His face turn west and shoreward through the glad
Swift revel of the waters golden-clad,
And back with light reluctant heart be bore
Across the broad-backed rollers in to shore.

As examples of Mr Swinburne's later sea poetry, we may mention those magnificent ballads, ‘In the Water' and 'On the Verge.'

Since the publication of A Midsummer Holiday Mr Swinburne has devoted himself mainly to poetic drama in the Elizabethan manner. In Marino Faliero (1885) he handled with great power the well-known story of the octogenarian doge of Venice. Faliero is a magnificent conception, and the stainless loves of Bertuccio and the Duchess are as pure and as fresh as the loves of Dante and Beatrice. It is indeed a curious error to imagine that the Swinburnian conception of love is solely or even mainly sensual. The truth is that in Mr Swinburne's poetry many phases of the love-passion are found. No doubt he seems to accentuate the sensual as distinguished from the sentimental side of love; and the explanation is to be sought not only in the poet's passionate temperament, but in his saturation with Greek poetry, in which love is an animal appetite like hunger or thirst. Further, his Elizabethanism leads him into direct locutions which are at variance with the modern taste for veiled suggestion. Stress is often laid on his Gallicism, but in point of fact his temper is utterly different from the Gallic temper, preferring plain, downright Saxon to salacious euphemism and suggestive periphrasis. The present literary convention is not likely to be permanent, and it must be said that Mr Swinburne's fearless candour is broader and larger and in essence more wholesome than the mawkish sentimentalism of the fading

Victorian age. Chastelard is a poignantly true study of a young man fascinated by the selfish cynicism of a beautiful woman. Everybody knows that there are women who dominate men not by their nobility, but by their ignobility-women whose charm is a repulsive attraction. But Mr Swinburne shows other aspects of love. It would be hard to match in our literature the extreme exaltation and heroic purity of the erotic passages in Tristram. Here the love-passion is shown in its healthiest and wholesomest phase, a phase which stands midway between Greek animalism and Victorian sentiment. Since Marino Faliero Mr Swinburne has published three plays: Locrine (1887), The Sisters (1892), and Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards (1899). In addition to the volumes of poems already mentioned, he has published Songs of Two Nations (1875); Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878); Poems and Ballads: Third Series (1889); Songs of the Springtides (1880); Studies in Song (1880); The Heptalogia, or the Seven against Sense (1880); A Century of Roundels (1883); Astrophel (1894); The Tale of Balen (1896). He has also made a volume of Selections from his poetical works.

His prose

works include George Chapman: a Critical Essay (1875); A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877); A Study of Shakespeare (1880); Miscellanies (1886); A Study of Victor Hugo (1886); A Study of Ben Jonson (1889); Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894). He has also contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica and to the leading monthly reviews many valuable critical monographs and essays. In his numerous studies of the Elizabethan dramatists he has done more than any writer save Charles Lamb to revive interest in the great poets so long overshadowed by the genius of Shakespeare.

In many respects, indeed, Mr Swinburne is more Elizabethan than Victorian. Like Ben Jonson he is 'passionately kind and angry,' and like Marlowe he is all air and fire.' No modern poet is more utterly born and more utterly made a poet. There seems to be no thread of prose in his nature. His imagination is perpetually incandescent, his poetic energy always at white heat. He sees everything in terms of poetry. He has no gift of prose compromise or secular conciliation. His intellect is worked by his imagination so swiftly that it seems uncontrollable; but in reality he is a perfect master of his vehicle. It is possible for a poet to be too poetical for his time, for in all save the golden ages of literature, poetry is a foreign language to four men out of five and to nine critics out of ten. Learning does not endow a man with the power of knowing poetry when he sees it. That is why so much modern criticism is preoccupied with the unpoetic elements of poetry -with its philosophy, its morality, its message to the age, its anecdotes, and so forth. Before poetry like Mr Swinburne's didactic criticism is dumb, searching in vain for the facile novelette, the easy platitude, the pious truism. He is a singer and nothing but a singer :

He sings in music for the music comes.

