MIL SWINBURNE AS A MASTER OF METRE. II I' the death

of Mr. Swinburne a great name is lost to contemporau literature. We say "name" advisedly, for Mr. Swinburne's tribute to that literature was finished, 111(1 it was in no sense likely that he would add to • Poetic achievement. He was rather a survival of the letorian age than an active force in the verse of the present age. That fact makes it easier to estimate his "e in English poetry than if his genius was still in process of development, and his poetic methods were still matters of active controversy. The essential fact about .... Swinburne is that he was a learned poet, learned not lt°,111Y in the literatures of ancient. and modern times, allu. especially in English literature, but learned perhaps in a higher degree than any of his contemporaries or prede- cessors in the lore and science of verse. Mr. Swinburne has been praised as a great master of melody; but herein lies an error. He was a great master of metre rather than of melody, if by melody we mean, as we should, the natural and inevitable sense of music in words. Mr. Swinburne understood how to use every metrical device that had ever been attempted in English verse, but he was not born with that melodious instinct which belonged supremely to Shakespeare, and in a less degree to Wordsworth, to Coleridge, and to Tennyson. We do not, of course, mean by this that Mr. Swinburne had not an extraordinarily acute ear. No man ever had one more acute. But his metrical effects were produced by a conscious, or even a mechanical, process rather than by an inborn and unconscious feeling for rhythm and harmony. That is why his verse, which at first astonishes us by its perfection of sound, in the end is apt to weary and prove unsatisfying. There is too much artifice and too little inspiration. It is the difference between "On such a night Stood Dido with a willow in her hand" and "Maiden and Mistress of the months and stars, Now folded in the flowerless fields of Heaven."

Take, for further example, Mr. Swinhurne's use of the ten- syllable heroic couplet. If we read four or five distiches, say, of the Prelude to "Tristram of Lyoneese," we are enchanted, aild feel inclined to declare that Mr. Swinburne has enlarged even the scope of that magnificent metre. What could be more captivating than the tribute to Shakespeare's Juliet I)— " The keen girl-star of golden Juliet bears

Light northward to tho month whose forehead wears Her name for flower upon it, and his trees Mix their deep English song with Veronese."

If, however, we read on, the glamour and the charm gradually seem to disappear, not because there is any real deterioration tin the verse, but because we begin to realise that what is delighting us is an artifice rather than a natural gift. To borrow a metaphor from music, the execution, though very brilliant, is of the mechanical order, and acquired by skill and practice rather than by inspiration. The more closely we read Mr. Swin• burnes poetry, the more clearly does this defect stand out. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that the real way to enjoy his verse is to read, or, still better, to speak, it in short quotations. Take, for example, that magnificent couplet in the poem on the launching of the ‘Livadia,' the great yacht which was designed as a floating city of refuge for the Tsar, but which he never used :— " With Death for helmsman and Despair for star And the white foam to cover the White Tsar."

That is a glorious piece of metre and rhetoric. Unfortu- nately, however, though the ear is delighted by one such anvil stroke, it wearies when they are repeated again and again with mechanical precision. Take another example. Who can read without a thrill of rapture the couplet:— " And hushed the torrent-tongued ravines With thunders of our tambourines " P We turn to the poem, the Prelude to "The Songs before Sunrise," and find plenty of lines to match those we have just given, but here, as before, our delight is spoiled by the mechanical way in which the effect is produced. We turn from such "intricacies of laborious song" to the simpler rhythms of an older, aueterer tradition. Browning never approached Mr. Swinburne in the matter of metrical science, and Tennyson, great student as lie was of our literature and language, bad nothing like his younger con- temporary's learning. And yet in both cases how far more moving are the harmonies produced. Mr. Swinburne could never have written the "Toccata of Galuppi's." Again, if he had tried to adapt for lyrical purposes the quatrain of Omar—he used it, of course unadapted, in his "Lane Veneris "—as did Tennyson in "The Daisy," how very different and how far less satisfying would in all probability have been the result.

If we attempt to follow in detail Mr. Swinburne's method of dealing with English metres, we shall realise what, for want of a better phrase, we have called the mechanical nature of his music. Again and again we see that in the course of his wide reading he has noted some metrical device, used perhaps accidentally by an earlier poet, and has realised that it could be fashioned into a new and conscious metre. All the world knows, and is delighted by, the charm and movement of Mr. Swinburne's

"If you were April's lady

Aud I were lord in May."

Yet comparatively few people realise that the genesis of the metre is to be found in a second-rate song in one of Dryden's plays. To show we are not exaggerating, let us contrast a verse from Dryden's lyric with one from that of Mr. Swinburne. Here is Dryden's commonplace and conven-

tional song:— The Passion you pretended Was only to obtain;

But when the charm is ended, The charmer you disdain. Your love by ours we measure, Till we have lost our treasure; For dying is a pleasure, When living is a pain."

