Posthumous Poems/Preface
PREFACE
The poems which, with the help of Mr. Thos. J. Wise, I have endeavoured in the following pages to present, as far as possible, in chronological sequence, belong to the whole range of Swinburne's career as an author. The earliest was composed in 1857, the latest is dated 1907, and accordingly they cover, in their rapid and fluctuating passage, exactly half a century. Various circumstances, some of which will presently be told, though the majority have doubtless ceased to be discoverable, led to their being suppressed or forgotten, but none of them were destroyed by the poet, and of none of them have we found any evidence that he wished for their destruction. The only exception is the unsuccessful prize poem of 1858. This, there is reason to believe, Swinburne did wish, in the exasperation of disappointment, to wipe out of existence. But his father's care in concealing this innocent from the massacre of his son's juvenile verses, was justified by the merit of so remarkable a poem, which, on historical and critical grounds alike, we have determined to restore. There passed into our hands also other pieces which we have reason to believe the poet wished to suppress, or on mature reflection would have so wished. These we have not printed. Our desire has been to be loyal to his memory, and we are here giving to the world nothing but what we believe that he would consent to give if he could direct our conduct.
The principal exception to the chronological arrangement adopted in this volume is the placing at the forefront of the book the eleven border ballads which Mr. Wise was so fortunate as to discover among the MSS. which he bought in 1909 from Watts-Dunton.[1] The rough drafts of these ballads were found among MSS. of the years 1862 and 1863, and the character of the handwriting, as well as of the paper, leads us to believe that they belong to this period. With them were found several of the ballads published at last in the Third Series of Poems and Ballads (1889) but provisionally set up in type in 1877. There is no doubt that Swinburne hesitated long as to whether he should give to the public any of his more primitive border ballads. At an early age he had been attracted to this class of poetry by the study of Scott's Border Minstrelsy of 1802-3, an examination of which will show that it contains, then published for the first time, all the ballads which most powerfully affected Swinburne's imagination. "Kinmont Willie," "The Lament of the Border Widow," "Johnnie of Braidislee," and a dozen others which peculiarly attracted Swinburne were unknown until Scott printed them in the Border Minstrelsy.
But that invaluable miscellany also contained a large number of "Imitations,"' towards which Scott was only a little less lenient than had been Percy and the other editors of the eighteenth century. Both Leyden and Scott, who did so much to enlarge and to ensure our knowledge of ballad literature, continued to believe the true border volkslied to be a thing too rough for direct imitation. Modern ballads were defined by Sir Walter Scott as "supposed capable of uniting the vigorous numbers and wild fiction, which occasionally charm us in the ancient ballad, with a greater equality of versification, and elegance of sentiment, than we can expect to find in the works of a rude age." The conviction that the original ballads were barbarous productions, without art or skill of any kind, but agreeable only when polished and improved, went so far and so late that even in 1859 Robert Chambers, a very thoughtful and practised critic of their text, started the theory that all the romantic Scottish ballads had enjoyed revision by Elizabeth, Lady Wardlaw, about the year 1700. This was absurd, and the best critics perceived the fascinating beauty of texts which were manifestly antique. But still the notion persisted that a "modern" ballad must be neater, smoother and less savage than a genuine product of the old Northumbrian border.
It is doubtless to this prejudice, which was still universal sixty years ago, that we owe the fact that Swinburne's best border ballads have remained unpublished to this day. In 1862, which is the date to which we attribute "Lord Soulis" and "Lord Scales," Swinburne was in the constant society of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to whose judgment he appealed on every occasion, and to whom all his poems were recited directly they were composed. Rossetti himself was greatly interested in resuscitating this form of lyric, and in "Stratton Water" we have an example of his success in composing an "imitation" ballad of real merit. With this may be compared Swinburne's own "We were ten maidens in the green corn" and "Stand up, stand up, thou Mary Janet" of the volume of 1866. In these published ballads of Rossetti and Swinburne a great deal of the simplicity of the originals is preserved, but there is a literary pre-occupation, and something of what Sir Walter Scott meant by "elegance of sentiment." It seems to be certain that the ballads of Swinburne which we print in this collection, were regarded by Rossetti, and probably by Morris also, as too rough and bare for publication, and that only such as possessed a pre-Raphaelite colouring or costume were permitted to pass the ordeal. But Swinburne persisted in his private conviction that a kind of poetry much closer to the old rievers' and freebooters' loosely-jointed and rambling folk-poems might be attempted, and he carefully preserved the ballads which we have the privilege of publishing to-day. There can be little doubt that in such rugged pieces as "The Worm of Spindlestonheugh" and "Duriesdyke," the aboriginal Northumbrian accent is more closely reproduced than in any other "imitation" border ballad.
