the days in which swinburne died, it was remarked by all, were days peculiar to the air and to the landscape which had inspired his verse. one riding in those days upon the high ridges of the new forest saw before him in the distant hills of dorset and of wilts, in the very clear line of the island, in the belt of sea, and in the great billows of oak woods and of beech that lift up from the hollows, in the clear wind and the new large clouds of spring before it, everything which his poetry meant to those who were of one tongue with him, and all that part of it which, though not incommunicable to foreigners, made him the least translatable of modern writers. nowhere was it easier to understand what influences had made, or rather driven, his form of expression than on those heights looking towards those hills, and under such a sky, feeling that wind come right from off the english sea.

for it is the chief characteristic of swinburne's work, and the one which will be noted of him throughout whatever changes the future may bring to our taste, that his motive (if one may use this[pg 55] metaphor) was the landscape and the air of england—especially of south england and of that very roll of land from the chalk to the chalk, from the northern avon of wiltshire to the cliffs of the island which a man surveys from the ridges of which i speak.

let it not be forgotten that revolutions in taste are among the most certain as they are among the most mysterious proofs of the power of rapid change combined with unity which is peculiar to europe, and which has been discovered in no other civilisations than that of the europeans. only some very few have escaped the chastening of that reflection. there are indeed some classics—one might count them upon the fingers of both hands—which no transition of taste much raises or much diminishes, and chief among these is the sovereignty of homer. but almost all the others do suffer violent neglects, nay, may be for a generation and more violently despised; or again, violently adored. and so rapid are these fluctuations of opinion—and so sincere while they remain—that we must always approach with extreme care the criticism of a contemporary. the fluctuations of opinion will at last decide an average. truth will be plotted out, a clear and intellectual thing, from the welter of mere stimulus. criticism will acquire, and with every new critic acquire further, certitudes and fixed points of judgment; and the reputation of a great poet is moulded and informed by the process of time, as all other worthy[pg 56] things are moulded and informed by the process of time. let us attempt then to stand apart from the feeling of the moment and to ask ourselves what certainly was present in the work of the great writer who died in this uprush of new weather, and this invitation to life that was sweeping over his own land. it is by qualities which, whether we approve them or disapprove, are certainly present in a writer that his reputation with posterity will be made, not by the emotions of the moment which those qualities arouse; nor is any great writer (nor any small one, for that matter) to be judged in general terms, but in particular—since writing is like a man's voice, and always has in it, no matter who produces it, if it be closely examined, characters not general but individual. a man who should have resisted the wave of enthusiasm for lord byron, but who should carefully have noted what at any rate he was, what his verse was and what it was not, who should have distinguished between what he certainly did easily and what he as certainly could not do, might have praised too much or too little, but that which his analysis had distinguished would enable him to know more or less what kind of posterity would judge byron, and how. he would have been able to guess, for instance, that a time of youth and of largesse would have drunk him in great draughts, a time of age and of exactitude would have found in him a mere looseness of words; he would have been able to see why foreigners especially could discover his greatness;[pg 57] why the reading of him was proper to a time of active and physical combat against oppression, was improper to any nation which a long peace had corrupted, or to any class which the opportunity for every licence and the power through wealth to approach every enjoyment had satiated and cloyed.

if we so examine swinburne we shall, as i have said, first notice that in all his work the mere nature of south england drives him. it is the expression often uncontrolled, always spontaneous, of an intense communion with that air, those colours, such hills and such a sea. in this swinburne, wholly novel as was his medium of expression, was peculiarly and rigidly national. whoever best knows that landscape and that sky best feels him. whoever in the future most neglects it or knows it least will least fully appreciate or will perhaps even neglect his work. in whatever times the inspiration of that belt of land weakens in the men who inhabit it (it weakened in the eighteenth century, for instance), in such a time the influence of swinburne's work will weaken too.