In Tennyson's just phrase, 'he is a reed through which all things blow into music.' This, far from being a defect, is a unique power, for he has made poetry almost as sensuously emotional and imaginative as music. It is with music that his poetry ought to be compared, for it affects the intellectual feelings not merely through the logical faculty, but mainly through the aural imagination. It rolls along in vast volumes of subtly modulated melody, in long, undulant waves of rhythmic harmony that elate and exalt, trouble and charm, thrill and enthral the mind. It enters the soul not by the avenue of the eye, but by the avenue of the ear; not like the coloured song of Milton or Shakespeare, Keats or Wordsworth, but like the symphonies and sonatas, the operas and oratorios, of the great musical composers. Other poetry may be read by the eye: his must be read by the ear. Unfortunately, in modern times the habit of reading poetry aloud has died out, and most men in the presence of poetry are like the deaf at a concert or the colour-blind in a picture gallery. That is why

the magnitude of Mr Swinburne's creative energy is unsuspected by students trained in the old didactic school. Bewildered by his manifold music, they charge him with masking his intellectual poverty under sonorous verbiage. It is strange that a fallacy so uncritical should pass for criticism. In sheer intellectual power of the imagination Mr Swinburne is surpassed by none of his contemporaries. The fact that his intellect expresses itself in so many new metrical forms proves rather than disproves its strength: for in his best work the conquest of sense is not less complete than the conquest of sound; the mastery of mind is as triumphant as the mastery of music. The quality of intellectual imagination displayed in 'Atalanta,' 'Erechtheus,' 'Tristram,' ' Hertha,' 'Tiresias,' 'The Hymn to Proserpine,' 'The Hymn of Man,' 'The Eve of Revolution,' 'Ave Atque Vale' (a threnody as fine as Lycidas or Adonais), 'The Triumph of Time,' 'A Forsaken Garden,' 'Hesperia,' 'The Garden of Proserpine,' 'By the North Sea,' 'A Nympholept,' A Song in Time of Order,' 'Itylus,' 'Jacobite Song,'' Cor Cordium,' ' Ilicet,' 'Christmas Antiphones,' and in scores of lyrics, songs, and sonnets, is of the first order. Full justice has never been done to the intellectual subtlety of such a poem as 'Hertha :'

I am that which began;

Out of me the years roll; Out of me God and man;

I am equal and whole;

God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.

Beside or above me,

Nought is there to go; Love or unlove me,

Unknow me or know,

I am that which unloves me and loves; I am stricken,

and I am the blow.

I the mark that is missed,

And the arrows that miss,

I the mouth that is kissed
And the breath in the kiss,

The search, and the sought, and the seeker, the soul and the body that is.

But what thing dost thou know,

Looking Godward, to cry

'I am I, thou art thou,

I am low, thou art high'?

I am thou, whom thou seekest to find him; find thou but thyself, thou art I.

No doubt it is Mr Swinburne's diffuseness which has engendered the critical delusion that he is mainly a gorgeous verbalist. But although in one sense he is the most diffuse of poets, in another sense he is the least diffuse. Few poets can pack an iambic line more cunningly and more closely, with more magical feats of elision, or beat more music into a sonnet or a song. As has been pointed out, he is diffuse only in anapæstic and dactylic metres. The true test of the Swinburnian

lyric is not verbal parsimony, but musical richness; for here it is music that expresses emotion-music and music alone, music often without colour, music often without pictorial flashes. Of course there are unvitalised tracts in Swinburne, as in all poets, where the music expresses no emotion, and then, no doubt, as Mr Myers said, we must read the emotion into the music. But true criticism must recognise that diffuseness is as legitimate in anapæsts and dactyls as it is illegitimate in iambs. For it has been shown that, owing to the dominance in English of the consonants over the vowels, the anapæstic line, with its crowded syllables, becomes 'pebbly' unless the corners are bevelled off by liquids; and the available words containing 1's and r's being limited, the expression of the thought must be manipulated in order to include them. The result is that the poet in his search for music diverges from concise and direct utterance, deliberately sacrificing verbal brevity to verbal music. Another charge brought against Mr Swinburne concerns his undoubtedly excessive use of alliteration. Here again the explanation is to be found in the laws governing anapæstic and dactylic verse; for if daring liquidation is necessary to oil the clogging consonants, daring alliteration is necessary to drive them along. Therefore criticism must recognise that bold alliteration is as legitimate in anapæsts and dactyls as it is illegitimate in iambs. If we study, for example, one of the loveliest choruses in Atalanta, the hymn to Artemis, we shall see that its rhythmical beauty could not have been achieved without liquidation and alliteration:

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain

Fills the shadows and windy places

With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;

And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,

For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,

The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Come with bows bent, and with emptying of quivers, Maiden most perfect, lady of light,

With a noise of winds and many rivers,

With a clamour of waters, and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
Round the feet of the day, and the feet of the night.
Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
Fold our hands round our knees, and cling?

