music, how does the soldier and trumpeter of the new day remember that he is a lover too?

The originality and the individual weight of the poem called Hertha in this book have been often remarked upon since Swinburne's critic, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, the Theodore Watts' of those days, first underscored its lines in red as first giving voice to the spirit of the new cosmogony which Swinburne was to develop in after years, and as being the only poem abreast of the most advanced thought of the time. It brings us within sight of the region which the poet was to occupy in his last years, in which nature, the cordial earth and her kindred elements, were to be more to him than human nature except in regard to children in all its dramatic life and colour.

But on the shelf Bothwell succeeds Songs before Sunrise, and in this magnificently impossible drama, his drame épique as he termed it in the dedication to Victor Hugo-the poem which like Spenser's Faerie Queene, no man reads right through, and the play which no theatre will ever play-Swinburne I believe took his revenge on the public, much as Browning did with Sordello. Nevertheless, a play written with a strong hand, in which the minds of men are better expressed than they are themselves, considered as dramatic forces. They speak too often in lofty monotone; the hands may be the hands of Bothwell or Darnley; the voice is always Swinburne's. Mary Queen of Scots is most euphuist when she is most moved : a mistake in art. What are those lines in Act 2, sc. xii?

Why should love

Have not the force to pluck but twelve hours back,
And twice consume and twice consummate life,
Twice crowned and twice confounded?

But the blank verse is often magnificent, and one of the best dreams ever wrought into the woof of tragedy is Darnley's dream in Act 2, sc. xix. (Yes, actually scene nineteen!) Since no one reads Bothwell now, let us quote half the passage to show what the irresponsible reader misses:

I dreamed this bed here was a boat adrift
Wherein one sat with me who played and sang,
Yet of his cittern I could hear no note
Nor in what speech he sang inaudibly,

But watched his working fingers and quick lips

As with a passionate and loathing fear,

And could not speak nor smite him; and methought

That this was David; and he knew my heart,

How fain I would have smitten him, and laughed

As 'twere to mock my helpless hands and hate.
So drove we toward a rock whereon one sat
Singing, that all the highest air of heaven

"It forecasts the new nature-worship which is beginning to assert itself as the religion of the twentieth century."

Was kindled into light therewith, and shone
As with a double dawn; stars east and west
Lightened with love to hear her, and the sky
Brake in red bloom as leaf-buds break in spring,
But these bore fires for blossoms: then awhile
My heart too kindled and sprang up and sang
And made sweet music in me, to keep time
With that swift singing; then as fire drops down
Dropped, and was quenched, and in joy's stead I felt
Fear ache in me like hunger; and I saw

These were not stars nor overhead was heaven,

But a blind vault more thick and gross than earth,
The nether firmament that roofs in hell,

And those hot lights were of lost souls, and this
The sea of tears and fire below the world

That still must wash and cleanse not of one curse

The far foul strands with all its wandering brine.

Bothwell was half written in London, in the poet's rooms in Great James Street, and while he was living its life, as he had written his play, with a characteristically reckless expense of nervous energy. He studied closely the town, delighting in its streets, its playhouses, its queerest haunts from Solferino's' to the Coal Hole.' We know how he went to the Marston nights, much favoured of young poets and critics; Noctes Ambrosianae that began at twelve and went on till daylight broke in on the late debaters. He became, because of his unconventional personal effect and his joyous indifference to public opinion, the scapegoat of the aesthetic movement, to whom every myth of Bohemia attached itself. Villon's companions and Marlowe's cronies were his, according to the lurid legend: he ate strange flesh, drank blood, spat fire, and read the works of Jeremy Taylor in bed at half-past three in the afternoon. This is life down in a city with a vengeance. 'But bless you, it's dear-it's dear!' to quote one of his favourite books of those days, Browning's Men and Women.