With regard to Swinburne's unequalled skill in reproducing the texture of style, a craft of which he has left a wide range of examples, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell tells me that William Morris, when he was dying, started making a selection of border ballads, which he declared were the finest poems in the English language, to be printed at the Kelmscott Press. The difficulties of gaps and various readings were too great for Morris in his enfeebled condition, and Mr. Cockerell suggested that the editing should be handed over to Swinburne. "Oh, no!' answered Morris, "that would never do. He would be writing-in verses that no one would be able to tell from the original stuff!" The ballads we publish to-day will show the complete justice of Morris's remark.
There is not much to be said with regard to the individual ballads or their sources in history. So far as can be discovered, no ancient ballad of "Lord Soulis" exists, but the hero, in whose legend Sir Walter Scott took a vivid interest, was a historical personage. The family name recurs frequently in the records of Scottish charters granted during the fourteenth century, and we are told that William, Lord Soulis, was one of the most powerful barons in the southwest of Scotland. He was of royal descent, and in pursuance of his claim to the Scottish throne, he conspired against Robert the Bruce. This plot was discovered by the acuteness of Lady Strathern. Lord Soulis was arrested at the head of a troop at Berwick in 1320, and, his life being spared by the King, his estates were forfeited and he was secretly confined for the rest of his years in the royal castle of Dumbarton, Probably owing to his disappearance, a legend grew up that Lord Soulis had been ignominiously executed with the King's connivance, and it was generally believed that he had been boiled to death within the Druid circle of Nine-Stone-Rig, which overlooks and slopes down to the Water of Hermitage. The cauldron in which the unfortunate Soulis was said to have been sodden was long exhibited to the credulous in Liddesdale.
What foundation there may have been for the popular belief that Lord Soulis was a wizard, and held communion with evil spirits, it is now hopeless to conjecture. John Leyden (1775-1811) put together all the rumours which he could collect in the rambling poem of "Lord Soulis" which he wrote about 1801, and which Scott afterwards annotated. Leyden caught something of the true ballad note, and he had the advantage of being himself a borderer, the descendant of small farmers long settled in Teviotdale,
Swinburne's ballad follows Leyden's in no respect, except in the indispensable particular of the boiling of Lord Soulis as a wizard. The three fair mays and the raiding of Eastness and Westness appear to be Swinburne's invention, but they follow exactly the ancient type of border minstrelsy. Everything which regarded the castle of Hermitage was romantically precious to this latest lover of Mary Queen of Scots.
What led Swinburne to the story of "Lord Scales" it is not easy to conjecture. A barony of Scales was founded in 1299, and continued to exist until 1460, when the seventh and last Lord Scales, who had been a great enemy of the common people and a supporter of Henry IV against Jack Cade at home and the Normans abroad, is said to have been murdered. The barony then fell into abeyance. But these Scaleses were a Herefordshire family, and had no special border reputation. If Swinburne intended to describe Robert, first Lord Scales, that worthy, who died in 1305, had been most active in France. The ballad of "Lord Scales" has nothing to do with the universal poison-ballad of Lord Randal. Nor has "Earl Robert" any connection with the ballad-hero whose mother poisons him because he has married Mary Florence against the mother's will. This is an instance in which Swinburne has retold a well-known ballad-legend; there are four versions of the story in Motherwell, and they all differ from Swinburne's.
