Come back, minaw: I wur to be your wife. 1 Tents, wagons, horses. After a while Percy returns to England and proceeds to Gypsy Dell, reaching it at the very moment when the Scollard,' maddened by jealousy on discovering that Rhona is to meet Percy that night, has drawn his knife upon the girl under the starlight by the river-bank. But the courageous girl overcomes her antagonist and hurls him into the water, where he is drowned. There are other witnesses the stars, whose reflected light, according to a gypsy superstition, writes in the water, just above where the drowned man sank, mysterious hieroglyphics legible only to a gypsy star-readersigns telling the story of the deed. For a Romany woman the penalty for marrying a Gorgio is death. Notwithstanding this, Rhona, defying all perils, marries Percy. Here is the bewitching picture of Rhona waking in the tent at dawn : The young light peeps through yonder trembling chink But Rhona cannot free her mind from forebodings, and one night when they are on the river together, she herself reads the runes of the stars : The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush-spears, The gypsies, by reading the starry signs, get, as Rhona foresaw, a knowledge of the homicide, and, inveigling her from her husband, secretly slay her. Percy, coming back to Gypsy Dell, tries vainly to find out where the gypsies have buried her. Then he flies from the dingle lest the memory of Rhona should drive him mad, and lives alone in the Alps, where he passes into the strange ecstasy, depicted in Natura Maligna,' which has been much discussed by the critics: The Lady of the Hills with crimes untold By glacier-brink she stood-by cataract-spray- My flesh would quail, but straight my soul would say: Of this awful vision Sir George Birdwood, the orientalist, wrote in the Athenæum of 5th February 1881: 'Even in its very epithets it is just such a hymn as a Hindu Puritan (Saivite) would address to Kali (“the malignant ") or Parvati ("the mountaineer"). It is to be delivered from her that Hindus shriek to God in the delirium of their fear. Finally, a magical dream comes to the anguished lover which prepares him for the true reading of 'The Promise of the Sunrise' and the revelation of Natura Benigna': Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear: I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove But when upon my neck she fell, my love, What power is this? What witchery wins my feet Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat? It is intensely interesting to the metrical student to see how in a form so novel, so concentrated, and so artistic, Rhona Boswell lives with an electric passion unrivalled save in the terse drama of the Border ballad or the 'lyrical cry' of Heine or Burns. JAMES DOUGLAS. Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in Chapel Street, Belgravia, on 5th April 1837. His father, Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne, belonged to an old Northumbrian family, and his mother, Lady Jane Henrietta, was a daughter of George, third Earl of Ashburnham. Although born in London, he was not a Londoner, for it was by chance that his birth took place at a time when his family were making a brief stay in the metropolis. His father owned a beautiful place in the Isle of Wight-East Dene, Bonchurch -together with the well-known Landslip; and his grandfather (Sir John Edward Swinburne, Bart.) resided at Capheaton, his estate in Northumberland. The two families for some years lived together, spending the summer at Capheaton and the winter at East Dene. Some of his later lyrics were written at The Orchard, a beautiful place at Niton Bay belonging to a relative. He entered Eton in his twelfth and left it in his seventeenth year. After leaving Eton he read for two years with the future Bishop Woodford. A reminiscence of his school-days appears in the Dedication to Poems and Ballads. Speaking of his verses, he says: Some sang to me dreaming in classtime, For the youngest was born of boy's pastime, In 1856 he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he joined a literary set, the chief members of which were John Nichol, T. H. Green, A. V. Dicey, G. Birkbeck Hill, and George Rankine Luke, a brilliant young student who was drowned (not unlike Lycidas') while swimming in the Isis. Other contemporaries were Sir Michael HicksBeach and Lord Bryce of Dechmont. Four contributions by Mr Swinburne appeared in the Undergraduate Papers (1857-58), a publication edited by John Nichol, who has described it as being 'to our set what The Germ was to Rossetti's.' Although in 1858 he took the Taylorian Prize for French and Italian, and a second-class in classical moderations, Mr Swinburne left Oxford in 1860 without taking a degree, and shortly afterwards published at his own expense his first volume of poetry, The Queen Mother and Rosamund (1860), two Shakespearian plays full of dramatic fire and poetic presage; but although its promise was recognised by some literary men, the book fell dead. In 1861 Mr Swinburne spent with his parents a few weeks in Italy. At that time Walter Savage Landor was living at Fiesole. Being already an ardent Landorian, Mr Swinburne had brought with him a letter of introduction to Landor from Lord Houghton (then Monckton Milnes), and the two poets met four or five times, the young generation mingling with the old : And with the white the gold-haired head During the next few years Mr Swinburne contri- Death laughs, breathing close and relentless And delicate dust. No prophet or preacher has painted the agony and anguish of sin more remorselessly than Mr Swinburne. With regard to the metrical structure of 'Dolores,' it is interesting to note that it is based on Byron's 'Stanzas to Augusta' ('Though the day of my destiny's over'). By truncating the last line of the stanza Mr Swinburne turned the Byronic jingle into a masterpiece of rhythmical music. In Poems and Ballads Mr Swinburne also showed his consummate mastery of the aerial lyric, the lyric spun out of rainbow film and moonshot mist. 