You have chosen the disguise of an old man of seventy-three [exactly double Butler's real age at that time], and must speak and act as such. An old man of seventy-three would scarcely talk as you do, unless he was constantly in your company, and was a very docile old man indeed—and I don't think the old man who is telling the story is at all docile.
You have chosen the disguise of an old man of seventy-three [exactly double Butler's real age at that time], and must speak and act as such. An old man of seventy-three would scarcely talk as you do, unless he was constantly in your company, and was a very docile old man indeed—and I don't think the old man who is telling the story is at all docile.
Young or old, Butler was never "docile," and he was not inclined to give up his idealism without a struggle. But Miss Savage was indomitable. She continued to undermine what she called "the special pleader," on the ground that "I prefer an advocate in flesh and blood." Under this pressure, and stimulated by Miss Savage's ingenuous annotations, Butler adopted more and more a realistic tone, and kept the story more and more closely on autobiographic lines. It was progressing steadily when Butler had to go to Canada on the business expedition which cost him so many months of his life, and when he returned to London he did not resume the novel. He took it up again in 1878, and disliked it; it needed Miss Savage's energy to start him again with proper gusto. Mr. Festing Jones was by this time upon the spot,and though he does not say so, he probably supported Miss Savage. They were the Aaron and Hur who held up the arms of this incorrigible "special pleader," and insisted that he should stick to the truth, and not embroider it. In 1884The Way of All Fleshwas finished; in 1885 it underwent some revision, and after that was not touched again.
So long as Butler was alive, the uncompromising revelations of his family life, and the bitterness of the censure of living persons, which the novel contained, made it impossible to dream of issuing it. To do so would have been to break a nest of hornets over Butler's pate. But the moment he was dead, his executor, the late Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, acting upon the author's known wishes, publishedThe Way of All Flesh. This was in 1903, and the publication synchronized with the surprising burst of critical appreciation which the announcement of Butler's death had awakened in the Press. In almost all unprejudiced quarters the value ofThe Way of All Fleshas a sincere and masterly contribution to imaginative literature, was acknowledged, although it took five years more for a second edition of the book to be called for. Butler, however, was recognized at last as an author of distinguished merit, and there was a reverberation of curiosity concerning so remarkable a man who had walked about among us for nearly seventy years without attracting any particular attention. This curiosity, it was indicated by his admirers, could now be assuaged by a study ofThe Way of All Flesh, which was a faithful portrait of the writer, and of all the persons who had checked his growth or encouraged his development. So the legend was started that no realLife of SamuelButler was required, because inThe Way of All Fleshwe already possessed a complete one.
Apart from the fact that the best of autobiographies can never be the "real life," because it can never depict the man quite as others saw him, it now transpires—and this is perhaps the most important feature of Mr. Festing Jones's admirable volumes—that the novel cannot beaccepted as an autobiography sound at all points. In spite of the warnings of Miss Savage, and, oddly enough, most of all in the person of Miss Savage herself, Butler was incapable of confronting the incidents of his own life without colouring them, and without giving way to prejudice in the statement of plain facts. He disliked excessively the atmosphere of middle-class Evangelicism in which he had been brought up, and we must dislike it too, but we need not dislike the persons involved so bitterly as Butler did. It was narrow, sterile and cruel, and it deserved no doubt the irony which Butler expended upon it. So long as we regardThe Way of All Fleshas a story, invented with the help of recollections which the novelist was at liberty to modify in any way he thought desirable, there is no quarrel to be picked with any part of it. But when we are led, as we have been, to take it as a full and true record of Butler's own life, with nothing changed but the names of the persons, we see by the light of Mr. Festing Jones that this is an absolutely untenable position.The Way of All Fleshis not an autobiography, but a romance founded on recollection.
The author ofErewhon, who was christened Samuel, not in honour of the author ofHudibras, but in memory of his own grandfather, the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, was the son of Canon Thomas Butler, incumbent of Langor-with-Branston, in Nottinghamshire, where the younger Samuel was born on the 4th of December, 1835. Readers ofThe Way of All Fleshmay recognize the Butler family at Langor in the very unflattering picture of the Pontifexes in that novel. The Bishop's grandson disliked him very much indeed—"bullying, irritable, stupid old turkey-cock"—until 1887, when he got hold of the Bishop's letters and papers, "and fell over head and ears in love with him." He excused his earlier sarcasms by saying—"When I wrote harshly describing him, I knew nothing about my grandfather except that he had been a great schoolmaster—and I do not like schoolmasters; and then a bishop—and I do not like bishops; and that he was supposed to be like myfather." For the latter, who is Theobald Pontifex inThe Way of All Flesh, he never expressed any leniency whatever, yet it is impossible to avoid hoping that if he had studied his father, as at the age of fifty he studied his grandfather, he might have relented a little in that instance also.
Ernest Pontifex says, inThe Way of All Flesh, that he could remember no feeling towards his parents during his childhood except fear and shrinking. To Butler, fathers in general, as a class, were "capable de tout," like the prophet Habakkuk. Mr. Festing Jones prints a very explicit paper he has found on this subject, the least distressing paragraph in which is the last, where Butler says, "An unkind fate never threw two men together who were more naturally uncongenial than my father and myself." Canon Butler was an evangelical clergyman of the Simeonite type, which flourished so intensely before and during the development of the High Church revival. He believed in bringing up children rigidly, from their infancy, in the strict practice of external religion. If they were recalcitrant, the love of God must be driven into them by their being whipped or shut up in a cupboard, or docked of some little puerile pleasure. Samuel Butler secretly rebelled, from babyhood, against this stern evangelical discipline, and the Canon, who had no imagination, simply redoubled his severities. It is an amusing touch, in this record of a dismal childhood, to learn that Samuel was excessively pleased, at the age of eight, by hearing an Italian lady in Naples say that a dear young friend of hers—poor unfortunate fellow,povero disgrasiato!—had been obliged to murder his uncle and his aunt. Probably the pleasure the little boy felt in hearing of this "misfortune" was the earliest expression of that rebellious and fantastic dislike of conventionality which was to run through the whole series of the man's works.
In the letters from Butler to his family, written at school and at college, there is, however, no trace of the violent antagonism which he afterwards believed that hehad always felt. It is true that a boy who writes to his father and mother, and indeed in similar circumstances a man too, is constrained to resign himself to a certain innocent hypocrisy. Very few children are able to send to their parents, and very few parents are able to endure from their children, a perfectly sincere description of their crude sentiments during adolescence. But if Samuel Butler was really tormented at home, as Ernest Pontifex was, it is odd that some note of hostility should not have crept into his juvenile correspondence. However, Mr. Festing Jones, who is as judicious as a Lord of Appeal, seems to entertain no doubt that Canon Butler was a holy horror, so that we must bow to his opinion.
