The other way of studying a poet is the scholarly way, the critical method (I do not mean the philosophical method; that is beside our subject); we read a poet closely, carefully, observing every new and unfamiliar word, every beautiful phrase and unaccustomed term, every device of rhythm or rhyme, sound or colour that he has to give us. Our capacity to study any poet in this way depends a good deal upon literary habit and upon educational opportunity. By the first method I doubt whether you could find much in Swinburne. He is like Shelley, often without substance of any kind. By the second method we can do a great deal with a choice of texts from his best work. I think it better to state this clearly beforehand, so that you may not be disappointed, failing to find in him the beautiful haunting thoughts that you can find in Rossetti or in Tennyson or in Browning.
Here I must digress a little. I must speak of the worst side of Swinburne as well as of the best. The worst is nearly all in one book, not a very large book, which made the greatest excitement in England that had been made since the appearance of Byron's "Don Juan." It is the greatest lyrical gift ever given toEnglish literature, this book; but it is also, in some respects, the most immoral book yet written by an English poet. The work of Byron, at its worst, is pure and innocent by comparison with the work of Swinburne in this book. It is astonishing that the English public could have allowed the book to exist. Probably it was forgiven on account of its beauty. Some years ago, I remember, an excellent English review said, in speaking of a certain French poem, that it was the most beautiful poem of its kind in the French language, but that, unfortunately, the subject could not be mentioned in print. Of course when there is a great beauty and great voluptuousness at the same time, it is the former, not the latter, that makes the greatness of the work. There must be something very good to excuse the existence of the bad. Much of the work of Swinburne is like that French poem, valuable for the beauty and condemnable for the badness in it—and touching upon subjects which cannot be named at all. Why he did this work we must try to understand without prejudice.
First, as to the man himself. We must not suppose that a person is necessarily immoral in his life because he happens to write something which is immoral, any more than we should suppose a person whose writings are extremely moral to be incapable of doing anything of a vicious or foolish kind. Shelley, for example, is a very chaste poet—there is not one improper line in the whole of his poetry; but his life was decidedly unfortunate. Exactly the reverse happens in the case of Swinburne, who has written thousands of immoral lines. The fact is that many persons are apt to mistakeartistic feeling for vicious feeling, and a spirit of revolt against conventions for a general hatred of moral law. I must ask you to try to put yourselves for a moment in the place of a young student, such as Swinburne was at the time of these writings, and try to imagine how he felt about things. In every Western boy—indeed, I may say in every civilised boy—there are several distinct periods, corresponding to the various periods in the history of human progress. Both psychologically and physiologically the history of the race is repeated in the history of the individual. The child is a savage, without religion, without tenderness, with a good deal of cruelty and cunning in his little soul. He is this because the first faculties that are developed within him are the faculties for self-preservation, the faculties of primitive man. Then ideas of right and wrong and religious feelings are quickened within him by home-training, and he becomes somewhat like the man of the Middle Ages—he enters into his mediæval period. Then in the course of his college studies he is gradually introduced to a knowledge of the wonderful old Greek civilisation, civilisation socially and, in some respects, even morally superior to anything in the existing world; and he enters into the period of his Renaissance. If he be very sensitive to beauty, if he have the æsthetic faculty largely developed, there will almost certainly come upon him an enthusiastic love and reverence for the old paganism, and a corresponding dislike of his modern surroundings. This feeling may last only for a short time, or it may change his whole life. One fact to observe is this, that it is just about the time when a young man's passionsare strongest that the story of Greek life is suddenly expounded to him in the course of his studies; and you must remember that the æsthetic faculty is primarily based upon the sensuous life. Now in Swinburne's case we have an abnormal æsthetic and scholarly faculty brought into contact with these influences at a very early age; and the result must have been to that young mind like the shock of an earth-quake. We must also imagine the natural consequence of this enthusiasm in a violent reaction against all literary, religious, or social conventions that endeavour to keep the spirit of the old paganism hidden and suppressed within narrow limits, as a dangerous thing. Finally we must suppose the natural effect of opposition upon this mind, the effect of threats, sneers, or prohibitions, like oil upon fire. For young Swinburne was, and still is, a man of exceeding courage, incapable of fear of any sort. A great idea suddenly came to him, and he resolved to put it into execution. This idea was nothing less than to attempt to obtain for English poetry the same liberty enjoyed by French poetry in recent times, to attempt to obtain the right of absolute liberty of expression in all directions, and to provoke the contest with such a bold stroke as never had been dared before. The result was the book that has been so much condemned.
