it has probably been a misfortune for mr. swinburne’s growth as a poet that no winter of critical neglect preceded the full recognition of his very remarkable talents. his best friends must allow that he is still somewhat younger in judgment than in his years and experience of authorship. it is not, however, much to be wondered at that he should have been tempted to rest content with having apparently attained at a single step a height of reputation to reach which has been with most poets the work of hard climbing during many years. mr. swinburne is still in the prime of life and in full possession of his powers, and some of his later work shows that he has that continued power of growth which is one of the greatest privileges of genius. if he will only listen to his own critical conscience, he may yet do work better and much more enduring than any he has yet{113} done. he cannot, indeed, hope to excel certain single passages of prose and verse in which he has attained a character of breadth and poetic ardour scarcely to be found in any other writer of the time; but he can (and there have of late been signs that he intends to) modify his manner of thinking and writing so that his best—which is very good indeed—may not be discredited by so much of the jejune in thought and composition as is to be found in a great deal of his work heretofore. hitherto mr. swinburne has been too much given to protesting; which is not the poet’s work, even when it is done wisely. in his future writing we shall probably hear more of the whisper of affirmative wisdom than the whirlwind of passionate negation; he will recognise more and more fully that the world is not and never will be made up of swinburnes and rossettis, and that it is vain to denounce popular beliefs and institutions, when he has only, to set up in their places, others which are, and for ever will be, unintelligible by the great majority of mankind, and inapplicable to their demands. the people will always insist on having kings and priests; and mr. swinburne has, no doubt, had his eyes too well opened by very recent history not to discern that it would be of little use to dethrone king log in favour of prime minister stork, or to unfrock an archbishop of canterbury{114} in order to transfer his authority to a general booth.
hitherto it has been impossible not to feel that there has been some disproportion between mr. swinburne’s power of saying things and the things he has to say. this defect of the “body of thought,” which coleridge once complained was wanting in an otherwise good poem, has reacted upon mr. swinburne’s language itself, producing sometimes a reiteration of words and imagery surpassing even that which is to be found in the works of shelley, and which in them arose from the same inadequacy of matter. for example, in a passage of thirteen lines in the present volume we have “flowery forefront of the year,” “foam-flowered strand,” “blossom-fringe,” “flower-soft face,” and “spray-flowers”; and in mr. swinburne’s poems generally it must be confessed that flowers, stars, waves, flames and three or four other entities of the natural order, come in so often as to suggest some narrowness of observation and vocabulary. this defect, also, is less manifest than it used to be, though probably the abandonment to the mere joy of words, which is natural and not altogether ungraceful in a writer who can use them so splendidly, will always be a characteristic of mr. swinburne’s poetry. it reminds us of the rapture of tristram in the truly magnificent{115} description of the bath he took before breakfast in “sea and sunrise,” and the reader is often carried with like joy upon the waves of words without troubling himself as to whether he and the poet are not both out of their depth.
mr. swinburne’s mode of dealing with human passions is somewhat of an anachronism. his heroes and heroines, like those of the old english drama and the scandinavian poems, often become heroic by the sacrifice of humanity, and, thereby, of the reader’s sympathy. the pictures of mary queen of scots and of iseult in this volume, for instance, though painted with a great brush are not truly great, because they are not greatly true—at all events, to any conditions which the modern world recognises or should desire to recognise. nor, granting that the characters and situations are poetical, is the execution quite what it ought to be. the effects are obtained by a cumulative rather than a developing process; and, at the end of a long poem or passage full of strong words and images, the idea of strength thence derived is rather that given by a hill than the living hole of a huge tree.
mr. swinburne’s metrical practice should be criticised with respect; for he has an unquestionably fine ear, and has ransacked the literature of all times in order to discover and appropriate, or{116} modify to his own uses, a number of movements which, unlike our familiar english metres, are whirlwinds and blasts of passion in themselves. such metres, however, should be sparingly used. they almost satisfy the ear without any accompaniment of sound meaning, and evoke, as it were by a trick, a current of emotion that is independent of any human feeling in the poet himself. this is a great temptation, and mr. swinburne has not always avoided the traps which he has thus set for himself. such metres have, moreover, the disadvantage of fixing in too peremptory a manner the key in which the poems written in them must be sustained. they allow none of the endless modulations which are open to the poet who writes in almost any of our native and less emphatic measures. mr. swinburne has the less reason for resorting so habitually as he does to this too easy means of obtaining passionate effect, inasmuch as some of his very best and most effective passages are written in our common metres. witness the almost incomparable apostrophe to athens, in “erechtheus” (unfortunately not included in these selections), and “sea and sunrise,” and “herse.”
there is one still easier and far less excusable source of effect which every friend of the poet must rejoice to see that he has of late abandoned.{117} there is nothing in the selections which a schoolgirl might not be permitted to read and understand, if she could; and there are a number of pieces about children which are so full of pure and tender perceptions as to cause a doubt whether, in some of his earlier writings, the poet was not wantonly flouting the world’s opinion rather than expressing any very real phase of his own feeling.