O that man's heart were as fire and could spring to her,
Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!
For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player,
For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
And the south-west wind and the west wind sing.
For winter's rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
The full streams feed on flowers of rushes,
Ripe grasses trammel a travelling foot,

The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes
From leaf to flower and flower to fruit;
And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire,
And the oat is heard above the lyre,
And the hoofèd heel of a satyr crushes

The chestnut husk at the chestnut-root.
And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,
Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
The Mænad and the Bassarid;

And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide,
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
The god pursuing, the maiden hid.

The ivy falls with the Bacchanal's hair
Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes;
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare

Her bright breast shortening into sighs ;
The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves,
But the berried ivy catches and cleaves
To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare
The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies.

It may seem superfluous to praise the metrical splendour of this immortal lyric, but one may pardonably dwell on the magical effect produced by the introduction of the couplet after the fourth line; by the choice of a dactyl for the opening of the second stanza instead of the anapæst used for the opening of the first stanza; and by the thunderous reiteration of the word 'fire' in the fourth line of the third stanza.

It must be admitted that in rhymed iambic measures Mr Swinburne is often too diffuse and too alliterative. This is due partly to his training in dancing metres, and partly to his undoubted passion for sacrificing the demands of the eye to the demands of the ear. His habit of allowing the rhyme to master his imagination continually retards the imaginative περιπέτεια :

For rhyme the rudder is of verses,

With which, like ships, they steer their courses.

Indeed, it must be said that no great poet has ever defied so defiantly the maxim, Ars est celare artem. He seems to reveal his art as carefully as other poets conceal it. But it would be absurd to suppose that he does so by chance and not by design. He doubtless deliberately accepts the loss in illusion for the sake of the gain in music. It is uncritical, therefore, to censure as insincerity what is evidently a deliberate means towards a definite end. The question whether the end justifies the means is a question of ear as well as eye; for undoubtedly undue servility to the eye tends towards metrical monotony as great as the metrical monotony produced by undue servility to the ear.

On the whole, it must be allowed that Mr Swinburne, by vindicating the stifled claims of lyrical music, has enriched our poetry with an almost inexhaustible variety of new rhythms, new metres, new measures, and new rhymes. He has, indeed, no rival as a metrical inventor. As a specimen of his extreme subtlety in this respect, it is sufficient to cite 'Super Flumina Babylonis,' one of the many grandly sonorous metrical structures which he has built upon the prose cadences of the Old Testament:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
Remembering thee,

That for ages of agony hast endured, and slept,
And wouldst not see.

Apart from its rhythmical beauty, this poem illustrates the Hebraic temper of the poet's genius. In prophetic grandeur and moral sublimity he is close of kin to the great Israelitish seers. His imaginative metempsychosis of the august Hebrew spirit is, indeed, one of the most original features of his poetry, and suggests a comparison with Milton's Hebraism which would, however, take us too far afield.

Another marvellous feat of metrical creation is the Kouμós in Atalanta, remarkable for rhythmical qualities quite different from those displayed in the poems already mentioned:

Oeneus.

Thou shouldst die as he dies

For whom none sheddeth tears;

Filling thine eyes

And fulfilling thine ears

With the brilliance of battle, the bloom and the beauty,

the splendour of spears.

Meleager.

For the dead man no home is ;

Ah, better to be

What the flower of the foam is

In fields of the sea

That the sea-waves might be as my raiment, the gulfstream a garment for me.

Would the winds blow me back?

Or the waves hurl me home?

Ah, to touch in the track

Where the pine learnt to roam

Cold girdles and crowns of the sea-gods, cool blossoms of water and foam !

