Studies in Literature and History
verse has given offence! One might reply that a subject which is
irreproachable, on the score of purity, in cold marble, may take a
very different colour when it is dilated upon in burning verse.
The controversy had its humorous side; but we have no intention of
stirring up again the smoke and fire of battles fought long ago. Mr.
Swinburne held his ground defiantly, and the appearance of _Songs and
Ballads_, published in 1871, showed no signs of contrition, or of
concession to inveterate prejudices. In the course of the intervening
five years the empire of Napoleon III. had fallen with a mighty
crash; Italy had been united under one Italian dynasty; Garibaldi had
become famous, and the Papal States had been absorbed into the Italian
kingdom. This volume, which was dedicated to Joseph Mazzini, shows the
ardent enthusiasm for the triumph of liberty, intellectual and
political, which runs through all Mr. Swinburne's poetry. The 'Song of
the Standard,' the 'Halt before Rome,' the 'Marching Song,' the
'Insurrection of Candia,' are poems that reflect current events; and
the 'Litany of Nations' is the national anthem of peoples striving for
freedom. But his verse rises to its highest pitch of exultation in the
glorification of emancipation of Man. The final line of the 'Hymn to
Man' is
'Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things';
and in one stanza of 'Hertha' is condensed all the wild declamation
against deities and despots that pervades his poetry at this stage,
with his joy in the deification of humanity:
'A creed is a rod,
And a crown is of night;
But this thing is God,
To be man with thy might,
To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life
As the light.'
There are no love-lyrics in this volume. He now stands forth as the
uncompromising enemy of established religions, a fierce assailant of
tyrannies, spiritual or temporal, an iconoclast who denounces churches
and tabernacles, priests and kings, the Roman Pope and the Jewish
Jehovah; one for whom the Papacy is, as it was to Hobbes, the Kingdom
of Darkness, its record blotted with tears and stained with blood, the
'grey spouse of Satan,' as he styled her in a later poem, sitting by a
fire that is fed with the bones of her victims. From this time
forward he declares open war upon theology, and even upon Theism; he
is the mortal foe of bigots and tyrants; his praise is for Giordano
Bruno, for Pelagius the British monk, born by the northern sea; for
Voltaire, for all who have fought and suffered in the cause of
intellectual emancipation. The prevailing religious beliefs seem to
him relics of mediaeval superstition, sophistry, and metaphysic--he
contrasts them with the bright and free nature worship of the old
world; he is a bitter enemy of the lofty spiritualism, the mighty
world-religion, before which the fair humanities of the _juventus
mundi_ had faded away. His delight is in the virile qualities of the
earlier civilisations, the patriotism, the heroic temper, the ardour
for civic liberties, the Hellenic delight in noble form and in
physical beauty. He is fretted by the restraint which Christian
authority imposes upon the unruly affections of sinful men; he scorns
the terrors of judgment to come, the prostration of the multitude
before the threat of eternal punishment, and the promise of celestial
recompense for terrestrial misery. Death is the 'sleep eternal in an
eternal night'; and the one thing as certain as death is pleasure. He
is the prophet of Hedonism; he is for giving the passions a loose
rein, for drinking the wine of rapture to the lees before we lie
'Deep in dim death, beneath the grass
Where no thought stings.'
Nevertheless, as the years go on, the note of regret and despair
quiets down, the restless spirit of the poet is subdued to the calmer
influences of nature; the charm of scenery, the association of places
with memories more frequently bring softer inspirations. In his
earlier poems his imaginative power found full scope in rendering the
impressions of natural beauty, the glory of elemental strife; as in
the 'Songs of the Four Seasons,' where the approach of a storm from
the sea is likened to a descent of the Norse pirates on to the
peaceful coast, and the metaphor produces a spirited picture:
'As men's cheeks faded
On shores invaded
When shorewards waded
The lords of fight;
When churl and craven
Saw hard on haven
The wide-winged raven
At mainmast height;
When monks affrighted
To windward sighted
The birds full-flighted
Of swift sea-kings;
So earth turns paler
When Storm the sailor
Steers in with a roar in the race of his wings.'
But more frequently the outlook on sea and land induces reverie, vague
yearnings, retrospective sadness, and, like all true artists, he
transposes into the landscape his own personal emotions, what he sees,
feels, and remembers. In the poem of 'Hesperia' the view of the sunset
over the sea stirs tender memories; the 'deep-tide wind blowing in
with the water' seems to be wafting his absent love back to him, and
his heart floats out toward her 'as the refluent seaweed moves in the
languid exuberant stream.' In such pieces the fierce amorous obsession
has been shaken off; he is no longer vexed by Shakespeare's[32]
hyperbolic fiend, his mood is comparatively gentle and pathetic, as in
the beautiful verses of 'A Forsaken Garden,' where his consummate
faculty of metrical expression, wherein sense and sound are matched
and inseparable, reaches, perhaps, its highest watermark:
'Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song;
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.'
