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MR. SWINBURNE'S NEW POEMS1

BY JOHN MORLEY

[WHEN Swinburne's Poems and Ballads: First Series appeared in 1866 no criticism did more to strike the note for general disapproval than the following article, which appeared in the Saturday Review for August 4 of that year. It was chiefly on the basis of this review that the publisher, Moxon, withdrew Poems and Ballads from sale. Not until December 20, 1923, was the authorship of the review generally known; at that time Sir Edmund Gosse revealed that it had been written by the late Lord (then Mr. John) Morley. As Sir Edmund pointed out, Swinburne's later knowledge that Morley had been its author did not keep the poet from forming a fast friendship with him or from becoming a regular contributor to the Fortnightly under Morley's editorship.]

Ir is mere waste of time, and shows a curiously mistaken conception of human character, to blame an artist of any kind for working at a certain set of subjects rather than at some other set which the critic may happen to prefer. An artist, at all events an artist of such power and individuality as Mr. Swinburne, works as the character compels him. If the character of his genius drives pretty exclusively in the direction of libidinous song, we may be very sorry, but it is of no use to advise him and to preach to him. What becomes of discoursing to a fiery tropical flower of the pleasant fragrance of the rose or

From the Empire Review (London publicaffairs monthly), May

VOL. 329-NO. 4275

the fruitfulness of the fig tree? Mr. Swinburne is much too stoutly bent on taking his own course to pay attention to critical monitions as to the duty of the poet, or any warnings of the worse than barrenness of the field in which he has chosen to labor. He is so firmly and avowedly fixed in the attitude of revolt against the current notions of decency and dignity and social duty that to beg of him to become a little more decent, to fly a little less persistently and gleefully to the animal side of human nature, is simply to beg him to be something different from Mr. Swinburne. It is a kind of protest which his whole position makes it impossible for him to receive with anything but laughter and contempt. A rebel of his calibre is not to be brought to a better mind by solemn little sermons on the loyalty which a mind owes to virtue. warmest prayer to the gods is that they should

Come down and redeem us from virtue.

His

His warmest hope for men is that they should change

The lilies and languors of virtue

For the raptures and roses of vice.

It is of no use, therefore, to scold Mr. Swinburne for groveling down among the nameless, shameless abominations which inspire him with such frenzied delight. They excite his imagination to its most vigorous efforts, they seem to him the themes most proper for poetic treatment, and they suggest ideas which, in his opinion, it is highly to be wished that English men and women would

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brood upon and make their own. He finds that these fleshly things are his strong part, so he sticks to them. Is it wonderful that he should? And, at all events, he deserves credit for the audacious courage with which he has revealed to the world a mind all aflame with the feverish carnality of the schoolboy over the dirtiest passages in Lemprière. It is not everybody who would ask us all to go hear him tuning his lyre in a sty. It is not everybody who would care to let the world know that he found the most delicious food for poetic reflection in the practices of the great island of the Ægean, in the habits of Messalina, of Faustina, of Pasiphaë. Yet these make up Mr. Swinburne's version of the dreams of fair women, and he would scorn to throw any veil over the pictures which kindle, as these do, all the fires of his imagination in their intensest heat and glow.

It is not merely 'the noble, the nude, the antique' which he strives to reproduce. If he were a rebel against the fat-headed Philistines and poor-blooded puritans who insist that all poetry should be such as may be wisely placed in the hands of girls of eighteen, and as fit for the use of Sunday schools, he would have all wise and enlarged readers on his side. But there is an enormous difference between an attempt to revivify among us the grand old pagan conception of Joy and an attempt to glorify all the bestial delights that the subtleness of Greek depravity was able to contrive. It is a good thing to vindicate passion, and the strong and large and rightful pleasures of sense, against the narrow and inhuman tyranny of shriveled anchorites. It is a very bad and silly thing to try to set up the pleasures of sense in the seat of the reason they have dethroned. And no language is too strong to condemn the mixed violence and childishness of depicting the spurious passion of a pu

trescent imagination, the unnamed lusts of sated wantons, as if they were the crown of character, and their enjoyments the great glory of human life. The only comfort about the present volume is that such a piece as 'Anactoria' will be unintelligible to a great many people, and so will the fevered folly of 'Hermaphroditus,' as well as much else that is nameless and abominable. Perhaps if Mr. Swinburne can a second and third time find a respectable publisher willing to issue a volume of the same stamp, crammed with pieces which many a professional vendor of filthy prints might blush to sell if he only knew what they meant, English readers will gradually acquire a truly delightful familiarity with these unspeakable foulnesses; and a lover will be able to present to his mistress a copy of Mr. Swinburne's latest verses with a happy confidence that she will have no difficulty in seeing the point of every allusion to Sappho, or the placing of Hermaphroditus, or the embodiment of anything else that is loathsome and horrible. It will be very charming to hear a drawing-room discussion on such verses as these, for example:

Stray breaths of Sapphic song that blew
Through Mitylene

Shook the fierce quivering blood in you
By night, Faustine.

