April 10 this year marked the centenary of the death of Algernon Charles
Swinburne at the age of seventy-two. The anniversary went largely
unremarked, though an observation to that effect in the Guardian provoked an
“Oh no it didn’t” letter, announcing that there was to be a centenary
conference at the University of London and a collection of academic essays
later in the year. Swinburne has indeed been well served within the
professional enclave of Victorian studies. The distinguished critic and
editor Jerome McGann, in particular, has been an unstinting advocate, from
his early Swinburne: An experiment in criticism (1972) to an exemplary
edition of the selected Major Poems and Selected Prose (2004). In the wider
culture Swinburne is now no more than a name, if that. Early biographical
records are usefully gathered in Lives of Victorian Literary Figures VI,
Volume Three: Algernon Charles Swinburne, edited by Rikky Rooksby (Pickering
and Chatto, 2008). Rooksby is also the author of the most recent Life of
Swinburne (1997): it is a highly informative work, as is Swinburne: The
portrait of a poet by Philip Henderson (1974). But what is lacking is a
biography that really gets under his skin in the manner of Richard Holmes’s
Shelley: The pursuit, while his copious poetic output has long languished on
the shelves of second-hand bookshops.
A few weeks after the anniversary, at the behest of a small group of residents
of the Isle of Wight, flowers were laid on Swinburne’s grave and the rector
of St Boniface Church delivered a thanksgiving for his life. “I am not sure
Swinburne was quite as firm an atheist as he was painted”, said the Revd
Graham Morris; “and I decided that he was going to have a blessing – whether
he liked it or not.” Though the rector would not like to say so, there was a
certain irony to the fact that the anniversary fell on Good Friday: one of
Swinburne’s most notorious lines, in his “Hymn to Proserpine”, was “Thou
hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from Thy breath”.
An ardent philhellene, he railed throughout his life against the monochrome
Christianity which had displaced the bright colours of pagan myth. To all
right-thinking Victorians, his name was synonymous with atheism and
republicanism, which is why he could not be allowed to assume the
Laureateship on Tennyson’s death. “I am told that Mr Swinburne is the best
poet in my dominions”, Queen Victoria was reported as saying, before
Gladstone – following correspondence with Lord Acton – resolved that the
appointment would never do.
Swinburne was at once the last of the Romantics and the first of the moderns,
which may be why the high modernists of the early twentieth century turned
against him. His Poems and Ballads of 1866 detonated in Victorian culture
with the force of a small thermonuclear explosion. Ladies accustomed to a
diet of Tennyson suddenly found themselves – if they could penetrate the
floating veil of Swinburne’s poetic language – reading poems about
lesbianism and sado-masochistic sex. It could quite reasonably be argued
that Swinburne was not merely the prophet of the twentieth-century sexual
revolution but the person who first gave open voice in the English language
to the joys of lesbianism. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest usage of
the word is from A. J. Munby’s diary in 1870, where the reference is clearly
to such explicitly lesbian poems as “Anactoria”: “Swinburne . . . expressed
a horror of sodomy . . . and an actual admiration of Lesbianism, being
unable to see that that is equally loathsome”. It is hard to imagine that
the work of the lesbian poet “Michael Field” (Katherine Bradley and Edith
Cooper) would have been possible without Swinburne’s role in shaping what
his most dazzling modern interpreter, Yopie Prins, has called “Victorian
Sappho”. And, regardless of orientation, his poems were declarations of the
right, especially for women, to feel sexual passion in an age of piety and
propriety.
To rediscover Swinburne’s cultural importance is one thing. To ask whether his
poetry is still worth reading today is quite another. F. R. Leavis’s charge
sheet, in one of his Cambridge seminars (recorded by Charles Winder),
requires a robust defence. “Swinburne: Tennysonian, subordination of sense
to sound, lapsing away from the sense. Use of words: what could happen after
Swinburne? Gilbert Murray’s Euripides happened.” A wash of words with no
meaning, the logorrhoea that gives poetry a bad name, the decadent clutter
that had to be swept away by the austere lucidity of the Imagists: that was
the judgement of my schoolmasters on Swinburne’s verse. He may have been
English poetry’s greatest technical innovator of anapaest and iamb in
bounding alternation: “When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, /
The mother of months in meadow or plain” (Atalanta in Calydon). But he was
all too easily parodied as a purveyor of high-sounding nonsense: “When the
foam of the bride-cake is white, and / The fierce orange-blossoms are
yellow” (Lewis Carroll, “Atalanta in Camden Town”).