But a special interest attaches to "The Worm of Spindlestonheugh," where we find Swinburne attempting to reconstruct the lost work of a real Northumbrian minstrel. There is known to have existed an authentic ballad of "The Laidley Worm of Spindlestoneheugh." When Hutchinson was writing his History of Northumberland in 1768, a local clergyman, the Reverend Robert Lamb, of Norham, communicated to him a ballad with that title, which Hutchinson printed in 1776. It has long been admitted that this was a forgery, although Lamb pretended to have copied it "from an ancient manuscript," and attributed it to an unknown medieval poet, Duncan Frasier. But there have been reported other ballads on the same subject, and it is now generally admitted that there existed, and still survived near the end of the eighteenth century, a genuine ancient ballad of "The Worm of Spindlestoneheugh." It was, moreover, the opinion of Professor Child that Lamb must have woven into his forgery a good many strands of the lost original.
Between these fragments and imitations, and Swinburne's spirited poem, there is practically no resemblance, except in the conventional description of the Worm, or fire-drake, the tradition of which seems to have been widely diffused. In the genuine ballad of "The Hagg Worm," we read—
"Word's gone cast, and word's gone west,
And word's gane over the sea,—
There's a laidler worm in Spindlestoneheughs
Will destroy the North Countree."
The metamorphosis of a beautiful maiden into a snake, dragon or "worm," the Schlangenjungfrau of Icelandic saga and Teutonic legend, is broadly disseminated. It is the subject of such famous primitive ballads as "Kemp Owyne" (or "Kempion") and "The Machrel of the Sea." Swinburne is seen here in the act of composing, on this familiar theme, a ballad in which no modern or "elegant" touch should distract a reader from believing that this was the genuine poem which is known to have once existed in connection with Bamborough Castle. The distinction between this design, and that which led Swinburne to compose the more or less pre-Raphaelite ballads of the volume of 1866, does not require emphatic statement.
The Ode to Mazzini was found after Swinburne's death, in an old copy-book, from which many leaves had already been torn, presumably by himself. Perhaps the removal of these loosened a page of the Ode to Mazzini, containing the close of Strophe IV and the whole of Strophe V, for these, unfortunately, have disappeared. From this imperfect text Mr. T. J. Wise privately printed the Ode to Mazzini, in November 1909, in an edition of only twenty copies. In 1916, however, another copy of the MS. was bequeathed by Miss Isabel Swinburne to the British Museum, which, besides giving the missing strophes, supplied several minor corrections. It had the appearance of being copied a good deal later, perhaps in a moment of revived interest about 1860. This second MS. has been followed in the present text.
It may be well to point out that at the time he wrote, and for long years to come, Swinburne seems to have had no personal knowledge of Mazzini. But he followed with ardent sympathy the propaganda of the friends of Young Italy in London, at the head of whose executive council stood the inspiring name of Walter Savage Landor.
The original MSS. contain no indication of date, and the generally rhetorical character of the poetry makes it at first sight impossible to obtain any such term, But on a close examination, one point after another becomes luminous, and we can at length, with almost perfect confidence, date the composition of this ode within a few months. The first salient observation which the reader makes is concerned with Strophe XVII, in which we learn that Poerio was still a prisoner when it was written. But Baron Carlo Poerio—whose case had been, in 1851, so eloquently brought before the English public by Gladstone, in his letters to Lord Aberdeen—was released from his prison on the "foul wild rocks" of the island of Nisida in December 1858. This fact was widely known in England, and Swinburne would certainly have learned it. Moreover, had the ode been written subsequent to January 1858, it could not but have contained some reference to the attempt of Orsini, which so greatly embarrassed the action of Mazzini and rendered the policy of Sardinia so difficult, besides thrilling Swinburne to the depths of his being.
Everything, on the other hand, points to 1857 as the year in which this ode was composed. Strophe VII, with its strange reference to the "priestly hunters," and the close of Strophe IX, are intelligible only in reference to Cavour's attempts to encourage the Papacy in its efforts, half-hearted enough, to check the violence of Austria and the guilt of Naples. In this connection, the reader of to-day may be surprised to find no acknowledgment of the services of the great "regenerator of Italy." But Swinburne, all through life, was unjust to Cavour, because of his monarchical tendencies, as were at that moment the leaders of "Young Italy," with Mazzini himself at their head. It is observable that the notion of the one and indivisible Republic, which pervades and animates Songs before Sunrise from beginnin to end, is not suggested in the Ode to Mazzini. Swinburne had not yet accepted such an idea; in 1857 his own boyish hopes were bounded, as were the more adult desires of Mazzini, by the frontiers of Italy.
