in good company 2

in good company 2

Swinburne was furious.

 

I had lunched with him and Watts-Dunton at The Pines, and after I

had smoked a cigarette with the latter, the author of _Atalanta in

Calydon_ had invited me upstairs to his sanctum, that he might show

me the latest acquisition to his library--a big parchment-bound book

tied with ribbons--the Kelmscott reprint of one of Caxton’s books. He

waxed enthusiastic, I remember, over the Rape of Danae. Then he took

up the proofs of an article on John Day which he was contributing to

the _Nineteenth Century_ that he might read some passages from it.

To verify a quotation, he walked to his shelves in search of a book,

talking volubly meanwhile, and turning, as was his custom, to look

directly at the person whom he was addressing. Unlike Watts-Dunton,

whose library was a witness to the catholicity of the owner’s

interests and of his tastes, Swinburne’s library was comparatively

small and select, for he was as exclusive in regard to the books he

admitted to his shelves as he was in regard to the men and women he

admitted to his friendship. Knowing exactly, I suppose, where the

required volume was to be found, his hand went as confidently towards

it--even though his face was turned away from it, and towards me--as

the fingers of a musician go towards the keys of a piano at which

he does not look. For once Swinburne’s instincts played him false.

Taking down the book without glancing at it, and still pouring out a

torrent of words, he opened it, his eyes on my face, and shaking the

forefinger of his right hand at me, said:

 

“Here it is! Listen!” and dropped his eyes upon the page.

 

To my astonishment his face suddenly crimsoned, the eyes that might

once have been bright blue, but were now faded, and, in fading,

seemed to have caught and retained something of the colour of the

great seas and of the grassy fields upon which they have so often

and so lovingly lingered, glowed with green fire like that we see in

the eyes of an angry cat, and he flung the book away from him in a

tornado of wrath. He had taken down the wrong volume, an anthology,

and opened at a page on which was printed a poem by the particular

writer who, like the wearer of a red coat intruding thoughtlessly

upon the domain of an angry bull, happened at that particular moment

to be the subject of a poet’s capricious wrath--for on occasion I

have heard Swinburne speak with kindly, if contemptuous toleration,

of a writer whose damnation in this world and the next he seemed at

another time ardently to desire.

 

“Of all my imitators,” he shrilled, literally quivering with the

tempestuousness of his passion, “this fellow (mentioning a poet

whose name I suppress) is the most intolerable. I claim--and you,

I know, will admit the justice of the claim--that perhaps the most

distinctive characteristic of my work in poetry is that I have taken

old and hackneyed metres, and have tried to transform them from a

mere jingle, and a mere jig-jig, into music. This pestilent ape

has vulgarised what I have done by servile imitations of my manner

and of my methods; but, what I had transformed into music, he has

transformed back into the vilest and most jigging of jingles.”

 

When a poet of Swinburne’s eminence thus turns the searchlight of

criticism upon himself, and seeks to lay bare, in a few pregnant

sentences, what he considers the secret of his art and of his

success, one must necessarily be interested and even fascinated. On

this occasion, however, I was more concerned about the singular state

of nervous excitability into which my host had worked himself than

curious to draw him out by further discussion.

 

Sir James Barrie says somewhere that “Temper is a weapon which we

handle by the blade,” a tragic instance of the truth of which I had

in mind at that moment. A certain distinguished writer, now dead,

who like Swinburne was a good hater, and scarcely less excitable

than he, had made, or imagined that he had made (the vagaries of

the artistic temperament are many), a deadly enemy of a fellow

craftsman and critic. Every adverse review of his work, or unfriendly

reference to himself, which appeared in the public Press, he insisted

on attributing, directly or indirectly, to the malignity of this

supposed enemy. A not ungenerous man at heart, in spite of--possibly

because of--his blaze of a temper and quickness to take offence,

the distinguished writer in question had shown much interest in a

struggling young author of his own nationality, and had not only

assisted him financially, but had been at great pains to find a

publisher for the lad’s first book, and had importuned his friends

on the Press to review the work favourably and at length. The first

notice to appear was adverse in the extreme, and the distinguished

writer instantly declared that he saw in it the hand of his enemy,

who had sought to stab at him by damning the work of a young fellow

known to be his friend and protégé.