The earliest overt evidence of a falling out between father and son is delayed until, in Mr. Jones's unfaltering narrative, we reach the son's twenty-third year. He does not seem, at first, to have combated his father's obstinate demand that he should take orders in the Church of England. That Canon Butler, a clergyman of clergymen, should have desired to see his Samuel take this step, ought not to seem unreasonable, though it certainly proved unlucky. In the novel, it will be remembered, Ernest Pontifex actually was ordained, but to this length Samuel Butler never proceeded. He went to a parish in the east of London to work with a parson who had been one of his grandfather's pupils at Shrewsbury. There his faith in the efficacy of infant baptism was shaken, and presently falling, brought down about his ears the whole fabric of Simeonite Christianity in which he had so assiduously been trained. He suddenly, and no doubt abruptly, wrote to the Canon and said that he "declined to be ordained." From a carnal as well as a spiritual point of view this must have been a nasty shock for his parents, and Mr. Festing Jones tells us "there was a long and painful correspondence." This he mercifully spares us, but refers us toThe Way of All Flesh, where Butler made dauntless use of it.
The financial situation was difficult. Canon Butler was fairly well-to-do, but he had other children to providefor, and Samuel, who refused to be a clergyman, went on refusing, as it must have seemed to his father, to be anything at all. Like the poet Cowley, he
neither great at Court nor in the War,Nor at the Exchange would be, nor at the wrangling Bar.
All professions were suggested, and each in vain. At last it was decided that Samuel should emigrate to New Zealand, and become a sheep farmer. Only nine years earlier, a Church of England colony had been founded at Canterbury, in the South Island, and the town of Christchurch had been founded. It had enjoyed a great success, and by the year 1859, when Butler landed, almost all the sheep lands had been already taken up. At last he found an unoccupied run at the "back of beyond," and built a little homestead for himself, which he called Mesopotamia. It is needless to dwell on this episode of Butler's life, further than to point out that it proved him capable of sustained physical industry and of considerable financial adroitness. The remainder of his career hardly suggests the possession of either. The New Zealand episode is sufficiently dealt with in Butler's own book,A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, which, by the way, shows no trace of the author's subsequent merit as a writer. In June, 1864, he sailed homeward from the port of Lyttelton, but not alone, and we now approach the strangest incident of his life.
It was to be expected that the £4,400 which Butler had received from his father in 1859 would by this time have dwindled to zero. Not at all; it had swelled to £8,000. But just before he left New Zealand a young man, called Charles Pauli, whom he had known but very slightly as a journalist in Christchurch, and who had no claim upon Butler of any sort or species, came to him and asked him to pay for his passage back to England, and to advance him £200 a year for three years. "To me," wrote Butler in 1897, "in those days this seemed perfectly easy; and Pauli, I have not the smallest doubt, intendedand fully believed—for his temperament was always sanguine—that he should be able to repay me." Butler had very little insight into the "temperament" of Pauli, and the whole of the extraordinary story increases our conviction that this sardonic and sarcastic analyst of imaginary life was as powerless as a child in face of reality. The dreadful Pauli adventure, told for the first time by Mr. Festing Jones, in his deliberate, unimpassioned way, is the most amazing revelation of simplicity traded upon by fraud that it is possible to imagine.
There soon proved to be a complete absence of harmony in the tastes of Butler and Pauli, who had really nothing in common. Yet they settled together, when they arrived in London, in rooms in Clifford's Inn, Fleet Street. There Butler lived for all the rest of his life, thirty-eight years; but presently Pauli went elsewhere. Then the relations of the two became incomprehensible. Pauli was very irritable, and constantly found fault with Butler. He refused to let Butler know his address, and yet was continually sponging upon him. He said that he could get no help from his own parents, and that Butler stood between him and starvation. For three years Pauli did not attempt to work. At last, in 1867, he was called to the Bar. He lunched with Butler three times a week, when he always said that he was earning nothing. Butler's own statement, written in 1898, the year after Pauli's death, is as follows:
I have no means of ascertaining how much Pauli had from me between the years 1864 and 1881 (but it exceeded £3,500). I kept no accounts; I took no receipts from him; the understanding was that he would repay me when he came into his reversion.... In 1879 I only admitted to my father having helped Pauli from time to time; the fact was, I had done everything.... I had more than shared every penny I had with him, but I believed myself to be doing it out of income, and to have a right to do it.
I have no means of ascertaining how much Pauli had from me between the years 1864 and 1881 (but it exceeded £3,500). I kept no accounts; I took no receipts from him; the understanding was that he would repay me when he came into his reversion.... In 1879 I only admitted to my father having helped Pauli from time to time; the fact was, I had done everything.... I had more than shared every penny I had with him, but I believed myself to be doing it out of income, and to have a right to do it.
Throughout the long periods in which Butler was hard pressed for sufficient money to exist—times in whichthere were painful and unseemly squabbles about an allowance between his father and himself—he was supporting Pauli, whose means of subsistence he took no pains to investigate, and who, in full cognition of Butler's attenuated sources of income, punctually took half for himself. Mr. Festing Jones's statement is amazing:
Pauli was called to the Bar in 1867, and took chambers in Lincoln's Inn for his work. He told Butler where they were, so that he could write if he had any communication to make to him that would not wait till they met; but Butler was not to go there. Of course, he could have gone, but he did not. He could have found out in a hundred ways where Pauli lived if he had set about it; but, knowing that Pauli did not wish it, he did nothing.
Pauli was called to the Bar in 1867, and took chambers in Lincoln's Inn for his work. He told Butler where they were, so that he could write if he had any communication to make to him that would not wait till they met; but Butler was not to go there. Of course, he could have gone, but he did not. He could have found out in a hundred ways where Pauli lived if he had set about it; but, knowing that Pauli did not wish it, he did nothing.
At last, in 1897, after having shared his poverty with this strange friend for thirty-three years, Butler read inThe Timesthat Pauli was dead. Then, at last, he made inquiries, and found that for a great many years past Pauli's income from the law had exceeded £700 a year, and for nearly twenty had been over £1,000. Pauli left £9,000, not a penny of it to Butler, whose parasite he had been for the greater part of his life, when every five-pound note was of consequence to Butler. One knows not which to be more astounded at—heartless greediness on the one side, or fatuous simplicity on the other. When all the evidence came out at last beyond all further concealment, Butler wrote: "I understand now why Pauli preserved such an iron silence when I implored him to deal with me somewhat after the fashion in which I had dealt with him." [That is to say, in telling him precisely what Butler's exact financial position was.] "The iniquity of the whole thing, as it first struck me in full force, upset me."
