, back to Japan : Tempt not a pinch at the hand of a man, And strive not to sting as you die away. So pert and so painted, so proud and so pretty, To_brush the bright down from your wings were a pity. • Fly away, butterfly, fly away."
The time is past for such reticences as were necessary when Sir Edmund Gosse in 1917 published his life of Swin- burne, and M. Lafourcade is perfectly right in recording cursorily how Swinburne one evening at Tudor House excitedly proclaimed the Marquis de Sade as " the acme and apostle of perfection," and spent many hours in deciphering his abominable manuscripts. Everyone knew that there was this strong vein of Sadism in his early work, but it must also be remembered that Swinburne loved shocking people, and was neither so red a Republican nor so black a moralist as he painted himself. M. Lafourcade shows a just sense of proportion in his brief treatment of such passages, and passes on to a full and reasoned criticism of the genius of the greatest lyrical artist in the English language. Lucid and logical, industrious in research and inspired in selection, his work is a model of the kind he means it to be, a mine of sifted and reliable material, and a huge case-book of psychological observation. It remains for him to extend his work to cover the later years, and, above all, to answer for us that baffling conundrum to which Sir Edmund Gosse hazarded no reply, namely, how Swinburne, rebel in every fibre, submitted himself to and contentedly endured those thirty years of incarceration at Putney. And when M. Lafourcade has done that, is it too much to hope that he will give us a life of Swinburne, built with the materials which he has himself mined, worthy of standing beside the Bonchurch edition of the poet's works ?
E. F. BENSON.
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