In all poetry there is no funeral dirge so heavily melancholy, so sorrowfully dolorous, so plangently solemn. The rhythms and the rhymes rise and fall like the slow feet of mourners, and the syllables beat with the very pulse of grievous despair. Another kind of metrical invention is found in 'The Eve of Revolution,' where the magnificent sublimity of the music is heightened and deepened by the splendid leitmotif of the trumpet that breaks up the night. Tremendous are the metrical antitheses and antiphones in Tristram of Lyonesse, notably in the book entitled 'Iseult at Tintagel,' where the wind and the sea chant a terrible choral accompaniment to the anguish of the Queen:

And swordlike was the sound of the iron wind,
And as a breaking battle was the sea. . . .
And as a full field charging was the sea,
And as the cry of slain men was the wind.
And all her soul was as the breaking sea,
And all her heart anhungered as the wind. .
And all their past came wailing in the wind,
And all their future thundered in the sea. . .
And as men's anguish clamouring cried the wind,
And as God's anger answering rang the sea. . . .
And like a world's cry shuddering was the wind,
And like a God's voice threatening was the sea.
And like man's heart relenting sighed the wind,
And as God's wrath subsiding sank the sea.
There is a perpetual play and counterplay of
symbolical imagery throughout the poem. The
leitmotif of tragic passion appears at the close of
the first book, 'The Sailing of the Swallow':

Their heads neared and their hands were drawn in one,
And they saw dark, though still the unsunken sun
Far through fine rain shot fire into the south;
And their four lips became one burning mouth.

And at the end, when Iseult steps on shore and finds Tristram dead, it resumes the whole tragedy of their tragic love :

And ere her ear might hear her heart had heard,
Nor sought she sign for witness of the word;

But came and stood above him newly dead,
And felt his death upon her, and her head
Bowed, as to reach the spring that slakes all drouth,
And their four lips became one silent mouth.

In many respects Tristram of Lyonesse must be regarded as Mr Swinburne's masterpiece. It is the noblest lyrical epic' in our literature. In it the heroic couplet is transformed from the cold artificial cadence of Dryden and Pope into a grandly sonorous and sinuous rhythmical life, full of cunningly linked harmonies and anapæstic undulations more nearly resembling the Homeric hexameter than any of the innumerable attempts to reproduce the strong-winged music of Homer,' and at the same time approximating very closely to the fluent continuity of blank verse. Where, for example, can such a passage as the description of Tristram rowing be matched?

And while they sat at speech as at a feast,
Came a light wind fast hardening forth of the east
And blackening till its might had marred the skies;
And the sea thrilled as with heart-sundering sighs
One after one drawn, with each breath it drew,
And the green hardened into iron blue,
And the soft light went out of all its face.
Then Tristram girt him for an oarsman's place
And took his oar and smote, and toiled with might
In the east wind's full face and the strong sea's spite
Labouring; and all the rowers rowed hard, but he
More mightily than any wearier three.
And Iseult watched him rowing with sinless eyes
That loved him but in holy girlish wise
For noble joy in his fair manliness

And trust and tender wonder; none the less
She thought if God had given her grace to be
Man, and make war on danger of earth and sea,
Even such a man she would be; for his stroke
Was mightiest as the mightier water broke,
And in sheer measure like strong music drave
Clean through the wet weight of the wallowing wave,
And as a tune before a great king played

For triumph was the tune their strong strokes made,
And sped the ship through with smooth strife of oars
Over the mid sea's grey foam-paven floors,
For all the loud breach of the waves at will.
So for an hour they fought the storm out still,
And the shorn foam spun from the blades, and high
The keel sprang from the wave-ridge, and the sky
Glared at them for a breath's space through the rain.

Or take the great couplet in the description of
Tristram's last fight:

But on the slayer exulting like the flame
Whose foot foreshines the thunder Tristram came.
Or the sunset in Joyous Gard:

So that day

They communed, even till even was worn away,
Nor aught they said seemed strange or sad to say,
But sweet as night's dim dawn to weariness.
Nor loved they life or love for death's sake less,
Nor feared they death for love's or life's sake more.
And on the sounding soft funereal shore

They, watching till the day should wholly die,
Saw the far sea sweep to the far grey sky,
Saw the long sands sweep to the long grey sea.
And night made one sweet mist of moor and lea,
And only far off shore the foam gave light,
And life in them sank silent as the night.