“I can remember no earlier enjoyment”, he recalled, “than being held up naked
in my father’s arms and brandished between his hands, then shot like a stone
from a sling through the air, shouting and laughing with delight, head
foremost into the coming wave.” The exhilaration of that moment, the smack
of pleasurable pain as the naked body hits the cold water and is then
submerged, was the sensation that he perpetually sought to recover in his
poetry. Thus “The Triumph of Time”:
I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.
I will go down to her, I and none other,
Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me;
Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast:
O fair white mother, in days long past
Born without sister, born without brother,
Set free my soul as thy soul is free.
Whereas for Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach the sea evoked the melancholy, long,
withdrawing roar of faith and for Tennyson crossing the bar and putting to
sea meant meeting one’s Maker in eternity, Swinburne’s sea figured freedom,
pleasure, passion and transcendence even as it was a metaphor for both birth
and death. His verse is just about the only place in buttoned-up English
culture where we find a mood and a style genuinely akin to that of the
Wagnerian Liebestod. And indeed, his outstanding later poem Tristram of
Lyonesse (1882) is by far the best of the many (mostly flaccid) Victorian
tellings of the great tale of love and death on the Cornish and Breton
coasts, while “Laus Veneris” (the lead narrative in the 1866 Poems and
Ballads) is the English Tannhäuser.
A search on bookfinder.com will instantly lead to a first edition of Poems and
Ballads or Tristram, yours for a pittance. But you will pay a small fortune
for The Whippingham Papers (1887), let alone The Pearl. A Journal of
Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading (1879–80), in which such poems as “A Boy’s
First Flogging” and “Charlie Collingwood’s Flogging” first appeared in
print. The centrality of the Eton birch to Swinburne’s sensibility was
suppressed by Edmund Gosse in the first biography of the poet (1917). Gosse
did, however, lay out the evidence in detail in an unpublished paper for his
friends called “Swinburne’s Agitation” (which also addressed the poet’s
alcoholism). He lodged the document in the British Library and it was
eventually published in 1962 as an appendix to the final volume of Cecil
Lang’s magisterial edition of the letters, the work that put Swinburne
scholarship on to a modern footing.
Swinburne’s predilection for the English vice – his nostalgia for the flogging
block at Eton, his visits to a notorious flagellation brothel in St John’s
Wood – has not helped his posthumous reputation. It provokes a snigger
and, among the more learned, a digression on that unfortunate period of his
life when Rossetti tried to make a man of him by setting him up with the
hefty American circus rider and poet, Adah Isaacs Menken. She reported that
“she did not know how it was, but she hadn’t been able to get him up to the
scratch, and couldn’t make him understand that biting’s no use”. Swinburne
was thus disappointed in his hope of finding the incarnation of one of the
more provocative figures in his Poems and Ballads, “Dolores, Our Lady of
Pain”. This is not my field of expertise, but it strikes me that the age in
which the acronym BDSM gets 30 million Google hits is one in which Swinburne
is ripe for a revival. More subtly, Yopie Prins wonders whether there is a
suggestive connection between the beat of the birch and that of the verse.
If Swinburne’s two abiding memories of Eton were Greek prosody and the
flogging block, is it surprising that he should have become both a masochist
and a master-metrician?
When Poems and Ballads was published in August 1866, John Morley wrote in the
Saturday Review that Swinburne “is either the vindictive and scornful
apostle of a crushing iron-shod despair, or else he is the libidinous
laureate of a pack of satyrs”. The publisher, Moxon, immediately withdrew
the book, but John Camden Hotten stepped in and republished it. As almost
always happens, the critics’ controversial damnation assured the book’s
success. Reading the volume from cover to cover one is struck not only by
the variety of metrical experiments, but also by the range of subject
matter: yes, there is ample biting and sexual swooning, together with
reiterated invocation of sleep and death, but there is also an abundance of
powerfully voiced republicanism, anticlerical fervour and epicurean life.
“He does not, like another poet, have to think in his metre: his mastery
compels the metre to think for him . . . . In each poem the rhythm and the
arrangement of rhymes give the form a richness, a clear tangibility, which
must be enjoyed for its own sake if a full half of the poem is not to be
lost.” Thus Edward Thomas on Poems and Ballads, in the astute critical book
on Swinburne (Algernon Charles Swinburne: A critical study) that he wrote
shortly before starting to create poetry that reads as a reaction against
him. Swinburne needs to be recited aloud. If he is read silently, the
languor of his language soon palls, but when spoken, the forward thrust of
the metre creates an energizing counter-movement. To catch his mood, you
need to quote him at length – as, for example, when he cuts across the
quatrain endings in “Sapphics”. Aphrodite comes to the poet at night and
transports his imagination to Lesbos:
Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion!