This "squalid and miserable story" is told with inexorable fullness by Mr. Festing Jones. What is very remarkable about it is the evidence it gives of Butler's irregular penetration into character. He could be extremely acute in one direction and absolutely obtuse inanother. The incredible indulgence which permitted him to be the dupe and victim of a scoundrel like Pauli for more than thirty years seems incompatible with the intense and suspicious analysis which he expended on the motives of his father. After all, when the worst of Canon Butler is admitted, he was a Christian and a gentleman by the side of the appalling Pauli. Yet Butler would sacrifice his father, and actually tell falsehoods, for the purpose of screening and enriching Pauli (see Vol. I., p. 114), of whose villainy he could at any moment have assured himself, and with whom he practically admits that he had nothing in common.
The Pauli episode is valuable in supplying light on certain defects in Butler's intellectual composition. In measure, it tends to explain the inconsistencies, the irregularities of his mental life, and of his action as a scholar. He was the opposite of those who see life steadily, and see it whole. He had no wide horizons, but he investigated a corner or a section of a subject with a burning glass which left all other parts of the surface in darkness. There were Paulis on his mental horizon; there were in almost everything he approached passages where his want of appreciation, his want (let us boldly say) of elementary insight, produced the oddest effect of imperfection. His literary judgments weresaugrenuto the last extreme. What are we to think of a man who lays if down that "Blake was no good because he learnt Italian to study Dante, and Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him; and as for Tennyson, well, Tennyson goes without saying"? There is no critical meaning in such outbursts; they would be almost imbecile in their aimless petulance if we did not understand that Virgil and Dante and Blake lay in the dark segment of Butler's vision, and that he had not so much formed an adverse opinion of their merits as no opinion at all. If, as surprisingly he did on every occasion, he heaped contempt on Virgil, it was simply because he wanted to get Virgil well out of the way of Homer, on whom his enthusiasm was concentrated.
It was so in all things. Butler despised the great Venetian painters, not because he had devoted attention to their faults, but because they stood in the way of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, to whom he had dedicated a frenzied cult. "Titian, Leonardo, Raffaelle and Michel Angelo, well, to speak quite plainly, I like none of them," he wrote in the last year of his life. In music it was just the same. Butler attached himself, from early youth to the grave, to Handel in an almost maniacal infatuation. In order to clear a space, as it were, round this solitary object of his worship, he covered Beethoven and Bach with contempt; and if anyone forced him to listen to the "Requiem" of Mozart, he stopped his ears and hummed "Loathsome urns, disclose your treasure," to drown the hideous Austrian discord. For Butler, "Bach wriggles; Wagner writhes." All the masterpieces of the world of music he sweeps together in a universal disapproval as "heartless failures," whereas of Handel's least remarkable passages he calls out, "Can human genius do more?" The result is that Butler is interesting and sometimes valuable when he praises; when he blames, he is sometimes amusing, but more often impertinent and tiresome. What is the point of calling Plato one of the "Seven Humbugs of Christendom," or of talking of "that damned Republic"? To pretend to admire these peevish outbursts, however much we may be stimulated by the better sides of Butler's intelligence, is abject.
No section of Mr. Resting Jones's biography is more interesting than that in which, in the patient, judicious manner in which he so eminently excels, he depicts the relation of Butler to Miss Savage. Readers ofThe Way of All Fleshare familiar with the figure of Alethea Pontifex, who occupies the position of heroine in that novel. It has long been known that this was the portrait of a friend whom Butler had studied, confided in, and deeply valued. In what degree it was an accurate portrait has not hitherto been known. I have no hesitation in saying that the chapters which deal with this situation—and they are executed with as much delicacy as realism—form themost unhackneyed and the most exciting section of Mr. Jones's volumes. They illuminate in portions, and they leave darker than ever in other parts, the rugged surface of Butler's extraordinary character; and I regret that exigencies of space do not permit me to do justice to documents so remarkable. But yet, something I must say.
The Alethea of the novel was so far from being an exact portrait that the sitter, after studying every line and touch of it, is supposed, was supposed by Butler himself, not to have perceived that it was intended for her. This, however, we must regard as hardly possible in the case of one so passionately clear-sighted, but there were many reasons why she should adopt such an attitude. Eliza Mary Ann Savage was a governess, whom Butler met about 1870, when he and she were art students together at Heatherley's. They were nearly of the same age, which at that time would be thirty-four. They were immediately drawn together by a singular parallelism in temper and sympathy. Miss Savage read the MS. of Erewhon, and minutely criticized it. From this time, 1871 to 1885, when she died, Butler submitted to her everything he wrote, and, obstinate as he was in the face of all other censures, invariably remodelled his work in accordance with her criticisms and suggestions. She supported him in all his enthusiasms, and shared all his prejudices. She was a very well-read woman, and was able to follow Butler into the remotest recesses of his studies. She responded to his lightest touch like a delicate musical instrument, and yet was rigid in opposing any divergence from what she conceived to be the normal line his talent ought to take. She was as stringently hostile to Christianity, as contemptuous of Darwin and Huxley, as infatuated about Handel, as haughtily an enfant terrible of the intelligence as he was, and the degree to which the admirers of Butler's books are indebted to her can never be definitely known, but is certainly very great.
Alethea Pontifex, inThe Way of All Flesh, is tall, handsome, with fine blue eyes. Miss Savage was short,insignificant, and plain, with brown eyes; she suffered from hip disease; physically, she was quite unattractive. This introduces into the real history an element of pathos and of pain which raises it to a far higher level of human interest than the novel has to offer us. To Miss Savage, in her isolated state, Butler was the whole world; and it is perfectly evident—Mr. Festing Jones need not hesitate so conscientiously in admitting it—that she was absorbingly, unalterably in love with Butler. She lived, quite unupbraiding, in the intermittent light of his countenance. For nearly twenty years they were, mentally, like a devoted husband and wife, yet the anomaly of their relations never struck Butler, to whom Miss Savage was a comrade of perfect sympathy, and no more. He did not observe, until Miss Savage was dead, that she had felt towards him otherwise than he felt towards her. He wrote, "I valued her, but she perfectly understood that I could do no more." Did she? Mr. Festing Jones prints a sonnet of Butler's, written in 1901, which seems to me to be one of the most amazing pieces of self-revelation that I know:
And now, though twenty years are come and gone,That little lame lady's face is with me still;Never a day but what, on every one,She dwells with me as dwell she ever will.She said she wished I knew not wrong from right;It was not that; I knew, and would have chosenWrong if I could, but, in my own despite,Power to choose wrong in my chilled veins was frozen.'Tis said that if a woman woo, no manShould leave her till she have prevailed; and, true,A man will yield for pity if he can,But if the flesh rebels, what can he do?I could not; hence I grieve my whole life longThe wrong I did in that I did no wrong.
