measure.

We may, with reason, be distrustful of anapæsts in theory, but no theory or principle can discount the manifest beauty of those lines, anapæsts though they be. And innumerable instances may be found in Swinburne's poetry of magnificent use of the We may continue to disallow the measure high abstract virtue, but it is unavailing to question the splendour of its application at times. But against these successes must be set poems like Dolores. This poem is in fifty-five eight-line stanzas, and before we have read ten of them the metrical scheme begins to cloy, and by the time we reach the end of the poem our rhythmic instinct is in a state very like revolt. Here, as usual, Swinburne's control of his medium is absolute, so wonderful indeed as to carry us, perhaps, through the whole poem at a first reading in a state of æsthetic excitement at least, and to impart a sense of buoyancy to the second or even tenth reading for a stanza or two. But there can be few people who return again and again to Dolores to delight in its cumulative effect. It is strange that we should feel a poem of less than five hundred lines, passionate, of great verbal richness, sustained in its emotion, to be too long. Yet we do feel this, and the reason is that the measure is too sweet and unresisting, too purely melodic, to bear constant repetition. The fact that some not unintelligent

people find themselves reading certain of Swinburne's poems responding only to the metrical beat without any reference to the explicit meaning of the words, is less negligible to criticism than might at first appear. A long succession of anapastic lines in English inevitably has this numbing tendency. For short flights, directed by a master, the measure may move with as large a beauty as any, but it would seem that no skill can adapt it successfully to sustained effort. The common charge, which does not make distinction between his good work and his bad, that Swinburne is deficient in the requisite intellectual stiffening for his poetry, may be traced to this characteristic of one of his favourite forms. Dolores is as good an instance as any. Swinburne had as much thought as most poets, as much, perhaps, as a poet should have. And this thought is not lacking in Dolores; but the metrical music after a time dulls our faculty, even our desire, for apprehending thought, and we blame the poet, justly, perhaps, but for a wrong reason. Considering this problem from another point of view, it might be said that if, from the body of Swinburne's good work, all the poems written in anapæstic measures were to be set aside, nothing would ever be heard of his poverty of thought.

Beyond this reservation which, while it affects much of his work, is made as to the essential

D

character of the measure and not Swinburne's rarely equalled use of it, criticism can do little more than wonder before his metrical music, as distinguished from the verbal music that has already been considered. Here again, as in his use of language, subtlety is rare, but subtlety in metrical music only becomes a virtue when it is rare. The beauty that irregularity bestows on verse, the delicacy of elision and syllabic variety and unexpectedness of beat, is beautiful only by contrast with a strictly ordered permanence, like a cloud-shadow passing across a sunlit landscape. Swinburne understood fully the secret of this beauty

Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see.
Sing all once more together; surely she,

She too, remembering days and words that were,
Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we,

We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there.
Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me,

She would not see.

He proved himself in some of his odes, moreover, to be a master of extraordinarily elaborate metrical schemes, and his lyrical work throughout is marked by an astonishing variety of stanzaic structure. But his supreme triumph as a lyric poet is the range and suppleness that he brought to the common English measures, the infallible instinct with which he ordered and re-combined them. Genius can be no common thief, but it absorbs everything.

It is possible that if Philip Sidney had not written

Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread;
For Love is dead:

All Love is dead, infected

With plague of deep disdain:
Worth, as naught worth, rejected,
And Faith fain scorn doth gain.
From so ungrateful fancy,
From such a female frenzy,
From them that use men thus,
Good Lord, deliver us!

we might never have heard

Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal

In an eternal night.

...

but the music of The Garden of Proserpine is as definitely Swinburne's creation as is the drama of Othello Shakespeare's.

Swinburne's use of words may be said to be the sublimation of our common tongue. It is, perhaps, not fantastic to say that if the man of ordinarily limited speech could by natural growth from his own estate become a great poet, he might more readily write like Swinburne than any other of the And Swinburne's metrical music is

masters.

similarly the sublimation of the common poetic beauty of that tongue. His management of the blank verse line may be considered more conveniently in examining his dramatic technique, but in his exercise of lyrical language and measures he sums up, as it were, the energy that bore its firstfruits in the poets far back beyond Marlowe, in Surrey and Wyatt, even in Chaucer. It is a superb achievement. After Swinburne poetry is finding for itself new channels of expression, new distribution and application of the eternal principles. It will sing of the recurring and elemental manifestations which are life, but it will sing with a difference. In the remote future a day will call for another Swinburne to sing the glorious summary of the poetic succession now at its birth. It can hope for nothing better than to be answered by a poet so fitly chosen.