All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish,
Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo;
Fear was upon them,
While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not.
Ah the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent,
None endured the sound of her song for weeping;
Laurel by laurel,
Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead,
Round her woven tresses and ashen temples
White as dead snow, paler than grass in summer,
Ravaged with kisses,
Shone a light of fire as a crown forever.
Yea, almost the implacable Aphrodite
Paused, and almost wept; such a song was that song.
Yea, by her name too
Called her, saying, “Turn to me, O my Sappho;”
Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not
Tears for laughter darken immortal eyelids,
Heard not about her
Fearful fitful wings of the doves departing,
Saw not how the bosom of Aphrodite
Shook with weeping, saw not her shaken raiment,
Saw not her hands wrung;
Saw the Lesbians kissing across their smitten
Lutes with lips more sweet than the sound of lute-strings,
Mouth to mouth and hand upon hand, her chosen,
Fairer than all men;
Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers,
Full of songs and kisses and little whispers,
Full of music; only beheld among them
Soar, as a bird soars
Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel,
Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion,
Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders,
Clothed with the wind’s wings.
According to George Saintsbury’s Historical Manual of English Prosody, the
proper run of the Sapphic line is “tumti-tumtum- tumtity-tumti-tum-ti”, but
all English poets with one exception fail to stop this changing itself into
“tumtity-tumtum-tumtiti-titumty”. The exception is Swinburne. These
particular Sapphics seem to me to come to the core of his art because they
are not only written in the metre of Sappho: they are about Sappho, who had
long been known as the “tenth Muse”. Whereas eighteenth- and earlier
nineteenth-century poets had, to use an ugly word, heterosexualized her by
mediating her story through Ovid’s heroic epistle on her doomed love for
Phaon, Swinburne restores her to her Lesbian origins via the combination of
feminine endings in the metre and female embraces in the narrative. The deep
reason why critics such as Morley were so scandalized by Swinburne was that
his verse was a complete affront to Victorian notions of masculinity.
“He kept as it were a harem of words to which he was constant and absolutely
faithful”: Edward Thomas again, skewering the vice of the later verse
especially – an obsessive use of the same favourite words over and over
again (sea, wave, sleep, dream, kiss, mouth, fire, light, bright, shine,
ache, desire, delight, high, sky). If Swinburne had died in middle age –
before Theodore Watts-Dunton dried him out and ensconced him at the Pines in
Putney – his poetry would have better stood the test of time.
But an earlier death would have deprived us of some of his best criticism.
Arthur Symons said that “He was the only critic of our time who never, by
design or accident, praised the wrong things”. Or, as T. S. Eliot put it,
“Swinburne had mastered his material, was more inward with the Tudor–Stuart
dramatists than any man of pure letters before or since . . . his perception
of relative values is almost always correct”. Besides being central to the
revival of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, Swinburne was a key
figure in the English reception of Charles Baudelaire; his Study of William
Blake (1868) inaugurated the serious study of an almost wholly neglected
genius; he was one of the first to appreciate the unique power of Wuthering
Heights; his Essays and Studies of 1875 were the spark that ignited the
critical powers of Oscar Wilde. He was, furthermore, a much underrated
Shakespearean, who wrote with especial originality on Iago and on Measure
for Measure, while also using his extraordinary ear to speculate
intelligently on questions of attribution. He argued that the first acts of
Titus Andronicus and Henry VI Part 1 were not by Shakespeare, but detected
his hand in the rest of Titus and the Talbot and Temple Garden scenes of
Henry VI. He believed that Shakespeare wrote the second but not the first
half of Pericles, and suggested that he may have had a hand in the creation
of Alice Arden. MacDonald D. Jackson, the early twenty-first century’s
leading expert on computer-assisted Shakespearean stylometry, would concur
with all these opinions.
Only a masochist or a Victorian-verse junkie would now want to read the
complete poetry and poetic dramas of Swinburne in the twenty-volume
Bonchurch edition. But on the centenary of his death anyone with a taste for
the high lyric tradition owes him at the very least the “Ave Atque Vale”
which he tendered to Baudelaire:
For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
Take at my hands this garland, and farewell.
Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,
And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother,
With sadder than the Niobean womb,
And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb.
Content thee, howsoe’er, whose days are done;
There lies not any troublous thing before,
Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,
For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
All waters as the shore.
Jonathan Bate is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University
of Warwick and the author, most recently, of Soul of the Age: The life, mind
and world of William Shakespeare, which appeared in paperback earlier this
year.