Here is the noble use Mr. Swinburne made of this vulgar example :— "If you were April's lady And I were lord in May, We'd throw with leaves for hours And draw for days with flowers,

Till day, like night, were shady, And night were bright like day, If you were April's lady And I were lord in May."

No doubt the rhymes are very differently arranged by Mr. Swinburne, and with far greater skill, but we cannot doubt that Dryden's song is the crude briar on which by grafting and selection Mr. Swinburne grew his many-petalled rose.

A commoner example of this power of adaptation is, of course, to be found in the "Dolores" measure. Mr. Swin- bum saw that the anapaests Breed had used for humorous verse and drawing-room satire might easily be employed for serious poetry. Again, till his time, with one, or possibly two, exceptions, dactylic and semi-dactylic measures were unknown in our poetic literature. Mr. Swinburne, however, must have noted Waller's exquisite song which begins :—

" Hylae, oh Hylae, why sit we mute Now that each bird saluteth the spring? Tie up the slackened strings of thy lute, Never mayst thou want matter to sing."

Like a scientific gardener, be took the flower, transplanted it, crossed it, and developed it till he gave the world such a measure as that of "Hesperia" :— " Out of the golden, remote wild West, where the sea without shore is."

Another example of Mr. Swinburne's marvellous capacity for finding a tiny flower self-sown in some other poet's garden and developing it into a new variety may here be given. Thousands of readers know and rejoice in the hurrying words of Mr. Swinburne's "Rococo" :— "Take hands and part with laughter, Touch lips and part with tears.

Once more and no more after, Whatever comes with years,

We twain shall not re-measure The ways that left us twain.

Nor crush the lees of pleasure

From sanguine grapes of pain."

At first sight it seems as if Mr. Swinburne, by a judicious disposal of his emphatic words, had contrived to discover an entirely new rhythm for iambic verse, for, unless by accident, the students of our literature will recall no other poem which has quite this lilt. Yet, as a matter of fact, Lander had used it before him. In this ease again, no doubt, Mr. Swinburne had taken up and developed a metre that had charmed him in the work of a poet whom he so greatly admired. Here is

Landor's poem :—

" If you no longer love me

To friendship why pretend P Unworthy was the lover,

Unworthy be the friend. I know there is another

Of late preferred to me. Recovered is your freedom And I myself am free. I've seen the bird that summer Deluded from its spray Return again in winter

And grieve she fled away."

Mr. Swinburne's poem is, of course, a garden variety, but it

is impossible not to recognise its origin in Landor's simpler lyric. It may interest our readers if we give yet one more example. In Shelley's " Hellas " one of the choruses contains the lines-

" A power from the unknown God

A Promethean ceugueror came "— an exquisite verbal rhythm, but, curiously enough, one which Shelley did not follow up. Mr. Swinburne, however, sari what could be made of this happy accident, and used it in that memorable chortle in "Atalanta in Calydou" which se delighted the world in the "sixties" :— "Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man."

Though we have pointed out that Mr. Swinburne was to some extent a "nurseryman" in the world of poetry, it must not be supposed that we fail to realise the wonderful science of his achievement. If his metrical devices cannot claim inspiration, they have at any rate given unfeigned delight to his own generation, and will give it, we believe, to future genera- tions. Metrical triumphs such as his will not die, but will survive as long as the English language. It is indeed to his metre that Mr. Swinburne will owe his share of immortality. Strangely enough, at the beginning of his career hie verse was thought to be unintelligible. As a matter of fact, it is ordinarill perfectly clear. He was not a poet whose thoughts were deeP or subtle, and as a rule the themes be chose were simple and elemental. But though Mr. Swinburne was in intent s decorative poet, we must never forget that he was also a true Englishman. He despised the notion that a poet's businees was merely to give pleasure to the senses. Sprung from race of sailors, he was a fervent lover of his country, while bie passion for liberty was deep and sincere.

Before wo close our attempt to estimate the debt of our literature to Mr. Swinburne, we must say a word of him as s critic, or rather an appreciator, for critic be was not. The bent of his genius led him both to condemn and to praise too strongly, but in spite of this defeot be was a most interesting and stimulating commentator upon other men's work. Oar literature would be distinctly the poorer if we did not possess his writings on the Elizabethan dramatists, and especially en Shakespeare, for in his devotion to Shakespeare be never faltered. Occasionally, indeed, his estimates of the Elizabetbau poets came very near to inspiration, as, for example, in his description of Webster as "a creek or inlet in the °coos which is Shakespeare." That was a literary aside worthy of Coleridge or De Quincey. Mr. Swinburne's writings on los poetic contemporaries are often most vivifying. The present writer will never forget the delight with which, as a boy, lie read the essay on the poetry of Matthew Arnold in Mr. $winburne's volume of "Essays and Studies." Nothing could be more delightful than the way in which Mr. Swinburne took his reader by the baud and led him through that great and noble garden, pointing out with fervour and generosity the varied beauties of flower and border, of fountain arla pleasaunoe, of arching stems and twining boughs.