In the series of landscape sketches grouped under the title of _A
Midsummer Holiday_, published nearly twenty years after the _Poems and
Ballads_, the treatment of his subject has become more impersonal. The
impression or idea is still coloured by transmission through the
spectator's mind. Mr. Swinburne has himself observed, very truly, that
'mere descriptive poetry of the prepense and formal kind is
exceptionally liable to incur and to deserve the charge of dulness:
it is unnecessary to emphasise or obtrude the personal note, the
presence or emotion of a spectator, but it is necessary to make it
felt and keep it perceptible if the poem is to have life in it or
even a right to live.'[33]
This is the right doctrine, and we may add that it is applicable as a
criticism to some of his earlier descriptive pieces, where the intense
personal feeling is somewhat too intense and disproportionate; so that
a reader gifted with less keenness of sensibility is disconcerted by
insistence on effusive moods with which he cannot be expected to be in
full sympathy. Mr. Swinburne might reply that for such dullards he
does not write; but the finest wines are too heady for a morning's
draught. In his more mature poems he appears to have deliberately held
back what may be termed the subjective emotion; the landscapes are no
longer peopled by figures or memories of the past; the thoughts which
they suggest are such as find response in all minds that are in accord
with the deeper and more subtle relations of human life to its
environment. He himself has indeed told us[34] that to many of his
studies of English land and sea no intimacy of years and no
association with the past has given any colour of emotion, that only
so much of the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring
these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive
that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the
spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or
woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the
sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The _Midsummer Holiday_ group
has two pictures of sweet homeliness--'The Mill Garden' and 'On a
Country Road'--the harvest of a quiet eye (in Wordsworth's phrase),
such as a rambling artist might jot down in his travelling sketch
book, of value the more remarkable because they are not in Mr.
Swinburne's usual manner. They give relief to the breadth and grandeur
of the other descriptions of the ocean, the crags, and the storms. For
to Swinburne, as to all the romantic English poets, the ocean stream
which encircles their island is an inexhaustible source of delight and
pride; it is our ever present defence in time of trouble; the fountain
of our country's wealth and honour; it is our traditional battlefield;
the winds and the waves are the breath and the force of our national
being. And through Mr. Swinburne's poetry runs a vein of undiluted
love for his native land. In his poem 'On the South Coast' he looks
out from 'the green, smooth-swelling downs' over the broad blue water,
and his thought is expressed in its final stanza:
Fair and dear is the land's face here, and fair man's work as a
man's may be:
Dear and fair as the sunbright air is here the record that speaks
him free;
Free by birth of a sacred earth, and regent ever of all the sea.'
The 'Autumn Vision' is an ode to the south-west wind, which has so
often filled the sails of the English warships:
'Wind beloved of earth and sky and sea beyond all winds that blow,
Wind whose might in fight was England's on her mightiest warrior
day,
South-west wind, whose breath for her was life, and fire to scourge
her foe,
Steel to smite and death to drive him down an unreturning way,
Well-beloved and welcome, sounding all the clarions of the sky,
Rolling all the marshalled waters toward the charge that storms
the shore.'
Charles Kingsley, like a hardy Norseman, preferred the north-east
gale. To him the south-west wind is
'The ladies' breeze,
Bringing back their lovers
Out of all the seas,'
while Mr. Swinburne hears in the rushing south-western gale
'the sound of wings gigantic,
Wings whose measure is the measure of the measureless Atlantic,'
and, after the storm,
'The grim sea swell, grey, sleepless and sad as a soul estranged.'
'A Swimmer's Dream' gives us the poetry of floating on the slow roll
of the waves, some cloudy November morning.
'Dawn is dim on the dark soft water,
Soft and passionate, dark and sweet.'
'Loch Torridon' preserves the charm of what might be a landlocked
lake, if it were not that the rippling tide flows in by an almost
invisible inlet from the sea. From his earliest to his latest poems
the magic of nature's changing aspects fascinates him; they inspire
him with a kind of ecstasy that finds utterance in the variety of his
verse, which reflects all the lights and shades of earth, sea, and
atmosphere. One may remark, by the way, that in proportion as his
poetic strength matures, the pagan gods and goddesses, who disported
themselves so freely in his juvenile verse, visit him much more
rarely; his imagery draws much less profusely upon the classic
mythology for symbols and figures of divinities whose diaphanous robes
are ill suited to our northern climate and Puritanic traditions, in
the wolds and forests once sacred to Thor and Woden.
* * * * *
It will be admitted by Mr. Swinburne's least indulgent critics that
his poetry displays throughout a marvellous power of execution. He
runs over all the lyrical and elegiac chords with unabated facility;