Studies in Literature and History
with much pity for him. In the long historical drama of _Bothwell_,
which has twenty-one scenes in its two acts, we have spirited
portraits of the fierce nobles who surrounded Mary Stuart during her
brief and distracted reign. The love passages are pauses in a course
of violent action, the assassination of Rizzio, the murder of Darnley
are not overcoloured melodramatically, and the scenes in and about the
Kirk of Field are darkened with the shadow of Darnley's imminent fate.
But Darnley's dream, presaging his coming doom, inevitably recalls the
dream of Clarence, and cannot but suffer from the reminiscence. We
might have something to say on the metrical construction of
Swinburne's blank verse, for he shares with Tennyson, though in a
minor degree, the distinction of having enlarged its scope and varied
its measure. But the subject would demand careful comparative
examination and analysis of different styles, such as is to be read,
with profit to all students of the art poetic, in Mr. J. B. Mayor's
_Chapters on English Metres_.
It will be understood that this article attempts no more than to
review the salient characteristics of Mr. Swinburne's poetry, to
indicate in some degree their connexion and development. It cannot but
fall far short, obviously, of being a comprehensive survey of his
contributions to English literature. We have made no reference, for
lack of space, to his treatment of chivalrous romance in _Tristram of
Lyonesse_, which Mr. Swinburne has rightly called 'the deathless
legend,' though, since its fascination has made it a subject for three
other contemporary poets, a comparison of their diverse manners of
handling the story would be interesting. It is with regret that we
have been compelled, also, to refrain from any adequate notice of Mr.
Swinburne's prose writings, for in regard to the poetry of his own
period the dissertations and judgments of one who combines high
imaginative faculty with scientific mastery of the metrical art must
have special value. Of the ordinary untrained criticism, the 'chorus
of indolent reviewers,' to use Tennyson's phrase, he is, we think, too
impatient. From a passage in his Dedicatory Epistle we gather that
some of the tribe have ventured so far as to insinuate that poetry
ought not to become a mere musical exercise. Mr. Swinburne's rejoinder
is that
'except to such ears as should always be closed against poetry,
there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient fulness
and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of
thought, to abide the analysis of any other than the purblind
scrutiny of prepossession or the squint-eyed inspection of
malignity.'
Apart from the wrathful form, the substance of what is here said
merits consideration, for undoubtedly the most musical of our poets,
from Shakespeare and Milton to Coleridge and Shelley, are those whose
verse has embodied the richest thought and has been instinct with the
deeper emotions. We must muster up courage to remark, nevertheless,
that while in Mr. Swinburne's finest poems the musical setting
accompanies and illuminates the thought or feeling, in some others the
underlying idea is too unsubstantial; its real presence is only
visible to the eye of implicit faith. Toward his fellow poets, his
equals and contemporaries, Mr. Swinburne's attitude is that of
generous enthusiasm, not excluding outspoken, yet courteous,
indication of defects, as may be seen in the essay[37] on Matthew
Arnold's _New Poems_, which is full of important observations on
poetry in general, beside some well-deserved strictures on Arnold's
shortcomings, in criticism as well as in verse. For Victor Hugo he has
nothing but panegyric. His articles on Byron and Coleridge are
luminous appreciations of the very diverse excellences belonging to
two illustrious predecessors; while in his _Notes on the Text of
Shelley_, high-soaring and incomparable, an unlucky emendation of a
line in 'The Skylark--the insertion of a superfluous word
conjecturally--by an editor whose work he commends on the whole,
provokes him to sheer exasperation:
'For the conception of this atrocity the editor is not responsible;
for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial fire would
be insufficient expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and
desperate head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of
Shelley with this damnable corruption.'
'Fas est et ab hoste doceri.' Mr. Swinburne has borrowed the style of
sacerdotal anathema from his mortal enemies, and pronounces it no less
inexorably. But these Notes were written nigh forty years ago, so we
may hope that by this time he has cast out, or at least subdued by
diligent exorcism, that same hyperbolic fiend which entered in and
rent him at certain seasons of his youth.
Mr. Swinburne has, indeed, the defects of his qualities. He is an
ardent friend and an unflinching adversary, but we have seen that in
prose no less than in poetry, in polemics as in politics, his style is
liable to become overheated and thunderous. He has no patience with
mediocrity in art; he disdains the _via media_ in thought and action.