Such fragments of Miss Savage's letters as Mr. Festing Jones prints show that she was an admirable correspondent. Butler put her letters together in a separate collection,edited, annotated, and ready for the Press. This is to be published some day in a volume by itself, and will have a pathetic value. But I confess to a certain feeling of regret that the inner being of this obscure, pathetic, and self-sacrificing woman should be immolated any further on the altar of Butler's egotism. My own instinct would be to say: Let poor Miss Savage, out of whose painful and imperfect existence so much "copy" has already been made, sleep on undisturbed under her mouldering headstone at Finchley. But Mr. Festing Jones knows best.
The most agreeable parts of this biography, at all events those which give us the most genial impression of Butler as a companion, deal with his repeated visits to Italy. These tours inspired, or were used to produce material for, a very pleasant section of his literary work. If we distinguish between the wit and picturesqueness of the ornament in Butler's controversial writings, and the actual basal texture of those writings, I do not see how a reasonable criticism can any longer pretend to set high value on his angry denunciations of the whole Darwinian theory of evolution, or on his diatribes about Unconscious Memory. There is a terrible work of his, published in 1887, calledLuck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification; there is another, of 1882, calledEvolution, Old and New. They are unreadable. His religious polemic was even more disagreeable than his scientific, and the lumbering sarcasm of the attack on Christianity, calledThe Fair Haven, is an epitome of all that is most unpleasing in the attitude of Butler. Unctuous sarcasm so sustained as to deceive the very elect, and "affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy," have a tendency to grow rancid in the passage of years, and to become exceedingly unappetizing. Samuel Butler, whose rashness was astounding, had the courage to call his homonym of theAnalogya "poor creature"! What would Joseph Butler, revisiting the glimpses of the moon, think of the author ofThe Fair Haven?
There is nothing of this incongruity in the books whichare founded on memories of Italian travel. Here the charm of Butler's style is expended, with a thousand oddities and playfulnesses, on subjects which blossom in its atmosphere. It is very strange thatAlps and Sanctuaries(1882), andEx Voto(1888), should share the neglect which was so unbrokenly the fate of Butler's publications, for these were charming and original to a high degree, and they illustrate, without any disadvantage, the whimsical penetration of his mind and the playful melody of his style at its best.The Authoress of the Odyssey(1897), which Hellenists found it impossible to take as a serious contribution to scholarship, was another of these by-products of travel in Sicily, and contained very numerous pages, which, whether convincing or no, were exceedingly picturesque and entertaining. No cultivated man or woman will, in the future, visit Trapani or ascend to the platforms of Mount Eryx without remembering how Butler was taken to the grotto where Ulysses hid his treasure, or how the Sicilian descendants of the Cyclopes treated him as a royal personage.
Not much new light is thrown on the purely literary characteristics of Butler by Mr. Festing Jones's biography. He has not dwelt at length on the individual works, nor at all on the general position of their author among his contemporaries. He left himself no space to go into such questions, being fully occupied with the task of interpreting and illuminating the personal characteristics of his subject. He is an unflinching portraitist, and in a painting of Oliver Cromwell from the life would be sure to do full justice to the wen. The rugged surface of Samuel Butler lends itself to such realism—and I will not say that Mr. Jones does not approach the confines of the superfluous in the excessive minuteness of his notes. We are assured that Butler took eight handkerchiefs and three pairs of socks with him when he went abroad, and that he very wisely carried diarrhœa pills in the handle half of his Gladstone bag. When Butler bought himself a new wash-hand basin, in 1887, the fact is duly recorded. We are told that once, in 1886, he swept every corner ofevery room of his lodgings with tea-leaves, and that it made him perspire freely. That there will be readers who do not care how many times Butler brushed his hair every day, nor on what occasion he wore "the high hat which appears in the corner of the picture in his room," I am not inclined to deny, but I am not of them. These little things, recounted with Mr. Festing Jones's humorous serenity, are my delight. If some contemporary had recorded the fact that Shakespeare habitually soaked the crust of his manchet in his last mouthful of sack, or that he wore out his left shoe faster than his right, how grateful we should be for the information. Only, there must come into our consideration: Are Butler and Shakespeare figures of equal significance, apart from their shoes and their hair-brushes?
There is less room for divergence of judgment on the question of the way in which Mr. Jones has revealed the moral and social characteristics of his hero. Here he could hardly be excessive. The amiability, the ruggedness, the nervous instability, the obstinacy as of a rock, the tenderness and the sardonic bitterness which made up so strange an amalgam, are all frankly revealed. It is for us to arrange them, if we can, into a consistent portrait of a most inconsistent figure. Here is, taken at random, an entry of Butler's own, which gives a good example of several of his characteristics:
17th April 1895. I travelled from Patros to Athens with a young Turk, about thirty years old, and his dog—an English terrier. We were alone in the carriage the greater part of the time, and I suppose the poor dog was bored; at any rate, after a while, he made up to me. He licked me all over my face, and then began to pretend that my coat pocket had got a rat in it which he must catch. I was so flattered at being made up to by anyone or anything who seemed to tell me I was a nice person, that I let him go on and hunt for rats all over me, till at last his master interposed in beautiful English, and then we talked. He was a Secretary to the Turkish Legation, and was very clever and nice.
17th April 1895. I travelled from Patros to Athens with a young Turk, about thirty years old, and his dog—an English terrier. We were alone in the carriage the greater part of the time, and I suppose the poor dog was bored; at any rate, after a while, he made up to me. He licked me all over my face, and then began to pretend that my coat pocket had got a rat in it which he must catch. I was so flattered at being made up to by anyone or anything who seemed to tell me I was a nice person, that I let him go on and hunt for rats all over me, till at last his master interposed in beautiful English, and then we talked. He was a Secretary to the Turkish Legation, and was very clever and nice.
The incident could hardly be more trifling, but it is inimitably told; and it reveals not merely a mastery of minute description, but the self-tormenting temperament of a man of extraordinary talent who, for some unfathomable reason, though love was in his heart, was for ever out of harmony with the world, and suspicious of those whom he would fain have ingratiated. Those are the main lineaments which Mr. Festing Jones's biography reveals, and they are those of a miniaturist touching his ivory with a fastidious brush, and of a "born orphan" who could not find a home in the wilderness of jarring humanity.
CONGREVE'S principal Continental critic has remarked that literary history has behaved towards him in a very stepmotherly fashion (sehr stiefmütterlich). There is no other English poet of equal rank of the last two centuries and a half whose biography has been so persistently neglected. When, in 1888, I wrote myLife of CongreveI had had no predecessor since John Oldmixon, masquerading under the pseudonym of "Charles Wilson," published that farrago of lies and nonsense which he calledMemoirs of The Life, Writings and Amours of William Congreve, Esq., in 1730. In this kingdom of the blind, however one-eyed, I continue to be king, since in the thirty-three years succeeding the issue of my biography no one has essayed to do better what I did as well as I could. The only exception is theWilliam Congreve, sein Leben und seine Lustspiele, published in 1897 by Dr. D. Schmid, who was, I believe, and perhaps still is, a professor in the University of Graz in Austria. I darted, full of anticipation, to the perusal of Dr. Schmid's volume, but was completely disappointed. He reposes upon me with a touching uniformity; he quotes me incessantly and with courteous acknowledgment; but I am unable to discover in his whole monograph one grain of fact, or correction of fact, not known to me in 1888.