'A Match' is perhaps the loveliest of his fairy cobwebs of song: If love were what the rose is, If I were what the words are, That get sweet rain at noon; If you were life, my darling, And I your love were death, And hours of fruitful breath; And I were page to joy, If you were April's lady, And I were lord in May, And I were lord in May. If you were queen of pleasure, And find his mouth a rein; And I were king of pain. Many enthusiasms now came to the moulding of the poet's rich and ebullient genius, which hitherto had been shaped by the poets of Greece, by the Elizabethan dramatists, by Shakespeare, by Shelley, by Landor, and by Victor Hugo, to whom, as well as to Mazzini, he had been devoted from boyhood. Taking rooms in London, where he had many congenial friends (Rossetti, William Morris, Meredith, Burne-Jones, Whistler, Watts - Dunton), he found himself in the midst of that marvellous efflorescence of the romantic spirit, the Pre-Raphaelite movement. But his passion for liberty kept pace with his romanticism. During the long struggle for Italian unity he was the Tyrtæus of freedom. A Song of Italy had appeared in 1867, and in 1871 came that majestic liturgy of liberty, that terrible hymnal of revolution, Songs before Sunrise. Thereafter he returned to the more purely artistic inspirations which had been overshadowed by his chivalrous championship of oppressed nationalities, although in William Blake, a Critical Essay (1868), he had displayed that variety of spiritual insight, that mastery of impassioned prose, and that versatility of imaginative penetration which afterwards in so many fields enriched the treasury of criticism. The romantic mystery veiling the fame and fate of Mary Stuart had always fascinated him. The 'ancestral voices' of his Jacobite forebears had kindled in his temperament, ever thirsting after high loyalties, the fiery fealty which a star-struck dynasty even in its darkest hour had always inspired. He now returned to this alluring theme, and in Bothwell (1874) he produced the second part of his great Stuart trilogy, which he completed in Mary Stuart (1881). It is a mistake to treat Mr Swinburne's tragedies as if they had been written for the stage. They were, of course, composed in deliberate contempt for the modern theatre, in which the drama is divorced from literature. Bothwell is really a chronicle play of epic dimensions into which the poet poured all the wine he had crushed from the grapes of history. To censure it because of its length is uncritical. It is not a drama, but a dramatic chronicle, or, to use Mr Swinburne's own phrase, a 'chronicle history.' Its gigantic scale is due not to verbosity, but to the poet's determination to present not a travesty of history, but a rigidly faithful series of historical pictures and portraits. It is a monument of that nineteenth-century discovery, the historic sense. It is as if a Gardiner had turned poet in order to paint passionately vivid portraits of Mary, of Bothwell, of Darnley, of John Knox, and of the minor figures in a tragic coil of doom as awful as that of the Oresteia. Bothwell is, indeed, too opulently rich in magnificent poetry to be enjoyed by those who judge in conventions and appraise in platitudes. It would be hard to find in poetic drama passages more splendid than the dreams of Bothwell and Darnley, the speech of John Knox, and the haunting scene in Darnley's chamber on the night of his murder. The blank verse of Bothwell is notable for natural fluency, freedom from rhetoric, and sweet spontaneity. In Erechtheus (1876) Mr Swinburne resumed the attempt to recreate the form and temper of Greek tragedy which had been so irrelevantly successful in Atalanta. During the ten years of incessant energy in varied technique which had passed since he wrote Atalanta the powers of the poet had steadily strengthened and matured. Under its austere form Atalanta pulses with the luxuriant exuberance of youthful romanticism. Its arraignment of the gods and most of its choruses are really as modern in temper as Prometheus Unbound. Erechtheus is a much more serious attempt to solve the problem which has fascinated many generations of poets from Milton to Shelley, from Landor to of Matthew Arnoldthe problem resurrecting in English the soul of Greek thought and imagination. In the case of Mr Swinburne the fascination was a fascination of opposites, for no temper could be less Greek than the Swinburnian temper. But there seems to be a principle in literature which resembles the principle of sexual selection. The artist sometimes instinctively seeks for his own antithesis and hungers after victory in