In these respects he stands alone among the Victorian poets, most of
whom anticipate with misgivings the evaporation of faith in the
supernatural, while they acknowledge that for themselves such faith
has little meaning, and are inclined to melancholy musing over the
'doubtful doom of human kind' which haunted the imagination of
Tennyson. And his attitude is still further apart from the
intellectual tendencies discernible at the present moment in pure
literature, which is now less concerned, we think, with these
questions than when Mr. Arnold wrote _Literature and Dogma_, and seems
more disposed to leave theology in the hands of the physical
scientists and the professional metaphysicians. However this may be,
it is to be seriously regretted that Mr. Swinburne's peremptory,
unscrupulous manner of dealing with religious forms and beliefs which
the world, perhaps, would not unwillingly let die, though by painless
extinction rather than by violence, has alienated reverent minds from
him, and has tarnished the brilliancy of his strenuous verse. The
sensuous frenzy of his juvenile poems is still remembered against him;
it betrayed a lack of moral dignity, of what the Greek poets, whom he
so much admired, meant by the word [Greek: aidos]. But we very
willingly acknowledge that of these excesses hardly a trace is to be
found in the very numerous pieces that fill the later volumes of his
collected poetry.
From these causes it has resulted that Mr. Swinburne does not, in our
opinion, now hold the position or command the influence which would
otherwise be accorded to one who may be reckoned the chief lyrical
poet of the second half of the nineteenth century; for after the
publication, in 1855, of _Maud_, Tennyson had passed his lyrical
climax, and Mr. Swinburne's superiority, as a lyrist, over all other
writers of that period is incontestable. His neo-paganism, moreover,
jars upon the realistic modernity of a generation for whom primitive
symbolism is obsolete as a form of expression, and whose prevailing
thought is too profoundly rationalistic to be attracted by a pagan
paradise. All this is to be regretted, since Mr. Swinburne undoubtedly
has the pagan virtues. His aspirations are concentrated on ideals that
ennoble the present life, on justice, inflexible courage, patriotism,
the unsophisticated intelligence; he loves liberty and he hates
oppression in all their shapes. He is throughout an optimist, who
believes and predicts that a clearer and brighter prospect is before
humanity. To Mr. Swinburne, in short, may be applied the words with
which Matthew Arnold summed up his essay upon Heine: 'He is not an
adequate interpreter of the modern world; he is a brilliant soldier in
the liberation war of humanity.' And future generations may remember
him as the poet who passed on to them the message of his spiritual
forefather, Shelley:
'O man, hold thee on in courage of soul
Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way;
And the billows of clouds that round thee roll
Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,
When heaven and hell shall leave thee free
To the universe of destiny.'
FOOTNOTES:
[31] _The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne._ In six volumes. With a
dedicatory epistle to Theodore Watts-Dunton. London, Chatto and
Windus, 1904.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1906.
[32] 'Out, hyperbolic fiend! how vexest thou this man?'--_Twelfth
Night._
[33] Dedicatory Preface.
[34] Dedicatory Preface.
[35] _Holiday and Other Poems_, 1906.
[36] Note on Poetry, p. 144.
[37] _Essays and Studies_, 1867.
FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN[38]
It may be doubted whether many students of history are aware that the
demarcation of frontiers, of precise lines dividing the possessions of
adjacent sovereignties and distinguishing their respective
jurisdictions, is a practice of modern origin. At the present time it
is the essential outcome of territorial disputes, it is the operation
by which they are formally settled at the end of a war: it registers
conquests and cessions; and occasionally it has been the result of
pacific arbitration. Among compact and civilised nationalities an
exterior frontier, thus carefully defined, remains, like the human
skin, the most sensitive and irritable part of their corporate
constitution. The slightest infringement of it by a neighbouring Power
is instantly resented; to break through it violently is to be
inflicting a wound which may draw blood; and even interference with
any petty State that may lie between the frontiers of two great
governments is regarded as a serious menace.
The whole continent of Europe has now been laid out upon this system
of strict delimitation. Yet it may be maintained that among the
kingdoms of the ancient world no such exact and recognised
distribution of territory existed; and, further, that up to a very
recent period none of the great empires in Asia had any boundaries
that could be traced on a map. Their landmarks were incessantly
shifting forward or backward as their military strength rose or fell;
and where their territories marched with some rough mountainous tract
inhabited by warlike tribes, they were perpetually plagued by petty
warfare on a zone of debateable land. On both sides some temporary
intrusion upon or occupation of country held by a neighbour, which
would now be the signal for mobilising an army, was treated as a
trespass of small importance, to be resented and rectified at leisure.
It is true that in earlier times the Romans marked off distinct
frontiers, and guarded them by military posts; but their policy was to
acknowledge no frontier power with equal rights, and their actual
political jurisdiction usually extended far beyond their lines of
defence, which were advanced or withdrawn as political or military
considerations might require. In fact, the Roman empire, like the
British empire in Asia, was a great organised State, surrounded, for
the most part, by small and weak principalities, or by warlike tribal
communities, and it grew by a natural process of inevitable expansion.
The emperors were often reluctant to enlarge their possessions; but
the raids and incursions of intractable barbarians, or the revolt of
some protected chiefship, frequently left them no option but to
conquer and annex. They soon found themselves compelled to overstep
the limits of empire prescribed by the policy of Augustus, and to lay
down an advanced frontier in the lands beyond the Rhine and the
Danube.
In Europe, where, as we have said, all national frontiers are now