 

Flinging the paper containing the review upon the ground, he stamped

upon it, and about the room, working himself up finally into so

furious a passion that it brought on a seizure from which he never

entirely recovered, and that practically ended his career.

 

“Temper is a weapon which we handle by the blade.”

 

This story I had only recently heard, and had good reason for

believing. Seeing my host literally trembling and quivering in every

limb with the intensity of the excitement, and of the anger into

which he had worked himself, my one anxiety was to distract the

attention of this representative of the proverbially irritable race

of geniuses from the disturbing subject, and to soothe him back to

his normal calm. Unfortunately for me, his deafness made my task

difficult, but I chanced to hit upon a topic in which he was keenly

interested, and, little by little, he quieted down, until I could see

that he had talked himself out and was ready for the afternoon nap in

which it was his custom to indulge.

 

Remembering that incident, and others like it within my knowledge, I

ask myself how it is possible to judge men and women of genius--men

and women to whose great brains the live blood rushes at a thought or

at a word; whose passions are like a laid fuse, ready to take fire

and to explode the mine at a touch--by the same standard which we

apply to the cold-blooded, sluggish-brained, lethargic and perhaps

more fortunate mortals to whom impulse is unknown, upon whom passion

has no sway, and who rarely commit themselves to any __EXPRESSION__ or to

any action, noble or mean, wise or indiscreet, without first of all

carefully weighing the results and counting up the costs.

 

“It is apparently too often a congenial task,” says George Eliot in

her _Essay on Heine_, “to write severe words about the transgressions

of men of genius; especially when the censor has the advantage of

being himself a man of no genius, so that those transgressions seem

to him quite gratuitous; he, forsooth, never lacerated anyone by

his wit or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse allusion; and his

indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the temptation that

lies in transcendent power.”

 

 

II

 

Of all controversialists (and he dearly loved a verbal encounter)

to whom I have ever listened, Swinburne was incomparably the most

crushing. He fought with scrupulous and knightly fairness, never

stooping to take a mean advantage of an adversary, and listening

patiently, punctiliously even, while the other side was making its

points. But, when his turn came, he carried everything before him.

Vesuvius in eruption could not more effectually overwhelm or consume

the rubble around its crater than Swinburne could scarify or sweep

away, by a lava-torrent of burning words, the most weighty arguments

of his opponents.

 

So, too, with his conversation. When he was moved by his subject,

when he talked in dead earnest, he did nothing else. He forgot

everything. In the middle, or even at the beginning of a meal, he

would lay down knife and fork, and turn to face his listener, quite

oblivious of, or indifferent to the fact that his dinner or lunch was

spoiling.

 

On one occasion I happened, half-way through lunch, to mention that I

had in my pocket a copy of Christina Rossetti’s latest poem, written

in memory of the Duke of Clarence, and entitled _The Death of a

First-born_.

 

Down went knife and fork as he half rose from his chair to stretch a

hand across the table for the manuscript.

 

“She is as a god to mortals when compared to most other living women

poets,” he exclaimed in a burst of Swinburnian hyperbole.

 

Then in his thin, high-pitched but exquisitely modulated and musical

voice he half read, half chanted two verses of the poem in question:

 

One young life lost, two happy young lives blighted

With earthward eyes we see:

With eyes uplifted, keener, farther-sighted

We look, O Lord, to Thee.

 

Grief hears a funeral knell: Hope hears the ringing

Of birthday bells on high.

Faith, Hope and Love make answer with soft singing,

Half carol and half cry.

 

Then he stopped abruptly.

 

“I won’t read the third and last verse,” he said. “One glance at it

is sufficient to show that it is unequal, and that the poem would be

stronger and finer by its omission. But for the happy folk who are

able to think as she thinks, who believe as she believes on religious

matters, the poem is of its kind perfect. Let me read that second

verse again,” and with glowing eyes, with hand marking time to the

music, he read once more:

 

Grief hears a funeral knell: Hope hears the ringing

Of birthday bells on high.

Faith, Hope and Love make answer with soft singing,

Half carol and half cry.

 

The last line, “Half carol and half cry,” he repeated three times,

lowering his voice with each repetition, until at last it was little

more than a whisper, and so died away, like the undistinguishable ceasing of far-off music.