The moment when the ode was written must have been early in 1857. Sardinia was provoking Austria to a violent act, so as to make war inevitable: the house of Naples was filling the cup of its iniquities; "out of a court alive with creeping things" the stiletto of Agesilao Milano had flashed on the 8th of December, 1856, but had failed to slay the detestable Bomba, a disappointment obscurely referred to in the latter part of Strophe XIII. On the 16th of March, 1857, Vienna could bear no longer the violent attacks of the Italian Press on Austrian tyranny in Lombardy, and the Ambassador withdrew from Turin. Mazzini immediately left London, where he had resided since he fled from Rome, and descended once more upon Italy. He found that distraction was rife among the friends of the Republic, and that hope was dying out, "like a forgotten tale." It was at this moment, almost without question, that Swinburne composed his Ode to Mazzini, in the hour of suspense. The careful reader will not fail to observe that the poet has not yet heard of any acts which Mazzini has performed on the soil of Italy. Had the insurrections at Genoa (June 1857) and Leghorn occurred, or had the attack on Naples, led by Pisacane, Mazzini's friend, been made, the poet must have celebrated them in his verse.
Everything, then, tends to show that Swinburne composed this ode in the Spring of 1857. He was just twenty years of age, and this was, with all its puerile shortcomings, the most powerful and accomplished work which he had written up to that time. We are, therefore, met by the question: Why did he publish it neither then, nor later? For this an answer is readily forthcoming. In 1857 he had no means of publishing anything, except the slight and imitative verses which he presently contributed to Undergraduate Papers. For that ephemeral periodical, the Ode to Mazzini was eminently unfitted. But the tide of history was running fast, and the lyric visions of 1857 were soon left high and dry on the shore of time. After the diplomatic isolation of Austria in 1858, after the war ending with the Peace of Villafranca in July 1859, after the death of Bomba and the capture of the Two Sicilies by Garibaldi in 1860, Swinburne's wild and vague aspirations became hopelessly old-fashioned, The interest of his ode was temporary, and its political purpose had ceased to exist.
Another reason why, when Swinburne became a prominent poet, he could not publish the Ode to Mazzini, may be found in its form. It is an irregular ode, of the Pindaresque sort, on the model which was invented by Cowley, and constantly employed during the close of the seventeenth century, but repudiated, in a brilliant and learned essay, by Congreve, as founded on a total misconception of the laws of Pindar's prosody. Later, Swinburne perceived the falsity of the "Pindaresque" ode, and his mature poems are types of disciplined evolution. There were therefore reasons of various kinds, external and internal, why the Ode to Mazzini, if not printed soon after it was written, could not be printed by Swinburne at all.
Of Swinburne's undergraduate poems some other examples have been preserved, and will be found in the ensuing pages. In 1857 the subject given at Oxford for the Newdigate Prize was "The Temple of Janus." Both John Nichol and Swinburne were competitors, and each declared that the other was sure to be successful. It was, however, awarded to Philip Stanhope Worsley of Corpus (1835-1866), afterwards a distinguished translator of Homer. Swinburne and Nichol went to hear Worsley read his poem at Commemoration, and the late Mr. Pringle Nichol obliged me with this anecdote. The two unsuccessful poets were not indisposed to be critical, when Nichol, hearing the line—
"Stars in their courses fought the fight of Rome,"
whispered to his companion, "That's fine"; whereupon Swinburne snapped out, "Why, it's in the Bible!"
No trace has been found of "The Temple of Janus," but the following year Swinburne again tried for the Newdigate. The subject given for the Prize Poem, to be awarded in March 1858, was "The Discovery of the North-West Passage." At this date, the loss of Franklin and his companions was universally accepted, although it was not until May 1859 that McClintock discovered the memorandum proving the death of Franklin to have taken place on the 11th of June, 1847. Swinburne's poem takes for granted that the whole party died together, but it is now known that the leader, by succumbing earlier, escaped the terrible sufferings of those who survived him. Swinburne's verses eloquently transcribe the general sentiment which prevailed all over the world until the return of the Fox in 1859.
