Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 95Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837-1909
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[Illustration: ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1837-1909. From the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.]
Life.—Swinburne was born in London in 1837. His father was an admiral in the English navy, and his mother, the daughter of an earl. The boy passed his summers in Northumberland and his winters in the Isle of Wight. He thus acquired that fondness for the sea, so noticeable in his poetry. His early experiences are traceable in lines like these:—
"Our bosom-belted billowy-blossoming hills, Whose hearts break out in laughter like the sea."
He went to Oxford for three years, but left without taking his degree. The story is current that he knew more Greek than his teachers but that he failed in an examination on the Scriptures. He sought to complete his education by wide reading and by travel, especially in France and Italy.
When he was twenty-five, he went to live for a short time at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in the western part of London, in the same house with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith. Swinburne admired Rossetti's poetry and was much impressed with the Pre-Raphaelite virtues of simplicity and directness.
Swinburne never married. His deafness caused him to pass much of his long life in comparative retirement. His last thirty years were spent with his friend, the critic and poet, Theodore Watts-Dunton, at Putney on the Thames, a few miles southwest of London. Swinburne died in 1909 and was buried at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight.
Works.—In 1864 England was enchanted with the melody of the choruses in his Atalanta in Calydon, a dramatic poem in the old Greek form. Lines like the following from the chorus, The Youth of the Year, show the quality for which his verse is most famous:—
"When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain."
The first series of his Poems and Ballads (1866) contains The Garden of Proserpine, one of his best known poems. Proserpine "forgets the earth her mother" and goes to her "bloomless" garden:—
"And spring and seed and swallow Take wing for her and follow Where summer song rings hollow And flowers are put to scorn."
Many volumes came in rapid succession from his pen. In 1904 his poems were collected in six octavo volumes containing 2357 pages. This collection includes the long narrative poems, Tristram of Lyonesse and The Tale of Balen, a faithful retelling of famous medieval stories. He, however, had more ability as a writer of lyrics than of narrative verse.
His poetic dramas fill five additional volumes. Chastelard (1865), one of the three dramas relating to Mary Queen of Scots, is the best of his plays. He had, however, neither the power to draw character nor the repression of speech necessary for a great dramatist. The best parts of his plays are really lyrical verse.
Many critics think that Swinburne's reputation would be as great as it now is, if he had ceased to write verse in 1866, at the age of twenty-nine, after producing Atalanta in Calydon and the first series of his Poems and Ballads. Although his interests widened and his poetic range increased, much of his work during his last forty years is a repetition of earlier successes. His Songs before Sunrise, however (1871), and the next two volumes of Poems and Ballads (1878 and 1889) contain some poems that rank among his best.
Later in life he wrote a large amount of prose criticism, much of which deals with the Elizabethan dramatists. His A Study of Shakespeare (1880) and his shorter Shakespeare (1905) are especially suggestive. In spite of the fact that the reader must make constant allowance for his habit of using superlatives, he was an able critic.
General Characteristics.—Swinburne's poetry suffers from his tendency to drown his ideas in a sea of words.
Sometimes we gain no more definite ideas from reading many lines of his verse than from hearing music without words. Much of his poetry was suggested by wide reading, not by close personal contact with life. His verse sometimes offends from disregarding moral proprieties and from so expressing his atheism as to wound the feelings of religious people. His idea of a Supreme Power was colored by the old Grecian belief in Fate. In exact opposition to Wordsworth, Swinburne's youthful poems show that he regarded Nature as the incarnation of a Power malevolent to man. He lacked the optimism of Browning and the faith of Tennyson. The mantle of Byron and Shelley fell on Swinburne as the poet of revolt against what seemed to be religious or political tyranny.
After Tennyson's death, in 1892, Swinburne was the greatest living English poet; but, even if his verse had not offended Queen Victoria for the foregoing reasons, she would not have appointed him poet-laureate after the misery of the Russians had moved him in 1890 to write, referring to the Czar:—
"Night hath naught but one red star—Tyrannicide.
"God or man, be swift; hope sickens with delay: Smite and send him howling down his father's way."
Swinburne's crowning glory is his unquestioned mastery, unsurpassed by any poet since Milton, of the technique of varied melodious verse. This quality is evident, no matter whether he is describing the laughter of a child:—
"Sweeter far than all things heard, Hand of harper, tone of bird, Sound of woods at sundawn stirr'd, Welling water's winsome ward, Wind in warm wan weather,"
or expressing his fierce hatred for any condition or place where—
"…a curse was or a chain A throne for torment or a crown for bane Rose, moulded out of poor men's molten pain,"
or singing the song of a lover—
"If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf, Our lives would grow together In sad or singing weather, Blown fields or flowerful closes, Green pleasure or grey grief; If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf;"
or voicing his early creed—
"That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea,"
or chanting in far nobler strains the Anglo-Saxon belief in the molding power of an infinite presence—
"I am in thee to save thee, As my soul in thee saith, Give thou as I gave thee, Thy life-blood and breath, Green leaves of thy labor, white flowers of thy thought, and red fruit of thy death."