In spite of this, I have always believed that someone with more patience and skill than I possess would be able to add much to our knowledge of a man who lived with the Pope and Swift and Addison of whom we know so much. The late George A. Aitken, who seemed to carry about with him a set of Röntgen rays which he applied to the members of the Age of Anne, would have been theman to do it. Not very long before his lamented death I urged the task upon Aitken; but his mind was set on other things, on Prior in particular. I do not know why it is that Congreve, one of the great dramatists of the world, perhaps our greatest social playwright, seems to lack personal attractiveness. It is a scandal that he has never been edited. His plays are frequently, but always imperfectly, reprinted, and without any editorial care. I was rejoiced to see that Mr. Montague Summers, than whom no one living is more competent to carry out such a labour, proposed to edit Congreve's plays. But even he did not intend to include the poems, the novel, or the letters; and I have heard no more of his project. To the book collector the folio publications of Congreve in verse are precious and amusing, but they have never attracted the notice of a bibliographer. Scholarship has, indeed, beenstiefmütterlichtowards Congreve, as the Austrian critic said.
My excuse for recalling this subject is the fact that I am able, through the kindness of Mr. Thos. J. Wise, to announce the existence of a work by Congreve hitherto unknown and unsuspected in its original form. In the matchless library of Mr. Wise there lurks an anonymous quarto of which the complete title is: "An Impossible Thing.A Tale. London: Printed: And Sold by J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane, MDCCXX." This was shown by Mr. Wise to several of our best authorities, who combined in the conjecture that it must be a hitherto unknown work by Prior. Yet since the poet's death—and this shows how little anybody reads Congreve—the contents of Mr. Wise's quarto have appeared in each successive edition of the Poems. But before this was perceived the truth had dawned upon Mr. Wise, who, turning over theHistorical Account of the English Poets, a publication by Curll in 1720, found that the following entry occurs in the "Corrigenda":
Mr. Congreve. This Gentleman has lately oblig'd us with two Tales from Fontaine, entitled,
I. The Impossible Thing.II. The Man That lost his Heifer.
These form his pamphlet of the same year, 1720. When Mr. Wise was kind enough to point this out to me it was only left for me to add that the anonymousHistorical Accountwas the work of Giles Jacob, the friend whose notes on Congreve's life form the nucleus of all we know about him. Thus the authorship of the two poems was proved. And it was only after that proof that I turned to the index of the old editions and found there the two poems, lurking unsuspected. I blush to recall the painful incident.
However, the separate publication of the two poems in a quarto of 1720 is a wholly unrecorded fact, and important to bibliographers.The Peasant in Search of his Heiferis added apparently as an after-thought, to fill up the sheet.An Impossible Thingopens with these lines:
To thee, Dear Dick, this Tale I send,Both as a Critick and a Friend.I tell it with some Variation(Not altogether a Translation)FromLa Fontaine; an Author,Dick,Whose Muse would touch thee to the quick.The Subject is of that same kindTo which thy Heart seems most inclin'd.How Verse may alter it, God knows;Thou lov'st it well, I'm sure, in Prose.So without Preface, or Pretence,To hold thee longer in Suspense,I shall proceed, as I am able,To the Recital of my Fable.
He does proceed, not without considerable indelicacy, but in excellent running verse. The "Dick" who was to enjoy it I conjecture—and in this Mr. Austin Dobson confirmed me—to have been Richard Shelton, who is connected with Prior'sAlma and A Case Stated. Prior and Congreve have so much in common that it is tantalizingnot to be able to persuade them to throw light upon one another; they were haunting the same coffee-houses when Swift was writing to Stella in 1710.
The discovery, after 200 years, of a unique copy of an unsuspected separate publication by Congreve confirms a suspicion of mine that other such pamphlets may exist. The earliest attempt at a bibliography was made by Giles Jacob, evidently under the poet's own eye, in 1720. Jacob gives a list of poems, with which "the ingenious Mr. Congreve, besides his excellent Dramatick Works, has oblig'd the Publick," but he adds no dates. Of these poems the first isAn Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles Lord Halifax, and the six next are odes of each of which we possess the text in folio form. But of theEpistle to Halifaxno separate edition is known, and it appears first in the octavo of 1710. But I cannot help suspecting that Giles Jacob possessed, or could refer to, a folio sheet of (probably) 1694, the year in which Halifax, to reward Congreve for the dedication ofThe Double Dealer, is supposed to have appointed him a Commissioner for licensing hackney coaches. But I have shown how confused is all the evidence with regard to Congreve's offices, which roused Thackeray to such superfluous indignation. Perhaps the shilly-shallying of Charles Montague had something to do with the suppression of an original folio of theEpistle, if it ever existed. In any case, a single sheet with, or more likely without, the signature of Mr. Congreve is worth looking out for.
As thirty-three years have passed since myLife of Congrevewas published I venture to take occasion to mention here one or two slight matters which I should like any possessors of that volume to interpolate. If I had the opportunity to issue a new edition I should further enlarge on a matter which I did make prominent, the very leading part which the veteran Dryden took in advancing the fortunes of his young and hitherto unknown rival. The episode is a charming one, and I have now some instances of it which escaped me in 1888. As is known, Congreve came up from the country some time in 1692.He was introduced by Southerne to Dryden, who took a great fancy to him at once. Dryden was preparing a composite translation ofJuvenal, and he gave the young man the Eleventh Satire to turn. Next came Dryden's Persius, to which Congreve prefixed a splendid poem of compliment: the triumph ofThe Old Bachelorfollowed in January. All this, and more, I worked out; but one very interesting evidence of Dryden's assiduous kindness escaped me. In 1705 was published as a folio pamphlet theOde on Mrs. Arabella Hunt singing, and I supposed that this was the original appearance of this pindaric, which is one of Congreve's best. But my attention has been arrested by observing that 1705 was the year in which Arabella Hunt died, and also that so early as 1693 Dryden published this ode in hisThird Miscellany. The Arabella Hunt ode therefore belongs to the beginning, and not, as I supposed, to the close, of Congreve's brief poetic career. It is a beautiful thing:
Let all be hushed, each softest motion cease;Be every loud tempestuous thought at peace;And every ruder gasp of breathBe calm, as in the arms of Death,
and ends with a Keats-like couplet:
Wishing forever in that state to lie,For ever to be dying so, yet never die.
