And Even Now
permit to visit him--I have the pleasantest, most sacred memories. His
was a wonderfully vivid and intense personality. The head was beautiful,
perfectly conic in form. The eyes were like two revolving lamps, set
very close together. The smile was haunting. There was a touch of
old-world courtesy in the repression of the evident impulse to spring at
one’s throat. The voice had notes that recalled M. Mounet-Sully’s in
the later and more important passages of Oedipe Roi. I remember that
he always spoke with the greatest contempt of Mr. and Mrs. Pegaway’s
translations. He likened them to--but enough! His boom is not yet at the
full. A few weeks hence I shall be able to command an even higher price
than I could now for my ‘Talks with Kolniyatsch.’
No. 2. THE PINES, 1914
[Early in the year 1914 Mr. Edmund Gosse told me he was asking certain
of his friends to write for him a few words apiece in description of
Swinburne as they had known or seen him at one time or another; and
he was so good as to wish to include in this gathering a few words by
myself. I found it hard to be brief without seeming irreverent. I
failed in the attempt to make of my subject a snapshot that was not a
grotesque. So I took refuge in an ampler scope. I wrote a reminiscential
essay. From that essay I made an extract, which I gave to Mr. Gosse.
From that extract he made a quotation in his enchanting biography. The
words quoted by him reappear here in the midst of the whole essay as
I wrote it. I dare not hope they are unashamed of their humble
surroundings.--M. B.]
In my youth the suburbs were rather looked down on--I never quite knew
why. It was held anomalous, and a matter for merriment, that Swinburne
lived in one of them. For my part, had I known as a fact that Catullus
was still alive, I should have been as ready to imagine him living in
Putney as elsewhere. The marvel would have been merely that he lived.
And Swinburne’s survival struck as surely as could his have struck in me
the chord of wonder.
Not, of course, that he had achieved a feat of longevity. He was
far from the Psalmist’s limit. Nor was he one of those men whom one
associates with the era in which they happened to be young. Indeed, if
there was one man belonging less than any other to Mid-Victorian days,
Swinburne was that man. But by the calendar it was in those days that he
had blazed--blazed forth with so unexampled a suddenness of splendour;
and in the light of that conflagration all that he had since done, much
and magnificent though this was, paled. The essential Swinburne was
still the earliest. He was and would always be the flammiferous boy of
the dim past--a legendary creature, sole kin to the phoenix. It had been
impossible that he should ever surpass himself in the artistry that
was from the outset his; impossible that he should bring forth rhythms
lovelier and greater than those early rhythms, or exercise over them a
mastery more than--absolute. Also, it had been impossible that the first
wild ardour of spirit should abide unsinkingly in him. Youth goes. And
there was not in Swinburne that basis on which a man may in his maturity
so build as to make good, in some degree, the loss of what is gone.
He was not a thinker: his mind rose ever away from reason to rhapsody;
neither was he human. He was a king crowned but not throned. He was
a singing bird that could build no nest. He was a youth who could
not afford to age. Had he died young, literature would have lost many
glories; but none so great as the glories he had already given, nor any
such as we should fondly imagine ourselves bereft of by his early death.
A great part of Keats’ fame rests on our assumption of what he would
have done. But--even granting that Keats may have had in him more than
had Swinburne of stuff for development--I believe that had he lived on
we should think of him as author of the poems that in fact we know. Not
philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is
the primal thing in poetry. Ideas, and flesh and blood, are but reserves
to be brought up when the poet’s youth is going. When the bird can no
longer sing in flight, let the nest be ready. After the king has dazzled
us with his crown, let him have something to sit down on. But the
session on throne or in nest is not the divine period. Had Swinburne’s
genius been of the kind that solidifies, he would yet at the close of
the nineteenth century have been for us young men virtually--though not
so definitely as in fact he was--the writer of ‘Atalanta in Calydon’ and
of ‘Poems and Ballads.’
Tennyson’s death in ‘98 had not taken us at all by surprise. We had
been fully aware that he was alive. He had always been careful to keep
himself abreast of the times. Anything that came along--the Nebular
Hypothesis at one moment, the Imperial Institute at another--won mention
from his Muse. He had husbanded for his old age that which he had long
ago inherited: middle age. If in our mourning for him there really was
any tincture of surprise, this was due to merely the vague sense that
he had in the fullness of time died rather prematurely: his middle-age
might have been expected to go on flourishing for ever. But assuredly
Tennyson dead laid no such strain on our fancy as Swinburne living.
It is true that Swinburne did, from time to time, take public notice
of current affairs; but what notice he took did but seem to mark his
remoteness from them, from us. The Boers, I remember, were the theme of
a sonnet which embarrassed even their angriest enemies in our midst.
He likened them, if I remember rightly, to ‘hell-hounds foaming at the
jaws.’ This was by some people taken as a sign that he had fallen away
from that high generosity of spirit which had once been his. To me it
meant merely that he thought of poor little England writhing under the
heel of an alien despotism, just as, in the days when he really was
interested in such matters, poor little Italy had writhen. I suspect,
too, that the first impulse to write about the Boers came not from the
Muse within, but from Theodore Watts-Dunton without.... ‘Now, Algernon,
we’re at war, you know--at war with the Boers. I don’t want to bother
you at all, but I do think, my dear old friend, you oughtn’t to let slip
this opportunity of,’ etc., etc.
Some such hortation is easily imaginable by any one who saw the two
old friends together. The first time I had this honour, this sight for
lasting and affectionate memory, must have been in the Spring of ‘99. In
those days Theodore Watts (he had but recently taken on the Dunton) was
still something of a gad-about. I had met him here and there, he had
said in his stentorian tones pleasant things to me about my writing, I
sent him a new little book of mine, and in acknowledging this he asked
me to come down to Putney and ‘have luncheon and meet Swinburne.’ Meet
Catullus!
On the day appointed ‘I came as one whose feet half linger.’ It is but
a few steps from the railway-station in Putney High Street to No. 2.
The Pines. I had expected a greater distance to the sanctuary--a walk
in which to compose my mind and prepare myself for initiation. I laid
my hand irresolutely against the gate of the bleak trim front-garden, I
withdrew my hand, I went away. Out here were all the aspects of common
modern life. In there was Swinburne. A butcher-boy went by, whistling.
He was not going to see Swinburne. He could afford to whistle. I pursued
my dilatory course up the slope of Putney, but at length it occurred
to me that unpunctuality would after all be an imperfect expression of
reverence, and I retraced my footsteps.
No. 2--prosaic inscription! But as that front-door closed behind me I
had the instant sense of having slipped away from the harsh light of the
ordinary and contemporary into the dimness of an odd, august past. Here,
in this dark hall, the past was the present. Here loomed vivid and vital
on the walls those women of Rossetti whom I had known but as shades.
Familiar to me in small reproductions by photogravure, here they
themselves were, life-sized, ‘with curled-up lips and amorous hair’ done
in the original warm crayon, all of them intently looking down on me
while I took off my overcoat--all wondering who was this intruder
from posterity. That they hung in the hall, evidently no more than an
overflow, was an earnest of packed plenitude within. The room I was
ushered into was a back-room, a dining-room, looking on to a good
garden. It was, in form and ‘fixtures,’ an inalienably Mid-Victorian
room, and held its stolid own in the riot of Rossettis. Its proportions,
its window-sash bisecting the view of garden, its folding-doors (through
which I heard the voice of Watts-Dunton booming mysteriously in the
front room), its mantel-piece, its gas-brackets, all proclaimed that
nothing ever would seduce them from their allegiance to Martin Tupper.
‘Nor me from mine,’ said the sturdy cruet-stand on the long expanse
of table-cloth. The voice of Watts-Dunton ceased suddenly, and a few
moments later its owner appeared. He had been dictating, he explained.
‘A great deal of work on hand just now--a great deal of work.’... I
remember that on my subsequent visits he was always, at the moment of
my arrival, dictating, and always greeted me with that phrase, ‘A great
deal of work on hand just now.’ I used to wonder what work it was, for
he published little enough. But I never ventured to inquire, and indeed
rather cherished the mystery: it was a part of the dear little old
man; it went with the something gnome-like about his swarthiness and
chubbiness--went with the shaggy hair that fell over the collar of his
eternally crumpled frock-coat, the shaggy eyebrows that overhung his
bright little brown eyes, the shaggy moustache that hid his small round
chin. It was a mystery inherent in the richly-laden atmosphere of The
Pines....
While I stood talking to Watts-Dunton--talking as loudly as he, for he
was very deaf--I enjoyed the thrill of suspense in watching the door
through which would appear--Swinburne. I asked after Mr. Swinburne’s
health. Watts-Dunton said it was very good: ‘He always goes out for his
long walk in the morning--wonderfully active. Active in mind, too. But
I’m afraid you won’t be able to get into touch with him. He’s almost
stone-deaf, poor fellow--almost stone-deaf now.’ He changed the subject,
and I felt I must be careful not to seem interested in Swinburne
exclusively. I spoke of ‘Aylwin.’ The parlourmaid brought in the hot
dishes. The great moment was at hand.
Nor was I disappointed. Swinburne’s entry was for me a great moment.
Here, suddenly visible in the flesh, was the legendary being and divine
singer. Here he was, shutting the door behind him as might anybody else,
and advancing--a strange small figure in grey, having an air at once
noble and roguish, proud and skittish. My name was roared to him. In
shaking his hand, I bowed low, of course--a bow de coeur; and he, in the
old aristocratic manner, bowed equally low, but with such swiftness that
we narrowly escaped concussion. You do not usually associate a man of
genius, when you see one, with any social class; and, Swinburne being
of an aspect so unrelated as it was to any species of human kind, I
wondered the more that almost the first impression he made on me, or
would make on any one, was that of a very great gentleman indeed. Not of
an old gentleman, either. Sparse and straggling though the grey hair
was that fringed the immense pale dome of his head, and venerably
haloed though he was for me by his greatness, there was yet about him
something--boyish? girlish? childish, rather; something of a beautifully
well-bred child. But he had the eyes of a god, and the smile of an elf.
In figure, at first glance, he seemed almost fat; but this was merely