Or Iseult's piteous prayer:

Yea, though deep lips and tender hair be thinned,
Though cheek wither, brow fade, and bosom wane,
Shall I change also from this heart again
To maidenhood of heart and holiness?
Shall I more love thee, Lord, or love him less-
Ah miserable! though spirit and heart be rent,
Shall I repent, Lord God? shall I repent?
Nay, though thou slay me! for herein I am blest,
That as I loved him yet I love him best-
More than mine own soul or thy love or thee,
Though thy love save and my love save not me.

Or the large imagery in the lines telling how
Tristram-

Let all sad thoughts through his spirit sweep As leaves through air or tears through eyes that weep Or snowflakes through dark weather: and his soul, That had seen all those sightless seasons roll One after one, wave over weary wave, Was in him as a corpse is in its grave.

Or this flash of romantic glamour :

And like the moan of lions hurt to death
Came the sea's hollow noise along the night.

Or this troubling picture of the queen :
And all that strange hair shed
Across the tissued pillows, fold on fold
Innumerable, incomparable, all gold.

The failure of modern poets to raise blank verse to the Shakespearian or to the Miltonic height suggests that the Swinburnian heroic couplet may be more suited to the genius of a language which craves for the rich emphasis of rhyme. Before Tristram was written our poets assumed, perhaps too hastily, that the heroic couplet was an artificial form incapable of being made ductile and flexible. Tristram overthrew that assumption, and perhaps the Tristram couplet may be still further developed by poets who cannot build the loftier harmonies of blank verse. It is, indeed, a pity that Mr Swinburne has not continued an experiment so fruitful.

In conclusion, it may be well to clear away certain uncritical ideas with regard to Mr Swinburne's religious poems. It is absurd to assume that, because he scourges the crimes of Christless Christianity, he is therefore blind to the moral grandeur of Christ. Now and again an ignorant and illiterate person speaks of such a poem as 'Before a Crucifix '—a vindication of Christ against theological caricatures of Christ-as if it were an attack on Christ Himself! It would indeed be strange if a poet who has drawn his inspiration so largely from the Bible were unable to realise

its ethical splendour. It is because he realises it more intensely than some of its professional interpreters that he perceives the paradox of an unchristian Christianity—

Of Christian creeds that spit on Christ.

His conception of Christ is summed up in his sonnet On the Russian Persecution of the Jews,' with its prophetic appeal :

Face loved of little children long ago,

...

Head hated of the priests and rulers then, . .
Say was not this thy passion, to foreknow

In death's worst hour the works of Christian men? There is really no deep difference between the Pantheism of Browning and the 'Pananthropism' of Swinburne; and the spiritual interpretation of the Incarnation brings the most liberal theologians very close to the Swinburnian conception of the divinity of man. It is not a paradox, therefore, but a platitude to say that Mr Swinburne, far from being irreligious, is one of the most religious poets of our time. Faults he has, but they are superficial faults of taste and judgment rather than deep flaws of the spirit; and the day is coming when it will be universally acknowledged that he has pursued his artistic aims with a high nobility of soul and with a lofty faith in the spiritual future of humanity.

JAMES DOUGLAS.

Thomas Hardy.

Thomas Hardy, one of the greatest novelists of the period, was born at Upper Bockhampton near Dorchester, 2nd June 1840. He was brought up and practised as an architect, gaining in 1863 the prize and medal of the Institution of British Architects and Sir William Tite's prize for architectural design. His intention was to become an architect, and his earliest work in print is an account of the building of a house, published in Chambers's Journal in 1865. But he gradually became absorbed in literature, and from the beginning of his career till now he has steadily risen in the estimation alike of critics and the public. Always a diligent student, he was in his early years deeply impressed by the poetry of Crabbe. The Dorsetshire poems of his friend and neighbour, the Rev. William Barnes, were also favourites, and he has written more than one critical appreciation of these, remarkable for depth and subtlety. Mr Hardy, who has resided for many years at Max Gate, Dorchester, has had no public life, and has jealously guarded his privacy. But on various occasions he has spoken frankly of his own intention in his novels, partly in his interesting prefaces and partly in occasional replies to critics. He has removed the thin veil which hangs over the scenery of his fiction. Mr Hardy's first novel, Desperate Remedies, was published anonymously in 1871. Though it had no popular success, its great power was recognised by the critics, notably