We cannot say that Swinburne was successful in this attempt at reform. He attempted a little too much, and attempted it too soon. Even in his own time the great French poet Charles Baudelaire was publicly condemned in a French court for having written verse less daring than Swinburne's. The great French novelistFlaubert also had to answer in court for the production of a novel that is now thought to be very innocent. It was only at a considerably later time that the French poets obtained such liberty of expression as allowed of the excesses of writers like Zola or of poets like Richepin. Altogether Swinburne's fight was premature. He must now see that it was. But I should not like to say that he was entirely wrong. The result of absolute liberty in French literature gives us a good idea of what would be the result of absolute liberty in English literature. Extravagances of immorality were followed by extravagances of vulgarity as well, and after the novelty of the thing was over a reaction set in, provoked by disgust and national shame. Exactly the same thing would happen in England after a brief period of vicious carnival; the English tide of opinion would set in the contrary direction with immense force, and would bring about such a tyrannical conservatism in letters as would signify, for the time being, a serious check upon progress. As a matter of fact, we cannot do in English literature what can be done in French literature. Swinburne might, but there is only one Swinburne. The English language is not perfect enough, not graceful and flexible enough, to admit of elegant immorality; and the English character is not refined enough. A Frenchman can say very daring things, very immoral things, gracefully; an Englishman cannot. Only one Englishman has approached the possibility; and that Englishman is Swinburne himself.
I think you will now understand what Swinburne's purpose was, and be able to judge of it. His mistakeswere due not only to his youth but also to his astonishing genius; for he could not then know how much superior in ability he actually was to any other English poet. He imagined that there were many who might do what he could do. The truth is that hundreds of years may pass before another Englishman is born capable of doing what Swinburne could do. Men of letters have long ago forgiven him, because of this astonishing power. They say, "We know the poems are improper, but we have nothing else like them, and English literature cannot afford to lose them." The scholars have forgiven him, because his worst faults are always scholarly; and a common person cannot understand his worst allusions. Indeed, one must be much of a classical scholar to comprehend what is most condemnable in the first series of the "Poems and Ballads." Their extreme laxity will not be perceived without elaborate explanation, and no one can venture to explain—I do not mean in a university class room only, I mean even in printed criticism. When this was attempted by the poet's enemies, he was able to point out, with great effect, that the explanations were much more immoral than the poems.
Now in considering Swinburne's poetry in a short course of lectures, I think it will be well to begin by explaining his philosophical position; for every poet has a philosophy of his own. As I have already said, there is less of this visible in Swinburne than in the other Victorian poets, but the little there is has a particular and beautiful interest, which we shall be able to illustrate in a series of quotations. I am presuming a little in speaking about his philosophy because therehas been nothing of importance written about his philosophy, nor has he himself ever made a plain statement of it. In such a case I can only surmise, and you need not consider my opinion as definitive. Swinburne is, like George Meredith, an evolutionist, and he has something of the spiritual element in him which we notice in Meredith as a philosopher—but always with this difference, that Meredith makes evolution preach a moral law, and Swinburne does not. But here we notice that Swinburne's evolution is something totally different from Meredith's in its origin. I have said to you that Meredith expresses evolutional philosophy according to Herbert Spencer; I consider him the greatest of our philosophical poets for that very reason. Swinburne does not appear to have felt the influence of Herbert Spencer; he seems rather to reflect the opinions of Comte—especially of Comte as interpreted by Lewes, and perhaps by Frederic Harrison. He speaks of the Religion of Humanity, of the Divinity of Man, and of other things which indicate the influence of Comte. Furthermore, I must say, being myself a disciple of Spencer, that Swinburne's sociological and radical opinions are quite incompatible with evolutional philosophy as expounded by Spencer. Indeed, Swinburne's views about government, about fraternity and equality, about liberty in all matters of thought and action, are heresies for the strictly scientific mind. The great thinkers of our century have exposed and overthrown the old fallacies of the French revolutionary school as to the equality of men and the meaning of liberty and fraternity. Swinburne still champions, or appears to champion, some of the erroneous ideas ofRousseau. Otherwise there is little fault to be found with his thoughts concerning the ultimate nature of things, except in the deep melancholy that always accompanies them. Meredith is a grand optimist. Swinburne is something very like a pessimist. There is no joy and no hope in his tone of speaking about the mystery of death; rather we find ourselves listening to the tone of the ancient Roman Epicureans, in the time when faith was dying, and when philosophy attempted, without success, to establish a religion of duty founded upon pure ethics.