The wonder is that his highly-strung, over-susceptible frame, whose nerves seemed to have been fed on quicksilver, ever stood it. As a matter of fact his constitution did not stand it. Judging by what his shrewd and wise physician in Welbeck Street, Dr. George Bird, who often saw him in those days, said of him, I gather that he was in danger of hopeless neurasthenia when he left London in 1879.

All the while he was maintaining his art with an apparently undiminished flow of books. His novel, A Year's Letters, was running through The Tatler in 1876–7; his Essays and Studies, full of characteristically extravagant appreciation and daring heresy, appeared in 1875, and the same year saw his essay on George Chapman. In the former volume, his first real prose testament, he showed not only his love of those poets, his chosen masters, who were gone, but a generous zeal for the work of his contemporaries. In his tribute to Coleridge, and in other vehement essays, he uttered some of those 3 T

VOL. LXV-No. 388

sayings which became proverbial and passed into the Victorian currency. In its pages he arrived at his favourite division of the Titans and the Olympians: Sometimes a supreme poet is both at once such above all men is Aeschylus : so also Dante, Michel Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Hugo, are gods at once and giants; they have the lightning as well as the light of the world, and in hell they have commands as in heaven; they can see in the night as by day.'

:

In the same statement of his dogmatic idolatry it was that he challenged Matthew Arnold's famous and perverse adjudication upon the claims of Shelley; and said that Byron was a singer who could not sing,' while 'Shelley outsang all poets on record but some two or three throughout all time. . . . He was alone the perfect singingGod; his thoughts, words, deeds, all sang together.' This is transcendent praise; but the appreciation of Hugo's books, L'Homme qui Rit and L'Année Terrible, is carried a pitch beyond it. Once more,' he said with the prostration of a devotee, we receive from the hands of our supreme poet a book full of light and music; but a book written in tears and blood and characters of flame.' Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems, William Morris's Life and Death of Jason, Arnold's New Poems, and John Ford for one older author, help to make up the book, the most exorbitant record of the artistic enthusiasms and literary ecstasies of a young poet to be had in the language.

However, in 1875, when Essays and Studies appeared he had already made the acquaintance of an encyclopedic fellow critic, who was, as we shall hear, destined considerably to affect his mind as time went on; and four years later he went to live with him close to Wimbledon Common. The first prose-book he wrote there was his Study of Shakespeare, and it was written while he was revolving his play of Mary Stuart. But in 1880, too, came his Thalassius, the first of the Songs of the Springtides, in which we seem to hear him definitely renouncing London and its fitful fever. Easy to see that it is the poet himself who is receiving his sea-baptism in the close of the poem, and listening to the old great voice of the old good time.' This too is part of the autobiography written intermittently and with varying emphasis in all his books that are most likely to count in the end, being lyrical in essence. We shall find it often referring after this to the remarkable friendship that was to colour all his second period, lasting from the year of Thalassius until his death. A friend, too, of George Borrow's and Rossetti's, and an anonymous critic of weight, Mr. Theodore Watts(-Dunton), was an evolutionist among the Victorian aesthetes, who had a theory all his own, and could prove to Rossetti that his inspiration was not really pre-Raphaelite, and could offer to Swinburne the post of lay clerk of nature in his new cosmogony. He acted as a conductor of the new ideas which Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Huxley and others were then busily expounding; and painted the way from a mere eclectic aestheticism to a faith in which a passion for

the sea and a sense of the joy of earth were not incidental, but dedemanded by ideal logic. This seems to have given Swinburne's imagination a new impetus : it resolved some of the erratic atoms in his make-up, and gave them a constructive nucleus. It is not necessary to apply this test to each of his books in turn. If his imagination had run riot in youth, out of exuberance and wantonness of spirit, it did not fail him now that he had passed the dangerous age, thirty-nine, that so often kills the lyric impulse in poets. With him the energy remained, apparently unabated. Take his Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor, and note at the thirty-eighth of the complex sixteen-line stanzas, some of which seem only to repeat the old figures and the accustomed effects and images, how the Tuscan motive lifts the melody.

