" The Horns of Elfland "

THERE appear now and then among those " upon this dull earth dwelling " solitary figures which are not to be judged by ordinary standards. They charm and enrage us, they utter strange and heavenly melodies in verse or prose, in paint or in marble, and intersperse them with the most excruciating discords. These are the spirits of the seas and woodlands and young Greek singers of the Golden Age, and of that rare and entrancing company Swinburne was one. Wise folk yield themselves to the bewitchment of their wild charm, and firmly shut their eyes to their more disconcerting antics.

But curiosity is a gift as well as a failing : we want to know as much as we may about these exquisite and exas- perating beings, and we therefore give the sincerest homage

to this noble edition of Swinburne's works in poetry and prose for which Sir Edmund Gosse and Mr. T. J. Wise are responsible. Sir Edmund reprints with certain additions his life of the poet which appeared in 1917. Mr. Wise contributes a model bibliography : the rest of the twenty splendid volumes are text. Though it is now nineteen years since Swinburne died, Sir Edmund, whose friendship with the poet was long and intimate, is still exceedingly discreet about his indiscretions, and no doubt he is right. He conveys, anyhow, with admirable grace and distinction a most vivid impression of the genies and personality of his friend.

This edition comprises much that has not hitherto been published, and these pieces are interesting on account of their authorship rather than for any intrinsic preciousness. The new poems, chiefly early ones salved by Mr. Wise, are in the main what one might expect from any very gifted boy. There are five fresh cantos of Queen Yseult, there are Shakespearean sonnets, there is an admirable prize-poem which failed to win the Newdigate, and in all these we occa- sionally hear the sound, like distant singing in the night, of the authentic voice. But there is nothing really to prepare us for the melody which rang out at dawn on the publication in 1865 of Atalanta in Cakdon. Never since the great age of Athens had there sung so Greek a voice, nor, though in his Erechtheus Swinburne came closer in form to the Aeschylean model, did he ever get so near to the spirit of Athenian song. Erechtheus reads like some marvellous translation from the Greek, but Atalanta is Greek : we feel that some young

poet who had fallen asleep under the plane-trees of the llyssus had awoke in our Western land and tuned his lyre

again. His voice was _heard next year in certain of the Poems and Ballads, not, let us hasten to add, in the erotic screams of " Anactoria," nor in the writhings and bitings of "Dolores," but in "Itylus," and in the gem of all those gems, "A Leave-taking." The ecstatic voice that chanted " Blossom by blossom the spring begins" broke sobbing over :— " Sing all once more together : surely she,

She, too, remembering days and words that were,

Will turn a little towards us, sighing but we,

We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there.

Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me,

She would not see.

Surely we are right in assigning to this most exquisite of all his songs the same personal inspiration as Sir Edmund Gosse tells us breathes in " The Triumph of Time," namely, the rejection and ridicule of Swinburne's love by the girl to whom he proposed.

Too often, however, Swinburne got intoxicated by words, and he screams instead of singing. Never in verse could he lose his incomparable beauty of diction, but he took pleasure in shocking the Philistines, whereas the supreme artist cares not two straws whether they are shocked or not

In the same way rebellion attracted him in itself, irrespective of the cause ; he gets tipsy with defiance, and the sincerity of his crusade for liberty suffers. Revolt, no doubt, was his tie with the Pre-Raphaelites, but -his expression of revolt

was completely opposite to theirs we may imagine, for instance, with what consternation would ' Barne-Jeines'S chaste and pallid maidens round the Mirror of Venus have beheld the invasion of his Maenads and his Bassarids. The

Pre-Raphaelites went on producing beauty, whereas Swinburne devoted himself too much to shocking stupidity and scolding ugliness. It is in this immoderation and violence that his critical prose loses force. In his essay on Charles Dickens his ecstasy of adoration is fanatical, and woe to any who ventured to find the minutest flaw in Dickens's splendour. George Henry Lewes permitted himself to make the perfectly sound criticism that Dickens exaggerates, upon which Swinburne, without any reasoned refutation, merely called him a chattering dunce, a malignant booby, a smirking scribbler, a consummate quack, and the ugliest of all human beings except " his consort George Eliot." With a parody of alliteration ruinous to prose and an infallibility ruinous to serious criticism, he lays down that any dissentient from himself speaks from " purblind perversity of prepossession " and scribbles " rancorous and ribald obloquy." That is sonorous, fine-sounding stuff, but it proves nothing. Swin- burne was always in an ecstasy and a rage, and in his great armoury of literary weapons there was never the rapier of humour, only bludgeons and bastinadoes. He lacked, too, the detachment of the real critic : Matthew Arnold, for instance, whom he once fervently admired, wrote in a letter to his mother that he had met " a pseudo-Shelley called Swinburne." In consequence Mr. Arnold as a poet ceased to exist, and became a Triton among minnows, self-centred and complacent, and a pseudo-Wordsworth. Again, Swin- burne got it into his head that George Eliot had inspired a trumpery journalistic attack on him, and so she was " an Amazon thrown sprawling over the crupper of her spavined and spur-galled Pegasus." Whistler offended him, and Swinburne's radiant appreciation of his art shining in the poem, " Before a Mirror," was superseded by a most senseless attack. Walt Whitman, to whom he had addressed one of the noblest of his odes, became a poet of the class of Ebenezer Elliott, and his goddess " a Hottentot wench under the influence of cantharides and adulterated rum." To this want of detachment there had now been added the influence of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton. He thought Whistler " a bit of a charlatan," and persuaded Swinburne to write this deplorable attack on him, and he disliked Whitman "most heartily."

The history of Mr. Watts-Dunton's ascendency over the poet presents a most puzzling problem. In 1879 Swinburne was in a very bad way—financially, physically, and mentally— and Mr. Watts-Dunton, lovingly but firmly, took him out of London and put him for the rest of his life in a cage at Putney. (Putney ! The very word is like a knell.) For thirty years Swinburne lived there with his rescuer, the manner of his days ordained for him, a walk in the morning, a siesta after lunch, sober work after siesta and early to bed. Under this unexciting regime his health grew robust, but the same vigilance kept from him almost all human intellectual influences save that supplied by the author of Aylwin. " Retro Bohemia " was the edict, and Bohemia comprised all the ferment and movement of the day. Perhaps, as Sir Edmund Gosse suggests, Swinburne's mental growth, so precocious and prodigious, had already 'ceased, but if there was any vital cell still holding the seed of fire, Putney was the very thing to extinguish it. No one would dream of denying the devotion of Mr. Watts-Dunton and its admirable physical results, but few would dare to deny that this ascendency of his, this bird-cage in which, to the practical exclusion of any freedom in social intercourse, the two hopped chirping from perch to perch, was a disastrous mental inter- ment, and passports to and from the Pines were not very easily obtained. The oddest part of all is that Swinburne never attempted to revolt ; the arch-rebel now hugged his chains, and walked and read and wrote and was very well. But Ichabod, Ichabod, the glory had departed; and throughout those years he lit not another star in his shining firmament. Yet already it was" thick-inlaid with patines of bright gold," and as long as the English language lives we shall listen entranced to their angelic harmonies.

E. F. BENSON.