It is now plain that this ode was published as a book at the death of the singer, but had been composed at least twelve years earlier. Another instance of Dryden's connexion with Congreve, which I observed too late to record it, is the fact that the latter contributed a song to theLove Triumphantof the former in 1694. In the dedication of that play Dryden speaks of "my most ingenious friend, Mr. Congreve," who has observed "the mechanic unities" of time and space strictly.Love Triumphantwas Dryden's last play, and its failure was complete. A spitefulletter-writer of the time gloats over its damnation because it will "vex huffing Dryden and Congreve to madness." All this confirms the idea that the elder poet's complaisance in the younger was matter of general knowledge, and Dryden's withdrawal from the ungrateful theatre must have been a blow to Congreve, who, however, practically stepped at once into Dryden's shoes.
Another biographical crumb. Charles Hopkins, one of the poet-sons of Ezekiel Hopkins, the once-famous Bishop of Derry, was aprotégéof Dryden, and in 1697 brought out his second play,Boadicea, which he dedicated to Congreve in a long poem, from which we learn that Hopkins was an intimate friend and disciple of the author ofThe Double Dealer.
You taught me first my Genius and my Power,Taught me to know my own, but gave me more.
He praises Congreve's verses, and then goes on to say, in lines of conspicuous warmth and sincerity:
Nor does your Verse alone our Passions move;Beyond the Poet, we the Person love.In you, and almost only you, we findSublimity of Wit and Candour of the Mind.Both have their Charms, and both give that delight.'Tis pity that you should, or should not write.
He proceeds, enthusiastically, in this strain, and closes at last in words which still carry a melodious echo:
Here should I, not to tire your patience, end,But who can part so soon, with such a Friend?You know my Soul, like yours, without design,You know me yours, and I too know you mine.I owe you all I am, and needs must mournMy want of Power to make you some return.Since you gave all, do not a part refuse,But take this slender Offering of the Muse.Friendship, from servile Interest free, securesMy Love, sincerely, and entirely yours.
This is by no means the only occasion on which Charles Hopkins proclaimed his gratitude and affection. As early as 1694 he paid a tribute of friendship to Congreve, who wrote a prologue to Hopkins's first tragedy,Pyrrhus King of Epirus(1695). I think we may presume that it was owing to the greater poet's influence that Pyrrhus was put on the stage, for Congreve wrote a prologue, in which he warmly recommended it, saying:
'Tis the first Flight of a just-feather'd Muse,
adding, to the audience:
Then spare the Youth; or if you'll damn the Play,Let him but first have his, then take your Day,
words which Congreve would hardly have used unless he had been responsible for the production.
It is odd that Hopkins should speak so humbly and Congreve dwell on his friend's inexperience, since Hopkins was at least six years older than Congreve, who was now twenty-seven and pretended to be only twenty-five. He enjoyed no further advantage from the devoted attachment of Charles Hopkins, who retired immediately to his father's home in Londonderry. Already he felt the decay of "a weak and sickly tenement," and his last play, pathetically entitledFriendship Improv'd(1697), was sent to London from Londonderry with a preface that bewailed his broken health. According to Giles Jacob, he was "a martyr to the cause of hard drinking, and a too Passionate fondness for the fair Sex." The same authority says that Hopkins "was always more ready to serve others than mindful of his own Affairs," and we can well believe it. An hour before his death, which took place in 1700, Charles Hopkins, "when in great pain," wrote a last copy of verses, which have been preserved. And so Congreve lost this most faithful henchman at the very moment when his own last and perhaps greatest play,The Way of the World, failed on the stage, and when he was most in need of sympathy.
Now for a white sheet to wrap both Congreve and myself. In 1888 I took credit, and not unjustly, for having discovered that Congreve prefixed verses to the first edition of a little rare book calledReliquæ Gethinianæ, which were never reprinted until I restored them, and that these were entirely different from those he prefixed to the third edition of the same book in 1703, the latter alone having been always since reprinted among Congreve's verses. Both poems are conceived in a Donne-like spirit of hyperbole. Grace, Lady Gethin, about whom I have found out more since myLife of Congrevewas published, was a young Irish lady, Miss Norton, who married an Irish baronet, Sir Richard Gethin, and died at the age of twenty-one in 1697. She secured a wide reputation for learning and piety, and she was actually buried in Westminster Abbey. Her essays—with mortuary folding-plates, again in the spirit of Donne—were posthumously published and produced a favourable sensation. But to my great confusion Leslie Stephen, who had (marvellously) studied Lady Gethin, pointed out to me, when he read my biography, that she was a fraud, conscious or unconscious. Her so-called works were cribbed out of several seventeenth-century writers of morality, but particularly out of Bacon. She had copied them into her commonplace book, doubtless without guile. My dear friend and master grimly remarked, "I wonder neither you nor Congreve spotted 'reading makes a full man'!" But he never said a word in print about our negligence, which deepens my remorse. I suspect that Congreve, like myself, did not read theReliquiævery carefully, but it is strange that no other of Lady Gethin's numerous contemporary admirers discovered the mare's-nest.
In 1888 I was not able to describe Congreve's ode on the Taking of Namur in its original form, but since then I have secured a copy of the first edition of 1695. The title isA Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer'd to the King, On His Taking Namure. By Mr. Congreve.There are many differences of text, showing that the poet subjectedthe poem to careful revision. In this first form, the King, afterwards spoken of as "William," is described and addressed as "Nassaw"; perhaps the poet was advised that His Majesty did not care to be incessantly reminded of his Dutch origin. Here is a cancelled passage, describing the horrors of the attack:
Cataracts of Fire Precipitate are driv'nOn their Adventurous Heads, as Ruin rain'd from Heaven...Echoes each scalding step resound,And horrid Flames, bellowing to be unbound,Tumble with hollow rage in Cavern'd Ground.
Perhaps Congreve thought this was too boisterous. In the Namur ode there are curious reminiscences of the battle of the angels in Paradise Lost. There was no half-title to this folio, let collectors take notice.
The complete neglect which has overtaken the minor writings of Congreve is regrettable. His odes and pastorals are deformed by a too-conscious rhetoric, and his imagery is apt to be what is called "artificial," that is to say, no longer in fashion. But they bear evidence of high cultivation and an elevated sense of style. When Dr. Johnson said thatThe Mourning Muse of Alexis(1695) was "a despicable effusion" he fell into the sin of over-statement. I admit that this agony of regret for the death of good Queen Mary II may not have been very sincere, and that the imagery is often vapid. Yet the poem is an interesting and a skilful exercise in a species of art which has its place in the evolution of our literature. It is not so good as Marvell would have made it earlier or as Collins later. But in 1695 I know not who could have done it better except Dryden, and even he, if more vigorous, was not commonly so melodious. That Congreve could not write a tolerable song I frankly admit. To book-collectors, however, the separate minor publications of our poet seem to offer a field which is still unharvested. With Mr. Wise's new discovery, and with the posthumousLetter to Viscount Cobham, there aresome nine or ten separate publications, besides the four (or five, withThe Judgment of Parisof 1701) quarto plays. When to these we add the controversial pamphlets andSquire Trelooby, in its two forms of 1704 and 1734, we have quite an interesting little body of first editions for the bibliophile to expend his energy in collecting.