next there must be noted that in him much more than in any other writer of the language, or, at any rate, much more than in any other modern writer of prominence, words followed rhythm, and the poem, though an organised and constructed thing, went bowling before the general music of its metre as a ship over-canvased goes bowling before the general gale. that music underlies all lyrical expression,[pg 58] and for that matter poetry of every other kind as well, all critics have always known. but it is modern to make of it, as it were, the necessary and conscious substructure of the work, and verlaine, who put it in his poetic art as the chief rule to consider "music and always music," was, in laying down such a law, the extreme expression of his time. sense is not sacrificed wholly in any place, it is but rarely imperilled even by this motive in swinburne. but one feels that reason has in the construction no divine place, but is subsidiary—as it is subsidiary in unworded tunes, as it is subsidiary in great and vivid dreams, as it is subsidiary (since one should be just even in judging extravagance) in all the major emotions of the human soul: in love, in combat, in despair. and in this necessary service of rhythm, this bondage to music, is to be discovered the source of another characteristic in the work: the perpetual repetition. two men, both sedulous and scholarly admirers, will be equally struck by the apparently contradictory judgments that swinburne was unequalled in the range of his vocabulary, and that swinburne was, quite beyond parallel, repetitive. each judgment would strike one of the two types of admirer as a paradox or a truism. yet both are true, and both have an illuminating meaning when his work is considered. that vast vocabulary (and if you will be at the pains to note word upon word or to make a short concordance you will see that the word "vast" is just)—that vast vocabulary, i say,[pg 59] proceeded from the necessity of satisfying the ear. an exact shade of length and emphasis were needed; they must be exactly filled, and some one word out of the thousands upon thousands which the numerically richest language of our time possesses must be hit upon to do the work. this surely was the source of that wide range. so also was it the source of the repetition.

repetition is discovered in literature under two aspects. it is deliberate and admiringly designed, or it is involuntary and an odious symptom of fatigue. the repetitions of catullus in their way, the repetitions of the hebrew poets in theirs, were meant to be; or rather (for their voluntary quality is obvious) they were exactly designed to produce a particular effect, and did produce it; the repetition of those who fail, involuntary and symptomatic of fatigue, may be neglected. swinburne's repetitions were neither of the one kind nor of the other; they were the recurrence of a set of words or of single words which suited the sound in his head. and just as to fit exactly a void of known form one word exactly fitting must be found (fitting not reason but the ear) so those which had been found to fit particular rhythms must be used again to fit those rhythms when they recurred, as naturally and as necessarily as a man picks up this tool and that to do some particular bit of carving which he has found it apt for in the past. the word in swinburne was subordinate.

it is a commonplace, and a true one—to pass to[pg 60] another matter—that the english writers of the later nineteenth century (and not the writers alone) reposed upon the jacobean translation of the old testament. that unique and fundamental piece of work, the monumental characters in which appear more largely with every process of retreat from it, whether in time or in conviction, has so formed that generation that it was itself almost unconscious of the enormous effect. swinburne is as full of it as kipling; the ready-made phrases of weary political discussion are full of it. the whole national life, in so far as modes of expression are concerned, was filled with it. many of swinburne's rhythms were the rhythms of the english psaltry, and perpetually you will find some sounding final phrase, especially if it ends in an interrogation, to be a phrase of biblical character or even a biblical transcription. herein, again, as in that effect of landscape and of air, he is national in every particle of his poetic being; and one may remark that this note is the note of unity in him, and that a recognition of it explains what has confused so many critics of his life and of his opinion. the man who in youth was ardent for a liberty which leant much nearer to anarchy than to the republic, who ranged, as the fashion was over all europe, to find subjects for that mood, in age perpetually sounded a note which had in it something exaggerated of fury and of protest against whatever might be thought to be weakening the very old and fixed boundaries of the national[pg 61] life. yet it was the same man whose extreme facility poured out in either field; the passionate protest of the first years was a protest drawn from the untrammelled nature about him which ran through him and made him write. the convinced and extreme political insistence of his later verse was drawn from the same source. it was still the surroundings of his own land that compelled him.

there is one last thing to be said: the work has been called pagan. it is the commonest praise or blame attached to the achievement. those who attach it, whether in praise or blame, have not clearly seen the pagan world. by pagan we mean that long, long manhood of europe (a thousand years long to our knowledge—how much longer we know not) in which the mind certainly reposed and was certainly in tune with the nature of the mediterranean. swinburne's great love of that mood was the love of a foreigner, of a much belated man, and of a man of the north. the sea of the atalanta in calydon is an english sea. all that attitude in him was reaction and a protest. it was full of yearning: now pagan paganism was not full of this. the very earliest moment in which a protest of that kind is to be found is the fourth century. for the transformation between the old and the new lay in this, that there came upon our race in the first four centuries of the roman empire a yearning which must be satisfied, and men since then have accepted an assuagement of it or have passionately protested[pg 62] against that assuagement, or have cynically ridiculed it, but they have never remained other than profoundly influenced by it. what is called "paganism" since that change came is not of marble and is not calm: it is a product, not of the old time, but of the new.