Studies in Literature and History
solve them, finds consolation in the 'Higher Pantheism.' They are soon
joined by Matthew Arnold and Clough, who represent the melancholy
resignation of sensitive minds that have discarded the creeds, for
whom the miraculous history of Christianity is an illusion that has
faded into the common light of day. Meredith, poet and novelist, falls
back upon communion with Nature; he preaches the doctrine of duty, of
working while the light lasts; he is a high moralist who accepts
stoically the conclusion that nothing beyond terrestrial existence is
knowable.
Thus Mr. Swinburne's elder contemporaries and precursors in poetry
were all in different modes and fashions optimists; at any rate in
their earlier writings. They stood outside the Churches; dogmatic
beliefs they tacitly put away; they were in sympathy with the
Christian ideal apart from its supernatural element; they professed a
vague trust in an unseen Power, chequered here and there by
intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the
central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry
we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of
love, often passionate, never erotic, no tearing aside of drapery, not
a line to scare modesty. In Tennyson's most impassioned lyrics the
principal figure is the broken-hearted lover, jilted by Cousin Amy,
or caught in the garden with Maud--with intentions strictly honourable
in both cases. The treatment of love by Browning and Meredith is
chiefly psychological; they are usually concerned with the tragic
situations that it can involve, though the comic aspect of sexual
infatuation occasionally provokes cynicism. In politics all these
poets are no friends to democracy or seething radicalism; they adore
liberty, yet they are votaries of law and order; they have a hatred of
misrule, and generally a cheerful confidence in the world's evolution
toward better things. On social ethics the poets of the mid-Victorian
period wrote with philosophic sobriety; they maintained a strict moral
standard. In their wildest emotional flights they abstained from
irreverence or indecorum. They undoubtedly represented the prevailing
cast of thought, the taste and tendencies of the society to which they
belonged; the growing scepticism, the influence on established ideas
of advancing science and philosophy. Literature had been showing
distinct signs of sympathy with these novelties, but in the early
'sixties an open revolt was generally discountenanced.
Mr. Swinburne's first publications were two historic plays, of which
something will be said hereafter. In 1864 he turned suddenly from
modern history to ancient legend for his dramatic subject, when he
aroused immediate attention by _Atalanta in Calydon_, which reproduced
the structure and metrical arrangement of a Greek tragedy. The
dialogue has the purity of tone, the clear-cut concision that belong
to its Hellenic model. At the beginning we have a joyous chant full of
sound and colour, gradually changing into the elegiac strain of
foreboding, the dread of pitiless divinities, the lamentation for the
hero's unmerited fate. The exquisite modulations of the verse, the
splendid choral antiphonies captivated all who were susceptible to the
enchantment of poetry. The delicate adaptation of the English language
to quantitative harmonies in high resonant lyrics showed extraordinary
skill in the difficult enterprise of communicating the charm and
cadences of the antique masterpieces. It is a heroic drama, severe in
style and character as the _Antigone_ of Sophocles. Then in 1865 came
_Chastelard_, conceived and partly written, as Mr. Swinburne has told
us, when he was yet at Oxford, a play in which he turns from the Greek
tragedians to rejoin the historical dramatists. The turn is abrupt,
for no character could have been more alien to the Greek notions of
heroism than that of the love-sick knight who joyfully throws away his
life for an hour in his lady's chamber, tears up the warrant
reprieving him from execution, and accepts death to save Queen Mary's
fragile reputation. But although the keynote of Mr. Swinburne's coming
poetry is struck in _Chastelard_--the overpowering enthralment of
Love, a joy to live and die for--
'The mistress and mother of pleasure,
The one thing as certain as death'--
yet it gave the British public no fair warning of what followed almost
immediately.
Into the midst of a well-regulated, self-respecting modern society,
much moved by Tennyson's 'Idylls,' and altogether sympathetic with the
misfortunes of the blameless king--justly appreciative of the domestic
affection so tenderly portrayed by Coventry Patmore's 'Angel in the
House'--Mr. Swinburne charged impetuously with his _Poems and
Ballads_, waving the banner of revolt against conventional reticence,
kicking over screens and rending drapery--a reckless votary of
Astarte, chanting the 'Laus Veneris' and the worship of 'Dolores, Our
Lady of Pain.' From the calm and bright aspect of paganism he is
turning toward its darker side, to the mystic rites and symbolism
which cloaked the fierce primitive impulses of the natural man. The
burden of these first poems is chiefly the bitter sweetness of love,
the sighs and transports of those who writhe in the embrace of the
dread goddess, known by many names in all lands, or the glory of man's
brief springtide, when the veins are hot, soon to be cooled and
covered by frost and fallen leaves. In the clear ringing stanzas of
the 'Triumph of Time,' who sweeps away the brief summer of lovers'
delight, bringing them to autumnal regrets 'for days that are over and
dreams that are done,' and lastly to wintry oblivion, we have almost a
surfeit of voluptuous melancholy. In this, as in other poems, the sea,
changeful in mood, alternately fair and fierce, a bright smiling
surface covering a thousand graves, fascinating and treacherous, is
the mythical Aphrodite, the fatal woman, merciless to men. All this is
set out in lyrics which amaze the reader by their exuberance of
language, profusion of metaphor, and classic allusion; in rhymes that
strike on the ear like the clashing of cymbals. It is as if Atys and
his wild Maenads were flying through the quiet English woodlands. The
long-drawn, undulating lines, in a quieter strain, of the 'Hymn to
Proserpine' and of 'Hesperia,' with their subtle music, lay the reader
under their charm; but too many of these poems are tainted by a
flavour of morbidity, and the average Englishman is not easily thrown
by the most potent spells into a state of amorous delirium.
