And yet this quality was not really accidental to his nature, but characteristic of it. His His eagerness for life did not express itself exhaustively in his art. He passed over great tracts of vicarious experience, and was content at the end to record the fact of his travel without setting down the detail of its nature. But the very fact that he was moved to record the experience at all is testimony to its intensity, and that he should frequently do so in the manner of the country through which he had passed is further evidence of an alert and generous receptivity. He was too great a poet to lose anything of his own dignity in doing this, just as he was too liberal a nature to be confined in his reflections. It was Swinburne's distinction not only to praise splendidly but also to be richly catholic in his enthusiasms. Wherever he found nobility of life he was ready to worship, no matter what the manifestation might be. Shakespeare and Chaucer, Browning and Dickens, Tennyson and Villon, Baudelaire and Christina Rossetti, Cromwell and Nell Gwynne, Darwin and Dumas, Burns and Grace Darling, all struck his spirit to fire. He might or might not explain the precise nature of his delight in these manifold adventures, but it was not of vital importance that he should do so. The inspiriting and admirable thing was the exuberant zest for life in all its changing forms. And as it was with men and women, so it was with every thing. Italy, Greece, republican France, the England of Drake and Nelson and Sidney, noble rebellion anywhere and everywhere, infancy and honourable age, Russia in subjection and Charles Lamb acclaiming his dramatic poets, there was instant and ungrudging response to all these. Of nothing but this life was he sure Death, if thou be or be not, as was said, Thy might is made out of our fear of thee: Earth, sea, and sky, as rain or vapour shed, But his certainty of this life was full and fearless. His own spirit was heroically active and poured itself out in a new and unforgettable music, and he was eager always to recognise and celebrate a kindred activity in whatever shape or place he might find it. It was no mere occasional fancy but the deep conviction of his nature that made him say, "All singing souls are as one sounding sea." CHAPTER III LYRIC ART HAVING examined Swinburne's thought and temper and the nature of his faculty of expression, there remains to be considered the manner, the art, with which he embodied his vision in the material under his control. It is notable that in his lyrical work his most certain successes are achieved in what we may call poems of middle-length. His very short lyrics, though often proving the facility with which he could equal and even excel the shapeliness of a model are not commonly marked by the extreme concentration that is essential to the best of their kind. It is, perhaps, not the least remarkable thing in our literature that the eighteenth century poets did not write more very short poems of high excellence, for while they were strangely deficient in the imaginative power to carry them to success in the long flights to which they were so often tempted, they had, and freely wasted, another quality that might have produced memorable results in another direction. They had wit, and it will be found that a certain aristocracy of wit is characteristic of nearly every quite short poem that defies time. It need hardly be said that wit in this sense has nothing to do with humour. It is a quality in life that enables a man to conduct some momentary action with perfect precision, grace, and finality. And so it is in poetry; there are times when the poet receives some swift intuitive perception, and endeavours to record it without analysis or reference to preceding or subsequent experience. It is then that he may almost be said to stand or fall by the measure of his wit, his ability to enclose the moment in a strictly self-contained yet pregnant and easily authoritative utterance. Herrick, who wrote more exquisite poems of very small compass than any other poet in the language, claims this quality as his chief distinction, and the same quality peculiarly inspires the structure of the sonnet, the form which Rossetti called with such admirable insight a moment's monument. It is the secret of all such poems as "The Lost Mistress," "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," and the two or three lyrics by which Lovelace is remembered Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind, True, a new mistress now I chase, And with a larger faith embrace Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore; I could not love thee, Dear, so much, It is not a quality that makes for greatness, but it makes for immortality, and a very short poem can with difficulty, if at all, achieve distinction without it. Lacking it a poet may possess yet more admirable powers, but he will need a wider range for their exercise. Occasionally in a sonnet and in one or two poems of childhood Swinburne approached this precision of style, but he never, I think, fully encompassed it. Even his roundels, deftly and often beautifully wrought as they are in technique, do, in spite of their strictly formal manner, lack this light yet full authority of wit. The craftsman builds the structure with unerring skill, but the poet's spirit is not happily contained within it. These poems affect us not as finely finished jewels of expression and temper, but as fragments of a wider experience arbitrarily impressed at any point by the artificer's seal. It was when he was free of this, for him, artificial limitation and could freely relate the impulse of the moment to the horizons of his experience that Swinburne found the most natural medium for his genius. Poems such as The Garden of Proserpine, the choruses of Atalanta, In Memory of Walter Savage Landor, beginning "Back to the flower |