Lovers of pleasure will think small beer of these desultory annotations. But in the case of a great dramatist like Congreve, whose career is very imperfectly known to us, I hold that all information is welcome, even though the separate details of it seem to be trivial. I present these glimmerings in the hope that they may not be useless to the future editor and biographer, whoever he may be, whose lamp will throw my taper into the shade.
NO modern poet offers a more interesting field for critical examination in his MSS. than Swinburne does, and in perhaps no other can the movement of mind, under changes of mood, be so accurately followed. His prose MSS. have a somewhat heavy uniformity, from which little is to be gathered, but the aspect of his written verse is so diverse as to be almost bewildering in its changes of form, not merely from one group of years to another, but even in the effusions of a single day. After long consideration, and a study of a multitude of MSS. written between 1857 and 1909, I have come to the conclusion that the critical value of Swinburne's drafts depends very much upon the spirit in which he happened to compose his poems. There were evidently three methods in his use. Some time ago there turned up a large number of dramatic and lyrical exercises, written by Swinburne as an undergraduate. These have greatly modified our conception of his early work, and they reveal in the apparently idle youth an amazing persistence in self-apprenticeship to the craft of verse. I hope to find leisure on a future occasion to describe these interesting and voluminous papers: in the meantime I only mention them here, in order to point out that they are written, with curious uniformity, and with very few corrections, in a hard, angular handwriting which Swinburne presently abandoned, but which resembles the formal script in which his later Putney poems appear to be composed.
I say "appear to be," because I am convinced, and my conviction is supported by the evidence of those who lived with him, that he adopted in later life the practice of composingand practically finishing his poems in his head before he put anything down on paper. He used to be heard walking up and down his room at The Pines, and then pausing awhile, evidently to write down what he had polished in his head. This accounts for the "clean" look of most of his later MSS., which appear to be first drafts, and yet have few corrections. What we now discover from the undergraduate MSS. of which I have spoken above is that, apparently, he adopted in early youth the plan to which he was to revert in old age. But of this plan there might be two varieties; Swinburne might work up his stanzas to perfection in his brain before writing anything, or he might be inspired with such a flow of language that the finished poem would slip smoothly from his brain. Doubtless there was something of both these in his practice, but I incline to think the former by far the most frequent. From neither can we obtain much impression of the mechanism of his invention.
But there was a third method, of which I am about to describe a peculiarly interesting example, which the poet adopted in the hey-dey of his poetical career. Soon after he left Oxford, perhaps in 1860, his handwriting changed its character; it became less boyish, but more crabbed and careless. I think that the weakness of his wrist may have been the cause of this alteration. It is particularly marked in the period from 1862 to 1870. His later writing was emphatic in its stiff inelegance, but usually legible; the script of his middle period was, at its best, lax and straggling, at its worst almost indecipherable. But it varied extravagantly, so much so that it is often difficult to believe that the same pen, and still more that the same hour, could have produced such violently diverse exhibitions. It has gradually dawned upon me, while helping Mr. Wise to disentangle an accumulation of rough copies and fragments, that the cause of this diversity lay in the degree of excitement which Swinburne put into the act of composition. He was always paroxysmal, always the victim of excruciating intellectual excitement which descended upon him like the beak of the Prometheanvulture. To discover the points at which, in a particular composition, this fury of inspiration fell upon him, is to get a little closer to the secret of Swinburne's astonishing virtuosity, and is my excuse for the following observations.
So many of Swinburne's MSS. have been preserved, principally in the newspaper bundles which he so oddly carried with him, without ever examining, through all his peregrinations from Oxford to Putney, that it is particularly vexatious that those which we could least afford to spare, those of his blossoming period from 1861 to 1868, are very exiguously represented. No scrap ofThe Queen Motherhas turned up, nor of the published form ofRosamond(an undergraduate sketch of this play remains). The original MS. ofChastelardexists only in a few fragments, the MS. sold in New York in 1913 being a clean copy for the press. According to the evidence of George Meredith, the first draft ofLaus Veneriswas written in red ink; the existing version, though containing corrections and cancelled passages, is written in black ink, and shows no sign of the frenzy of composition; it is evidently a transcript. OfPoems and Balladsno general MS. exists, but portions of the "copy" sent to the printers are in various collections. Most of these are transcripts, and show no sign of emotion or excitement. Several first drafts ofPoems and Ballads, however, have been preserved, and of these the most remarkable that I have examined is that ofAnactoria, of which I will now give some account.
Swinburne's first drafts offer none of the attractions which collectors of autographs commonly desiderate. They are never signed and rarely headed. That of the long poem afterwards calledAnactoriahas neither a title nor the Greek epigraph from Sappho. It is written, or rather wildly scribbled, on both sides of six sheets of blue foolscap, the water-mark of one of which is 1863, doubtless the date of the composition of the poem. These sheets were thrown away, and came into our hands in a great disorder of papers, mostly worthless, which left The Pinesafter Watts-Dunton's death. As we turned them over, in the welter of manuscript, my eye caught the line
Lilies, and languor of the Lesbian air,
and I realized what lay before us. Scattered through the bundle, five sheets were identified, but unfortunately one sheet was missing. By a happy chance, this also turned up in another parcel three years later, and the first draft is now, I believe, complete, although one passage in the published poem, as I shall presently show, is absent.
The text begins high up on the first sheet, and offers no peculiarity in the opening eight lines, which, with the slight exception of "Sting" instead of "Blind" in line 2, are identical with the published version of 1866. The handwriting is the usual script of Swinburne in the 60's, crabbed, but plain and calm. Suddenly, with line 7, a sort of frenzy takes the poet's pen, and at the side of the paper, in lines that slope more and more rapidly downwards, and in such a stumbling and trembling hand that they are with great difficulty to be spelt out, are interpolated the lines:
Severed the bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves,And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves.I feel thy blood against my blood; my painPains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.
Then, in very small clear script, opposite this outburst, is written, by itself, like a solo on a flute:
Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower,Breast kindle breast and either burn one hour.
To this immediately follows:
In her high place in Paphos,
which is the opening of line 64 in the published version. But the first draft stops here, leaving that half-line uncancelled, and proceeds quietly, in a large hand,
Saw love, a burning flame from crown to feet,
and so on for six lines which are now to be found in the middle of the poem. Thereupon follows a breathless interlude of six couplets, scribbled with extreme violence and so curiously interwoven that the only way to explain their relation is to quote them:
I would my love could slay thee; I am satiatedWith seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead,Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shakeLife at thy lips, and leave it there to ache;Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill,Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill;I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat,And no mouth but some serpent's found thee sweet.I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,Intense device, and superflux of pain,Relapse and reluctation of the breath,Dumb tunes and shuddering semitones of death.