alien forms. All the romantic riot in Mr Swinburne's blood clamoured for Greek severity and Greek straint. Nothing is more remarkable in the phenomena of literature than this unconscious re 'Argument,' written in prose as magical as that of the Authorised Version. Or take 'Anactoria' (perhaps the pinnacle of his achievements in point of form), or 'On the Cliffs,' in which he captures the uncapturable Sapphic cadence : Bid not ache nor agony break nor master, But of all Mr Swinburne's spiritual transmigrations Erechtheus is the most wonderful. Its cold austerity of contour, its pure sanity of style, its noble patriotism, its holy maternal heroism, its magnanimity, and its clangorous songs of storm and battle are all built up into an edifice of balanced beauty and symmetrical strength. The choruses in Erechtheus will never be so popular as the choruses in Atalanta; but in perfection of form and unity of spirit it is nobler than Atalanta, and indeed nobler than any other reincarnation of Greek ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry. economy of correction. The same tendency may be seen in Browning, whose Gothic grotesquerie and barbaric formlessness were always sprawling at the feet of Greek sanity and Greek beauty. The most paradoxical feature of Mr Swinburne's Hellenism is its co-existence with his romanticism. His imagination is Protean. He assumes the very soul of a period, and for the time sings as if he were a poet of the time. At one moment he is an Elizabethan dramatist, at another a Hebrew seer, at another a French lyrist, at another a Greek poet. His mastery of multifarious styles is unparalleled. The vivid Greek verses prefixed to Atalanta are followed by the no less vivid art. After Erechtheus the romantic temper reconquered the poet's imagination, and thenceforward it maintained its ascendency. This no doubt is partly due to the influence of the closer intimacy which sprang up about this time between him and the great romantic poet and critic Mr Theodore WattsDunton. It was in 1879 that the two friends became permanent housemates at The Pines, Putney Hill. They lived together ever after. In these days when literary friendships are sometimes more perilous than literary enmities, the spectacle of a literary friendship which endured for forty years refutes a reproach which is often cast at the Republic of Letters. Though living so near London, Mr Swinburne was not of London, and his days passed serenely between the lintels of literature and life. Yet he was by no means the bookish recluse of popular legend. He saw to many friends at The Pines. He was full of physical fire and energy. A great lover of long rambles, he was seen every morning 'walking the Wimbledon postman off his legs.' He was like a boy in his hearty love for the open air. He never deigned to wear an overcoat or to carry an umbrella or wear a glove, but swung along with an elastic stride in winter and summer, in wind and snow and rain, with a gusto for all weathers as hearty as George Borrow's. He delighted in swimming with his friend, who as a boy swam at Cromer with George Borrow. The value of a comradeship so congenial in so many ways to Mr Swinburne's essentially sociable nature can hardly be exaggerated, and there can be no doubt that his genius owes much to the sympathy and the incitement of this ideal companionship. Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) was inscribed: 'To my best friend, Theodore Watts, I dedicate in this book the best I have to give him;' and to it was prefixed this beautiful sonnet : Spring speaks again, and all our woods are stirred, Shine forth and speak in season. Life stands crowned Hath time not shown, through days like waves at This truth more sure than all things else but death, That washes toward your feet these waifs of life. Assuredly the poet gave his 'best,' for besides Tristram, in which the impassioned splendour of his lyrical genius culminated, the volume contains some of his finest sonnets (including the superb cameos of the Elizabethan dramatists) and that lovely nosegay of child-songs, 'A Dark Month.' In A Midsummer Holiday (1884), which was also inscribed To Theodore Watts,' Mr Swinburne commemorated a holiday spent with his friend on the East Anglian coast. As this volume contains some of Mr Swinburne's most magnificent seaballads, a word about his passion for the sea may not be out of place. Doubtless other poets have sung the sea, but no other poet has sung it so spontaneously and so sincerely. Most of our poets, from Campbell to Kipling, regard the sea either as a stage for our naval heroes, or as material for metaphor, or as a stock-pot of sentiment, or as a reservoir of rhetoric. Even Byron addresses the ocean as if it were a public meeting. Mr Swinburne was the first poet to escape from all these artificialities and to do for the sea what Wordsworth did for the land. His clean rapture in the sea is free from literary affectation. The glorious description of Tristram swimming is written in the grandly spacious manner of the greatest poetry: And he, ere night's wide work lay all undone, And stood between the sea's edge and the sea Whose swift foot's sound shook all the towers of So clothed with might, so girt upon with joy, : And all the life that moved him seemed to aspire, Like music mild and keen as sleep and strife: |