Clothed as with tenderest weft of Tuscan air. . . .

The new ideas above referred to are the ideas, it may be said, that have tended and are tending to destroy the romantic spirit. But Swinburne, born a poet and made a romanticist in his salad days, could not forego his birthright: and as it happened his new guide, philosopher and friend was a romanticist too who could show the two spirits not incompatible. Every great English poet has touched, or longed to treat at one time or another, Celtic romance. Swinburne had fallen under its charm in his turn, and the spell was that of the magic of Iseult, the Essylt of the Welsh tales, the Isolde of Wagner ; but the poem is inspired by the goddess Rhianon too.

Long before, reading Boccaccio, and searching for a vehicle in which to make Italian romance run delicately in English verse, the poet had tried and found good Dryden's narrative couplet. The Two Dreams, in the first series of 'Poems and Ballads,' is the prelusive strain to the later music of Tristram of Lyonesse. But the pace of the first is but tardy compared with the poem of 1881-2:

Within this house a righteous lord abode,
Ser Averardo; patient of his mood,
And just of judgment; and to child he had
A maid so sweet that her mere sight made glad
Men sorrowing, and unbound the brows of hate;
And where she came, the lips that pain made strait
Waxed warm and wide, and from untender grew
Tender as those that sleep brings patience to.
Such long locks had she, that with knee to chin

She might have wrapped and warmed her feet therein.

Compare these with the lines that paint Iseult in the opening of the later romance, The Sailing of the Swallow, and see how magically he had learnt to surcharge with melody the same close couplets. The lavish music and sumptuous colour of the love-passages in this romance of Cornwall and Brittany have often been praised. There lay indeed the very rapture and self-indulgence of its writer's

sensuous art. But the scene at the close where Tristram lies wounded, and in his despair confers with the other Iseult of Brittany, shows a rarer control of the lyric-epic instrument.

In Tristram of Lyonesse Swinburne had consciously gathered all his powers up for a decisive achievement, and he excelled himself in writing it. He had seen the mastersingers, his contemporaries, one after another take up Celtic romance, and deal finely and accordantly with it after their manner. But he was not quite satisfied with any of their modern settings. Certainly he did not find the idyllic grace of the Idylls of the King to his mind. But this very dissatisfaction with Tennyson's method only helped to quicken his own artistic desire to deal with the stories told by Malory and the French taletellers. Matthew Arnold's delightful Tristram poem, which he rated much higher, stirred in him a finer spirit of emulation, and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, one of the few things in modern music that had appealed to him-for he had little ear for music apart from verseserved to decide the impulse. His unaffected delight at the triumphant accomplishment of the theme may be read in the sonnet of dedication he prefaced to it:

Life stands crowned

Here with the best one thing it ever found,

As of my soul's best birthdays dawns the third.

Whether it was before writing Tristram or after that he went with Principal Jowett to Cornwall, and visited Tintagel and the sea scenes that figure in the romance drawn from that wild coast, I am not sure. Poets have sometimes been content to figure first the scenes in art that they have gone to nature to confirm or not afterwards. If this were taken to imply that Swinburne did not study, and for that matter too paint, his chosen subjects in plein air, the suggestion would be libellous. He lived half his days out of doors, and what he did not know about some of the wilder coasts of England, north and south, would not be worth recovering. And one of the essential qualities of Tristram comes of the glorious conceit of the sea and the wilder elements as enlarging the wild passions of

men.

Tristram was written yesterday, as it might seem, for a generation in literature is like a day. But a change in the spirit of poetry and in the current of thought has come about since then, and one is not sure how they affect the achievements of a generation ago. The importance of the romance in Swinburne's history cannot be overlooked because in it we see the amorist and love-romancer passing at recurring moments into the new style romanticist, the first articles of whose faith were written by Wordsworth and Shelley. After this, his genius was more and more deliberately given over to the nature-poetry and the religious rhapsodies of earth, sea, and sky,