Letters on Literature | Page 7

has the wind's wail in its voice, and all the mad regret of
"Porphyria's Lover" in its burden.
The use of "colour-words," in all these pieces, is very curious and
happy. The red ruby, the brown falcon, the white maids, "the scarlet
roofs of the good town," in "The Sailing of the Sword," make the poem
a vivid picture. Then look at the mad, remorseful sea- rover, the slayer
of his lady, in "The Wind":
"For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping green behind It
is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the wind; On
its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind; If I move my
chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far, And the faint
yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard's jar, And the dogs will
howl for those who went last month the war."
"The Blue Closet," which is said to have been written for some
drawings of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic manner.
Our brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856- 60, when
Mr. Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were undergraduates.
Perhaps it wants a peculiar turn of taste to admire these strange things,
though "The Haystack in the Floods," with its tragedy, must surely
appeal to all who read poetry.
For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr. Morris's
long later poems, "The Earthly Paradise" especially, were less art than
"art manufacture." This may be an ungrateful and erroneous sentiment.
"The Earthly Paradise," and still more certainly "Jason," are full of such
pleasure as only poetry can give. As some one said of a contemporary
politician, they are "good, but copious." Even from narrative poetry Mr.
Morris has long abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr. Matthew Arnold's
parable of "The Progress of Poetry."
"The Mount is mute, the channel dry."
Euripides has been called "the meteoric poet," and the same title seems
very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his
name--I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in

prose--when he published "Atalanta in Calydon" in 1865. I remember
taking up the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford Union, and being
instantly led captive by the beauty and originality of the verse.
There was this novel "meteoric" character in the poem: the writer
seemed to rejoice in snow and fire, and stars, and storm, "the blue cold
fields and folds of air," in all the primitive forces which were alive
before this earth was; the naked vast powers that circle the planets and
farthest constellations. This quality, and his varied and sonorous verse,
and his pessimism, put into the mouth of a Greek chorus, were the
things that struck one most in Mr. Swinburne. He was, above all, "a
mighty-mouthed inventer of harmonies," and one looked eagerly for his
next poems. They came with disappointment and trouble.
The famous "Poems and Ballads" have become so well known that
people can hardly understand the noise they made. I don't wonder at the
scandal, even now. I don't see the fun of several of the pieces, except
the mischievous fun of shocking your audience. However, "The Leper"
and his company are chiefly boyish, in the least favourable sense of the
word. They do not destroy the imperishable merit of the "Hymn to
Proserpine" and the "Garden of Proserpine" and the "Triumph of Time"
and "Itylus."
Many years have passed since 1866, and yet one's old opinion, that
English poetry contains no verbal music more original, sonorous, and
sweet than Mr. Swinburne wrote in these pieces when still very young,
remains an opinion unshaken. Twenty years ago, then, he had enabled
the world to take his measure; he had given proofs of a true poet; he
was learned too in literature as few poets have been since Milton, and,
like Milton, skilled to make verse in the languages of the ancient world
and in modern tongues. His French songs and Greek elegiacs are of
great excellence; probably no scholar who was not also a poet could
match his Greek lines on Landor.
What, then, is lacking to make Mr. Swinburne a poet of a rank even
higher than that which he occupies? Who can tell? There is no science
that can master this chemistry of the brain. He is too copious.
"Bothwell" is long enough for six plays, and "Tristram of Lyonesse" is
prolix beyond even mediaeval narrative. He is too pertinacious;
children are the joy of the world and Victor Hugo is a great poet; but
Mr. Swinburne almost makes us excuse Herod and Napoleon III. by his

endless odes to Hugo, and rondels to