In late years, Swinburne was never known to make the slightest reference to the fact that he had entered the lists again, and this time without the support or rivalry of Nichol. His disappointment at failure—for the prize was awarded to a Mr. Francis Low Latham, of Brazenose College— must have been acute. Lord Bryce remembers that the Old Mortality were indignant at Swinburne's not being the winner, from which it seems likely that he read his poem to the members of the club. He certainly read it to Stubbs, who considered his success more than probable. We cannot but be astonished that the judges were not struck by the extraordinary merits of the poem, by its melody, by its high strain of feeling, by its patriotism and dignity. No successful Newdigate, we may believe, has ever excelled it in solid beauty since the foundation of the prize. But it is possible that the examiners did not even read it. By the will of Sir Roger Newdigate, the only permissible metre was the heroic couplet. Doubtless the metre of Swinburne's poem was considered irregular enough to make the poem ineligible.
Not very much requires to be said about the miscellaneous pieces. The paraphrase of Dies Iræ is very early, not later, certainly, than 1857. Possibly it was produced for the benefit of the Warden of Radley during one of Swinburne's visits to St. Peter's College. There exists a careful prose translation of the Latin poem, evidently of the same date, in Swinburne's handwriting. King Ban is a fragment from an attempt to put the early chapters of the Morte d'Arthur into blank verse. King Ban of Benwick and King Bors of Gaul were, it will be remembered, the two good kings who supported Arthur and fought with him against Claudas and the Eleven Bad Kings. It is interesting to note that it was from precisely this section of the Arthurian epic that Swinburne took, long afterwards, The Tale of Balen.
"In the Twilight" was almost certainly written in October 1867, when Victor Emmanuel, acting under the advice of Ratazzi, had endeavoured to confine Garibaldi to his island. It was probably rejected from Songs before Sunrise on account of its similarity of subject and tone with "A Watch in the Night."
The greater part of the poems here published were hidden, unknown to Watts-Dunton, at the Pines. All round Swinburne's sitting-room there were discovered after his death unsightly rolls or parcels tied up in old newspaper, some of them looking as if they had not been opened for half a century. These parcels were found to contain proofs, bills, letters, prospectuses and every species of rubbish, together with occasional MSS, in prose and verse, On reflection, it became evident what they were. For many years Swinburne was in the habit of allowing miscellaneous material to gather on his table, until a moment came when he could bear the pressure of it no longer. He would then gather everything up, tie the whole in the current newspaper of the day, and then delicately place it on a shelf, where it never was again disturbed. A fresh heap would then begin to grow, till the day when the poet suddenly pounced upon it, and doomed it to the recesses of another newspaper. Through a great part of his life, Swinburne seems to have carried out this curious plan, and in earlier days, when he wandered from lodging-house to lodging-house, he must always have carried with him his carpet-bag of newspaper parcels.
It took a very long time to sort out the contents of these packages, and to examine and verify the poems which seemed to be unfamiliar. In this laborious and delightful work Mr. Wise was kind enough to associate me from the first, since Watts-Dunton's interest in the matter had become entirely a financial one. At last, in the summer of 1913, we satisfied ourselves that no more early poetry of a nature fitted for publication would turn up, and we began to arrange the discovered pieces which are now at last given to the public.
There is a section of Swinburne's lyrical writing which has often been talked of, but will not at present escape our guardianship. Once, in the sixties, Jowett drove the poet home from a dinner, and some one asking the Master afterwards how Swinburne had behaved, Jowett answered with an indulgent smile, "O, he sang all the way,— bad songs—very bad songs." The world is growing less and less censorious, and more and more willing to be amused. Perhaps a future editor, perhaps even we ourselves, may one day venture in this direction, but not yet.
May, 1917.
- ↑ We owe the communication of a MS. of Wearieswa' to the kindness of Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell.