CHAPTER XCIV

THE INSPIRED PARRAKEET

I remember the first poet I ever met in my youth; one of the “pure” poets, a dreamy soul, who lived in the ugly city of New York, and wrote about beauty in distant Nineveh and Tyre. He earned his living in a book-store, where he faded slowly, and his hair came to look as if the moths had been feeding on it. Only once I saw fire in his eyes, and that was when the name of Swinburne was mentioned. “Swinburne is a _god_!” he exclaimed.

Yes, Algernon Charles Swinburne is no mere poet; he is divinity, before whose high altar the art-for-art’s-sakers perform obeisance. He was born in 1837, of an aristocratic county family in the North of England. So he always had plenty of money, and lived his own life in the aristocratic fashion. They sent him to Eton at the age of twelve, and then to Oxford, but respectability failed to “take” with him.

He was the strangest figure in which the soul of a poet was ever housed. As a child he had been beautiful, but something must have gone wrong with his glands, so that his head grew faster than his body. He developed a noble brow, but a weak mouth and receding chin; his enormous head was lighted by two bright green eyes, and covered with a shock of vivid red hair. When he became excited, which he was liable to do at a moment’s notice, his arms and legs began to jerk convulsively, and he would rush about the room, orating vehemently, perhaps hopping upon the sofa, like a bright-colored parrakeet. He was an omnivorous reader, and knew all the poetry there was in the world--most of it by heart, and would pour it out by the hour, in Latin, Greek, French, Italian or English. If he became too much excited, he would suddenly have a fit and fall unconscious, to the terror of the company; but after a while he would come to, just as lively and full of words as ever.

In his childhood and youth, according to the English custom, they filled him up with Greek and Latin verses; he absorbed the bad as well as the good, wine and women as well as song. Then he came under the spell of Victor Hugo, who filled him with a fervor for liberty. It is an interesting illustration of the influence a great poet can exert. Swinburne worshipped Hugo with frenzied extravagance, and remained a disciple of republicanism all through his seventy-two years; and this without the slightest actual contact with republicanism, without anything in his environment or his actions to explain such revolutionary fever.

Worldly impracticability was carried to its last extreme in this combustible youth; he always had to have somebody to take care of him, and fell under the spell of one personality after another: Rossetti, William Morris, Mazzini, and finally Watts-Dunton, who literally saved his life. Swinburne would come up to London and engage in what he called “racketing”--by which he meant stimulating his frenzies with alcohol. He would keep this up until he was completely prostrated, and then his father or one of his friends would carry him off to the country and mount guard over him, and there he would live a quiet and placid literary life until the world lured him forth again. By the time he was forty he had carried his dissipation to such extremes that he was all but wrecked. One by one his friends had to give him up, and he was living in wretched lodgings at the point of death.

It was then that Watts-Dunton took charge of his affairs once for all, and turned his country house into a sort of literary sanitarium, and kept the poet for thirty years, strictly forbidding any but respectable citizens to call upon him. Here the queer little parrakeet hopped about in the library, and gradually grew old and deaf, and wrote a great deal of prose and verse of little consequence. Some critics fight with the moralists over the question, Is it better for a poet to die drunk and inspired, or to live sober and dull? My friend, George Sterling, writes me on this point: “I still refuse, probably from personal experience, to believe that alcohol helps the artist to function at his best.”

Swinburne’s first great work, published at the age of twenty-eight, was an imitation Greek play, “Atalanta in Calydon.” As poetry it is marvelous; nobody since Shelley had poured out such a torrent of glorious words. All the tricks of the trade are in it--how many you can learn from Professor Saintsbury, who lists them: “equivalence and substitution, alternative and repetition, rhymes and rhymeless suspension of sound, volley and check of verse, stanza construction, line-and pause-moulding, foot-conjunction and contrast.” Such are the weapons in the armory of those who have read all the poetry there is in the world!

What else is there beside verbal splendor and technical tricks? The answer is: The familiar Greek aristocratic personages, struggling in vain against their gods; the old Greek fatalism and pessimism, taken up as a literary exercise and carried to un-Hellenic extremes. It might have puzzled you, perhaps, that a poet of republicanism and revolt should also be a poet of pessimism; but you would have been ill-advised to ask the question of Swinburne, for once, when a friend ventured to criticize his work, he stared for a moment or two of horror, then uttered a shrill scream, and rushed upstairs to his room, and seized his manuscript and spent hours tearing it into shreds and throwing it into the fire--and then spent the rest of the night rewriting it from memory!

Swinburne could not think, he could only feel, and so he was capable of pouring his poetic frenzy into absolutely contradictory ideas. So we have these magnificent choruses of “Atalanta,” in which man’s despair at his own fate is voiced with overwhelming poignancy:

For a day and a night and a morrow, That his strength might endure for a span With travail and heavy sorrow, The holy spirit of man.... He weaves, and is clothed with derision; Sows, and he shall not reap; His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep.

But then, if that be true, what is the use of struggling for liberty and overthrowing tyrants? What indeed is the use of writing beautiful verses and reading proofs and wrangling with publishers and critics? Manifestly, no use whatever. Nevertheless, Swinburne would read a news item about Napoleon the Little, and he would fly into another frenzy, and write a poem in which he called for the blood of tyrants. He collected all these into his “Songs before Sunrise,” which constitute one of the bibles of liberty. When I meet an art-for-art’s-saker, I never fail to ask him if he has read Swinburne’s “Prelude,” in which the poet describes his conversion to the cause of human service.

Play then and sing; we too have played, We likewise, in that subtle shade. We too have twisted through our hair Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear, And heard what mirth the Mænads made.

Such has been the poet’s life; but now he has reformed, and taken up the duty of passing on the light of the intelligence to his fellows:

A little time that we may fill Or with such good works or such ill As loose the bonds or make them strong Wherein all manhood suffers wrong.

And that leads us by a natural transition to the “Marching Song,” a battle-cry of the revolution:

Rise, ere the dawn be risen; Come, and be all souls fed; From field and street and prison Come, for the feast is spread; Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead.

“My other books are books,” Swinburne declared, “but ‘Songs before Sunrise’ is myself.” His respectable biographer, Edmund Gosse, is both puzzled and shocked by this, and points out how completely Swinburne’s hopes of republicanism have failed to be realized in the modern world. Yes; the poet failed to see that the lords of finance, the fat men of the bourgeoisie, would subsidize autocracy and subsidize superstition, as a means of riveting slavery upon the human mind and body for another century. But let Professor Gosse take care of his health for a few years more, and he may see that Daylight which was heralded in the “Songs before Sunrise.”

We have stepped ahead of our story and omitted to mention Swinburne’s earlier volume of miscellaneous work, “Poems and Ballads,” which was published shortly after “Atalanta,” and gave the Victorian age the worst shock of its existence. This was the time of Tennyson at his most mawkish, the time of “Maud” and “Enoch Arden”; literary England had not seen anything really indecent since Byron’s “Don Juan,” nearly half a century ago. But here came this young aristocrat--the son of an admiral, and therefore beyond prosecution for anything that he might do--throwing out upon the world an inspired glorification of sexual and alcoholic riot.

Swinburne was, of course, just as sincere in his praise of Venus and the vine as he was in his praise of liberty; more sincere, in fact, because he practiced what he preached in the former case, but he omitted to go off and die in the cause of liberty as Byron had done. Some of his licentious poetry is perfect from the technical point of view; but, on the other hand, “Poems and Ballads” contains the worst combination of words ever put into a poem: “the lilies and languors of virtue and the roses and raptures of vice.” It is pleasant to be able to record that Swinburne had the wit to ridicule his own habit of silly alliteration; see the parody called “Nephelidia”: “From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,” and so on.

In “Thus Spake Zarathustra” there is a doctrine of freedom, which is summed up: I ask you, not free _from_ what, but free _to_ what? And that is what I should like to point out to young poets who uncritically accept Swinburne as a god. It is possible to be entirely free to do what you please, and yet not please to do many silly and destructive things. Young poets are free to write as eloquent verses as they know how; and they may put into those verses a celebration of all things beautiful and just and noble in the world. On the other hand, they may put in a celebration of debauchery; and they may try it out for themselves, and fall slaves to alcohol and drugs, and end in the mad-house or a suicide’s or drunkard’s grave--like Baudelaire and Verlaine and Musset and Poe and Dowson, and that brilliant, unhappy genius whose story we have next to read.

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