The shameless nameless love that makes
Hell's iron gin

Shut on you like a trap that breaks
The soul, Faustine.

And when your veins were void and dead,
What ghosts unclean

Swarmed round the straitened barren bed
That hid Faustine?

What sterile growths of sexless root
Or epicene?

What flower of kisses without fruit
Of love, Faustine?

We should be sorry to be guilty of anything so offensive to Mr. Swinburne as we are quite sure an appeal to

the morality of all the wisest and best men would be. The passionate votary of the goddess whom he hails as 'Daughter of Death and Priapus' has got too high for this. But it may be presumed that common sense is not too insulting a standard by which to measure the worth and place of his new volume. Starting from this sufficiently modest point, we may ask him whether there is really anything in women worth singing about except 'quivering flanks' and 'splendid supple thighs,'' hot sweet throats' and 'hotter hands than fire,' and their blood as 'hot wan wine of love.' Is purity to be expunged from the catalogue of desirable qualities? Does a poet show respect to his own genius by gloating, as Mr. Swinburne does page after page and poem after poem, upon a single subject and that subject kept steadily in a single light? Are we to believe that having exhausted hot lustfulness, and wearying the reader with a luscious and nauseating iteration of the same fervid scenes and fervid ideas, he has got to the end of his tether? Has he anything further to say, and any further poetic task but to go on again and again about

The white wealth of thy body made whiter
By the blushes of amorous blows,
And seamed with sharp lips and fierce fingers,
And branded by kisses that bruise,

and to invite a new Félise to

Kiss me once hard, as though a flame
Lay on my lips and made them fire?

Mr. Swinburne's most fanatical admirers must long for something newer than a thousand times repeated talk of

Stinging lips wherein the hot sweet brine That Love was born of burns and foams like wine, and

Hands that sting like fire, and of all those women

swift and white
And subtly warm, and half perverse,
And sweet like sharp soft fruit to bite,
And, like a snake's love, lithe and fierce.

This stinging and biting, these 'lithe lascivious regrets,' all this talk of snakes and fire, of blood and wine and brine, of perfumes and poisons and ashes, grow sickly and oppressive on the senses. Every picture is hot and garish with this excess of flaming violent color. Consider the following stanzas:

From boy's pierced throat and girl's pierced bosom

Drips, reddening round the blood-red blossom, Bathing the spices and the pyre,

The slow delicious bright soft blood,

Bathing the flowers and fallen fire,

Bathing the blossom by the bud.
Roses whose lips the flame had deadened,
Drink till the lapping leaves are reddened
And warm wet inner petals weep;
The flower whereof sick sleep gets leisure,
Barren of balm and purple pleasure,

Fumes with no native steam of sleep.

Or these from the verses to 'Dolores,' so admirable for their sustained power and their music, if hateful on other grounds:

Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel

Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;
The heavy white limbs, and the cruel

Red mouth like a venomous flower;
When these are gone by with their glories,
What shall rest of thee then, what remain,
O mystic and sombre Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain?

By the ravenous teeth that have smitten Through the kisses that blossom and bud, By the lips intertwisted and bitten

Till the foam has a savor of blood, By the pulse as it rises and falters,

By the hands as they slacken and strain, I adjure thee, respond from thine altars, Our Lady of Pain.

Thy skin changes country and color,

And shrivels or swells to a snake's. Let it brighten and bloat and grow duller, We know it, the flames and the flakes. Red brands on it smitten and bitten,

Round skies where a star is a stain, And the leaves with thy litanies written, Our Lady of Pain.

Where are they, Cotytto or Venus,

Astarte or Ashtaroth, where?

Do their hands as we touch come between us? Is the breath of them hot in thy hair?

From their lips have thy lips taken fever,
With the blood of their bodies grown red?
Hast thou left upon earth a believer
If these men are dead?

It was too rashly said, when Atalanta in Calydon appeared, that Mr. Swinburne had drunk deep at the springs of Greek poetry, and had profoundly conceived and assimilated the divine spirit of Greek art. Chastelard was enough to show that this had been premature. But the new volume shows with still greater plainness how far removed Mr. Swinburne's tone of mind is from that of the Greek poets. Their most remarkable distinction is their scrupulous moderation and sobriety in color. Mr. Swinburne riots in the profusion of color of the most garish and heated kind. He is like a composer who should fill his orchestra with trumpets, or a painter who should exclude every color but a blaring red and a green as of sour fruit. There are not twenty stanzas in the whole book which have the faintest tincture of soberness. We are in the midst of fire and serpents, wine and ashes, blood and foam, and a hundred lurid horrors.