It is not surprising, therefore, that this first volume of poems,
saturated with intoxicating Hedonism, had, as Mr. Swinburne wrote in
the Dedicatory Preface appended to the full collection of his works,
'as quaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard
or read of.' The eruption of neo-paganism was sudden and unexpectedly
violent--the rumblings of scientific and philosophic scepticism had
given no warning of a volcanic explosion in this direction. The
current literature of 1865 was much more prudish and less outspoken
than it is at the present day; the gentlemanly licentiousness of
Byron's time had been completely suppressed; the moral tone of the
middle class was still outwardly Puritanic. English folk were by no
means prepared to rebuild the altars of the primitive deities who
presided over man's unquenchable desire, or to be otherwise than
somewhat aghast at the invocations of Astarte or Ashtaroth, or the cry
to Our Lady of Pain, the 'noble and nude and antique.' The result was
that the first edition of the _Poems and Ballads_ was withdrawn,
though they were reissued in the same year, when Mr. Swinburne
published a reply to his critics. Nevertheless, although the graver
and, we may say, the higher judges of what was admissible to a
nineteenth-century poet were entirely against him, it cannot be denied
that the impulsive youth of that generation felt the enchantment of
Mr. Swinburne's intoxicating love-potions--were sorely tempted to dash
down Tennyson on the drawing-room table, and to join the wild dance
round the shrine of Aphrodite Pandemia.
In the _Poems and Ballads_ Mr. Swinburne keeps on some terms, so to
speak, with theology. In the poem entitled 'A Litany' the Lord God
discourses with Biblical sternness to His people, who tremble before
Him, and threatens them with 'the inevitable Hell,' while the people
implore mercy--a strange excursion into the Semitic desert out of the
flowery field of paganism. And another poem is a pathetic rendering of
the story of St. Dorothy, a Christian martyr. It is true that he
looks back with aesthetic regret to the triumph of Christianity over
the picturesque polytheism, and that perhaps the finest poem in this
volume is the 'Hymn to Proserpine,' where a votary of the ancient
divinities confesses sorrowfully that a new and austere faith has
triumphed, but predicts that its kingdom will not last, will decline
and fall like the empire of the elder gods--
'All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and
be past;
Ye are gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you
at last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes
of things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you
for kings.'
The 'Hymn to Proserpine' is a fine conception of the champion of a
lost cause standing unmoved among the ruins of his Pantheon. But the
quiet dignity of his attitude is marred by the lines in which the
votary of fair forms turns with loathing from the new faith which has
conquered by the blood and agony of saints and martyrs. The violent
invective is like a red streak across the canvas of a picturesque and
highly imaginative composition. Yet if he had been reminded that
Lucretius, standing in the midst of paganism, sternly denounced the
evils and cruelties of religion, Mr. Swinburne would probably have
replied that the Roman poet, could he have been born again fourteen or
fifteen centuries later in his native country, would have found these
evils enormously increased, and that the sacrifice of Iphigenia in
Aulis was as nothing to the hecatombs of the Inquisition.
His intense imagination summons up a bright and luxurious vision of
the pre-Christian civilisation in Greece and Rome, as yet little
affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in
contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old
nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts,
by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal
with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed
animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well to
follow the example, in this respect, of these great masters of his own
art; since his early defects and excesses are mainly due to his having
missed their lesson by disregarding the limitations which they
scrupulously observed.
When he reissued the _Poems and Ballads_, Mr. Swinburne took occasion,
as we have said, to reply, in a pamphlet, to the strictures and strong
protests which they had aroused. He was at some trouble to discover
the passages or phrases 'that had drawn down such sudden thunder from
the serene heavens of public virtue': he was comically puzzled to
comprehend why the reviewers were scandalised. He trampled with
sarcasm and scorn upon canting critics, and retorted that the prurient
prudery of their own minds suggested the impurities which they found
in works of pure art. There is nothing, he insists, lovelier, as there
is nothing more famous in later Hellenic art, than the statue of
Hermaphroditus, yet his translation of a sculptured poem into written