If this passage be compared with the published text, it will be observed that firstly, there are, with the single alteration of "kill" for "slay," no verbal modifications whatever: and that secondly the couplets are shifted about like counters in a game, or as if they were solid objects which might be put here, there, or anywhere in a liquid setting. The first draft ofA Song of Italy, now in the possession of Mr. Thos. J. Wise, presents the same characteristics, though in a less degree.
We are still on the opening sheet of the draft ofAnactoria, and it now presents to us, quietly and conscientiously written in the middle of the page:
For I beheld in sleep the light that isIn her high place in Paphos, heard the kissOf body and soul that mix with eager tears,And laughter stinging thro' the eyes and ears,
a sort oftesseraevidently left there to be fitted in whenever a favourable blank presented itself; we find it, without the smallest change of language, fixed in the middle of thepoem. It is noticeable that the fragment "In her high place in Paphos" is now utilized.
A storm of excitement presently ruffles the poet, and he turns the sheet in such agitation that he holds it upside-down. Without leading up to it in any way, he starts a passage
She came and touched me, saying"Who doth thee wrong, Sappho?"
which closes abruptly with lines which may be cited because they contain several of the very rare instances in which the draft slightly differs verbally from the text of 1866:
Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead?"Be of good cheer, wilt thou forget?" shesaid:"Forshe that flies shall follow for thy sake,Forshe shall give thee gifts thatwillnot take,Shall kiss thatwillnot kiss thee" (yea, kiss me)"WhenI wouldnot, etc."
We presently come across the only Couplet in the whole poem which was cancelled in the first draft, and yet reappears in the published text. This is:
Bound with her myrtles, beaten with her rods,The young men and the maidens and the gods,
now very effectively introduced into the argument, but in the first draft destroyed with a whirling movement of the pen, so that it looks as if a dust-storm involved it. Written with frenzied violence, almost perpendicularly, the draft then presents a couplet:
Taught the sun ways to travel, woven most fineThe moonbeams, shed the starbeams forth as wine,
for which a place is now found immediately before the "Bound with her myrtles" couplet. The ecstasy of the poet seems to have suddenly flagged here, and there followsimmediately, in sedate script, with even lines, the passage
Alas, that neither moon nor sun nor dewNor all cold things can purge me wholly through,Assuage me nor allay me nor appease,Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease,Till time wax faint in all his periods,
which now takes its place near the very close of the poem. The actual closing lines are, in like fashion, appended to the third page of the draft. They read as follows:
Till fate undo the bondage of the gods,And lay to slakethe unquenchable desireLethean lotus on a lip of fire,Andpouraround and over and under meThe wake ofthe insuperable sea.
There was evidently on the poet's part no original intention of utilizing these lines as a conclusion to the poem. I give them here because they present the solitary instance of important verbal alteration to be found in the whole text of 1866.
It would baffle the most meticulous investigation to restore the innumerable false starts, broken lines, and rejected readings which underlie the text of the Draft. There is no question here of Swinburne's creating or polishing anything in his mind, the whole work of composition proceeds on the paper itself, and what is very curious is the fact that nothing of any merit or technical beauty seems, so far as it is possible to decipher the cancelled verses, to be lost. As soon as ever the expression became adequate the line was left, and was never modified; as long as it was inadequate, it was pitilessly rejected, and the verse not passed till it satisfied the ear and imagination of the poet. What is interesting is that this work was carried out with the pen, and not, as was the practice in Swinburne's later years, with the mind; and nothing could be more opposed to the popular notion of Swinburne as the inspired improvisatorethan all this evidence of intense laborious application to his creative task. In fact the more the original MSS. of Swinburne are examined, the more clearly is he revealed to us as an artist equally sedulous and sensitive, working by fits and starts, in gusts of overwhelming emotion, but always sufficiently master of himself to recognize, with finality, when the exact form of expression had been reached. Having recognized it, he did not, like Tennyson, Landor and other poets, fidget any further with it, but left it verbally permanent.
On the other hand, the draft ofAnactoriaproves, what we might have suspected, that if Swinburne completed his verbal text in his first movement of laboured inspiration, he made no effort then to build up his poem. It may be observed thatDoloresis a rosary of stanza-beads on an invisible string; in other words, that the string might be broken, the beads shaken together, and the stanzas arranged in an entirely new sequence, without any injury to the effect of the poem. In other cases, and these some of Swinburne's finest lyrics, the same want of progression is to be noted. But we have not been able to witness the process before, nor were we prepared to find it working in a poem which is so elegiacal asAnactoria. Yet the evidence of the First Draft is positive. It is now clear that Swinburne forged his brilliant Dryden-like couplets as though each one were a stanza, and practically treated them as bits of mosaic to be fitted, in cooler blood, into a scheme not present to his mind when his inspiration seized him.
We seem, therefore, to be in the presence of a curious phenomenon. Whereas in the case of most poets the general outline of the work precedes the execution of it in detail, Swinburne offers us the paradox of an execution carried to the utmost finish before the act of evolution begins. He takes a bag-ful of couplets, all polished to the finest point, and—on some subsequent occasion—he builds these up into a poem which has the aspect of inevitable growth. The First Draft ofAnactoria, which I have attempted to describe, is totally unintelligible, a chaos ofRodin-like fragments, unless we accept this theory of the poet's method.
One point remains to be stated. The published text ofAnactoriacontains 304 lines. Of these I have found, scattered over the tract of delirious manuscript, 270. It is curious that not a single verse should have been added by the poet when he came to distribute and arrange his cluster of couplets, the solitary accession to the text being the solid passage of 34 lines in the middle of the poem, beginning
Or say what God above all gods and yearsWith offering and blood-sacrifice of tears.
Of this, not a single trace is to be found in the Draft. My first supposition was that the sheet containing these lines was lost, as might well be when we consider the accidental and fortuitous way in which the rest was retrieved. But I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The text in the Draft stops at the line
The mystery of the cruelty of things
without any sign that the idea of the impassive harshness of Fate was to be expanded. The 34 lines which now follow have, moreover, a character that distinguishes them from the rest ofAnactoria, with which they are not quite in keeping. They leave the individual passion of Sappho entirely out of sight, and they are instinct with an order of theological ideas which occupied Swinburne in 1864 and 1865, when he was writingAtalanta in Calydonand the earliest ofSongs before Sunrise. They are on a higher philosophical plane than the melodious ravings of the love-sick poetess, and the more we read them, the more may we be persuaded that they are an after-thought.