Unsparing use of the most violent colors and the most intoxicated ideas and images is Mr. Swinburne's prime characteristic. Fascinated as everybody must be by the music of his verse, it is doubtful whether part of the effect may not be traced to something like a trick of words and letters to which he resorts in season and out of season with a persistency that any sense of artistic moderation must have stayed. The Greek poets in their most impetuous moods never allowed themselves to be carried on by the swing of words instead of by the steady, though buoyant, flow of thought. Mr. Swinburne's hunting of letters, his hunting of the same word, to death is ceaseless. We shall have occasion by and by to quote a long passage in which

several lines will be found to illustrate this:

Came flushed from the full-flushed wave. Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star.

White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendor, a flame.

There are few pages in the volume where we do not find conceits of this standing doing duty for thoughts. The Greeks did not wholly disdain them, but they never allowed them to count for more than they were worth. Let anybody who compares Mr. Swinburne to the Greeks read his ode to 'Our Lady of Pain,' and then read the wellknown scene in Antigone between Antigone and the Chorus, or any of the famous choruses in the Agamemnon or an ode of Pindar. In the height of all their passion there is an infinite soberness of which Mr. Swinburne has not a conception.

Yet, in spite of its atrocities, the present volume gives new examples of Mr. Swinburne's forcible and vigorous imagination. The 'Hymn to Prosperine' on the proclamation of the Christian faith in Rome, full as it is of much that many persons may dislike, contains passages of rare vigor:

All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and

sorrows are cast

Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,

Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:

Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,

And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,

White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,

Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;

In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;

In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;

With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years;

With travail of day after day, and with trouble

of hour upon hour;

And bitter as blood is the spray, and the crests are as fangs that devour:

And its vapor and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;

And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea:

And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air;

And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare.

The variety and rapidity of suspension, the reveling in power, are not more remarkable here than in many other passages, though even here it is not variety and rapidity of thought. The anapæst to which Mr. Swinburne so habitually resorts is the only foot that suffices for his never-staying impetuosity. In the 'Song in Time of Revolution' he employs it appropriately and with a sweeping force as of the elements:

The heart of the rulers is sick, and the high priest covers his head:

For this is the song of the quick that is heard in the ears of the dead.

The poor and the halt and the blind are keen and mighty and fleet;

Like the noise of the blowing of wind is the sound of the noise of their feet.

There are, too, sweet and picturesque lines scattered in the midst of this fire which the poet tosses to and fro about his verses. Most of the poems, in his wearisomely iterated phrase, are meant to 'sting the senses like wine,' but to some stray pictures one may apply his own exquisite phrases on certain of Victor Hugo's songs, which, he says:Or fell more soft than dew or snow by night Or wailed as in some flooded cave Sobs the strong broken spirit of a wave.

For instance, there is a perfect delicacy and duty in four lines of the 'Hendecasyllabics'a metre that is

familiar in the Latin line often found on clocks and sundials, Horæ nam pereunt et imputantur:

When low light was upon the windy reaches
Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily
Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows
And green fields of the sea that make no pasture.

Nothing can be more simple and exquisite than:

For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span.

Or than this:

In deep wet ways by gray old gardens
Fed with sharp spring the sweet fruit hardens;
They know not what fruits wane or grow;
Red summer burns to the utmost ember;
They know not, neither can remember,

The old years and flowers they used to know. Or again:

With stars and sea winds for her raiment
Night sinks on the sea.

Up to a certain point one of the deepest and most really poetical pieces is that called 'The Sundew.' A couple of verses may be quoted to illustrate the graver side of the poet's mind:

The deep scent of the heather burns
About it; breathless though it be,
Bow down and worship; more than we
Is the least flower whose life returns,
Least weed renascent in the sea.

You call it sundew: how it grows,
If with its color it have breath,
If life taste sweet to it, if death
Pain its soft petal, no man knows:
Man has no sight or sense that saith.

There is no finer effect of poetry than to recall to the mind of men the bounds that have been set to the scope of their sight and sense, to inspire their imaginations with a vivid apprehension of the size and the wonder and the strange remote companionship of the world of force and growth and form outside of man. Qui se considérera de la sorte,' said Pascal, ‘s'effraiera, sans doute, de se voir comme suspendu dans la masse que la

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