An important test of any writer's metaphysical position is what he believes about the soul. Swinburne's idea is very well expressed in the prelude to his "Songs before Sunrise." A single stanza would be enough in this case; but we shall give two, in order to show the pantheistic side of the poet's faith.
Because man's soul is man's God still,What wind soever waft his willAcross the waves of day and nightTo port or shipwreck, left or right,By shores and shoals of good and ill;And still its flame at mainmast heightThrough the rent air that foam-flakes fillSustains the indomitable lightWhence only man hath strength to steerOr helm to handle without fear.Save his own soul's light overhead,None leads him, and none ever led,Across birth's hidden harbour-bar,Past youth where shoreward shallows are,Through age that drives on toward the redVast void of sunset hailed from far.To the equal waters of the dead;Save his own soul he hath no star,And sinks, except his own soul guide,Helmless in middle turn of tide.
This is a very plain statement not only that man has no god, and that he makes his own gods, but that he never had a creator or a god of any kind. He has no divine help, no one to pray to, no one to trust except himself. So far this is in tolerable accord with the teaching of the Buddha, "Be ye lights unto yourselves; seek no refuge but in yourselves." But the question comes, What is man's soul? Is it divine? Is it part of the universal soul, a supreme and infinite intelligence? There is another meaning in the first line of the first stanza which I quoted to you about man's soul being man's god. Some verses from the wonderful poem called "On the Downs" will make the meaning plainer.
"No light to lighten and no rodTo chasten men? Is there no God?"So girt with anguish, iron-zoned,Went my soul weeping as she trodBetween the men enthronedAnd men that groaned.O fool, that for brute cries of wrongHeard not the grey glad mother's songRing response from the hills and waves,But heard harsh noises all day longOf spirits that were slavesAnd dwelt in graves.. . . . . . .With all her tongues of life and death,With all her bloom and blood and breath,From all years dead and all things done,In the ear of man the mother saith,"There is no God, O son,If thou be none."
This is the declaration of a belief in the divinity of man, a doctrine well known to students of Comte. It is not altogether in disaccord with Oriental philosophy; you must not suppose Swinburne to be speaking of individual divinity, but of a universal divinity expressing itself in human thought and feeling. His view of life is that the essential thing is to live as excellently as possible, but we must not suppose that excellence is used in the moral sense. Swinburne's idea of excellence is the idea of completeness. His notions of right and wrong are not the religious or the social notions of right and wrong. In this respect he sometimes seems to think very much like the German philosopher Nietzsche. Nevertheless he does tell us that the real spirit of the universe is a spirit of love, a doctrine at which Huxley would certainly have laughed. But it is beautiful doctrine in its way, even if not true, and admirably suits the purposes of poetry.
I think that I need not say much more here about Swinburne's philosophy; you will understand that he is at once a pantheist and an evolutionist, and that is sufficient for our purposes. But it is necessary to remember this in order to understand many things in his verse, and especially in order to understand some of his extraordinary attitudes in condemning what most men respect, and in praising what most men condemn.Remember also that his judgments, like those of Nature, are never moral; they are not always the reverse, but they are founded entirely upon æsthetic perception. Those who praise him especially are men in revolt like himself. Therefore he praised Walt Whitman, at a time when Walt Whitman was being condemned everywhere for certain faults in his compositions; therefore he sang the praises of Baudelaire, as none other had done before him (and here he is certainly right); therefore he praised Théophile Gautier's "Mademoiselle de Maupin," calling it "the golden book of spirit and sense"; therefore also he wrote a sonnet praising Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights, which made a great scandal in England because it translated all the obscene passages which nobody else had ventured to put into English or French. The æsthetic judgment in all these cases is correct, but I will not venture to pronounce upon the moral judgment any further than to say this, that Swinburne delights in courage, and that literary courage in his eyes covers a multitude of sins.
Not a few, however, of these daring songs of praise are among the most wonderful triumphs of modern lyric verse. I should like, for example, to quote to you the whole of his ode to Villon, but I fear that because of its length, and the unfamiliarity of the subject, we cannot afford the time. I will quote the closing stanza as a specimen of the rest, and I am sure that you will see its beauty.
Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire,A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire;Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame.But from thy feet now death has washed the mire,Love reads out first at head of all our quire,Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
Each stanza ends with this strange refrain of "sad bad glad mad," adjectives which excellently express the changeful and extraordinary character of that poor student of Paris with whose name modern French literature properly begins. He lived a terrible and reckless life, very nearly ending with the gallows; he was an associate at one time of princes and bishops, at another time of thieves and prostitutes; he would be one day a spendthrift, the next day a beggar or a prisoner; and he sang of all these experiences as no man ever sang before or since. Really Swinburne's praise in this case is not only just—it represents the best possible estimate of the singer's faults and virtues combined.
To speak in detail of the great range of subjects chosen by Swinburne is not possible within the limits of this lecture. I am going to make selections from every part of his production, except the dramatic, as well as I can, and the selections will be made with a view especially to show you the music of his verse and the brilliance of his language. Most of his poems are above the ordinary lyrical length rather than below it, and I hope that you will not be disappointed if I do not often give the whole of a poem, for the selections will contain, I am sure, the best part of the poem.
Being a descendant of great seamen, Swinburne had every reason to sing of the sea; and he has sung of it better than any one else. A great number of his poemsare sea-poems, or poems containing descriptions of the sea in all its moods, splendours, or terrors. Sun, sea, and wind are favourite subjects with him, and I know of nothing in the whole of his work finer than his description of the wind as the lover of the sea. The verses I am going to quote are from a great composition entitled "By the North Sea." The personal pronoun "he" in the first line means the wind personified.
The delight that he takes but in livingIs more than of all things that live:For the world that has all things for givingHas nothing so goodly to give:But more than delight his desire is,For the goal where his pinions would beIs immortal as air or as fire is,Immense as the sea.Though hence come the moan that he borrowsFrom darkness and depth of the night,Though hence be the spring of his sorrows,Hence too is the joy of his might;The delight that his doom is for everTo seek and desire and rejoice,And the sense that eternity neverShall silence his voice.That satiety never may stifleNor weariness ever estrangeNor time be so strong as to rifleNor change be so great as to changeHis gift that renews in the giving,The joy that exalts him to beAlone of all elements livingThe lord of the sea.What is fire, that its flame should consume her?More fierce than all fires are her waves:What is earth, that its gulfs should entomb her?More deep are her own than their graves.Life shrinks from his pinions that coverThe darkness by thunders bedinned;But she knows him, her lord and her lover,The godhead of wind.
This titanic personification of sea and wind is sublime, but Swinburne has many other ways of personifying wind and sea, and sometimes the element of tenderness and love is not wanting. Sometimes the sea is addressed as a goddess, but more often she is addressed as a mother, and some of the most exquisite forms of such address are found in poems which have, properly speaking, nothing to do with the sea at all. A good example is in the poem called "The Triumph of Time." The words are supposed to be spoken by a person who is going to drown himself.
O fair green-girdled mother of mine,Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain,Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine,Thy large embraces are keen like pain.Save me and hide me with all thy waves,Find me one grave of thy thousand graves,Those pure cold populous graves of thine,Wrought without hand in a world without stain.
We shall also find great wonder and beauty in Swinburne's hymns to the sun, which is also for him, as for the poets of old, a living god, and which certainly is, in a scientific sense, the lord of all life within thisworld. The best expression of this feeling is in a poem called "Off Shore," describing sunrise over the sea, and the glory of light.
Light, perfect and visibleGodhead of God!God indivisible,Lifts but his rod,And the shadows are scattered in sunder, and darknessis light at his nod.At the touch of his wand,At the nod of his headFrom the spaces beyondWhere the dawn hath her bed,Earth, water, and air are transfigured, and rise as onerisen from the dead.He puts forth his hand,And the mountains are thrilledTo the heart as they standIn his presence, fulfilledWith his glory that utters his grace upon earth, andher sorrows are stilled.. . . . . . . . .As a kiss on my browBe the light of thy grace,Be thy glance on me nowFrom the pride of thy place:As the sign of a sire to a son be the light on my faceof thy face.. . . . . . . . .Fair father of allIn thy ways that have trod,That have risen at thy call,That have thrilled at thy nod,Arise, shine, lighten upon me, O sun that we see tobe God.. . . . . . . . .Be praised and adored of usAll in accord,Father and lord of usAlways adored,The slayer and the stayer and the harper, the lightof us all and our lord.
Swinburne has no equal in enthusiastic celebration of the beauties of sky and sea and wood, of light and clouds and waters, of sound and perfume and blossoming. Indeed, one of his particular characteristics, a characteristic very seldom found in English masterpieces, though common in the best French work, is his art for describing odours—the smell of morning and evening, scents of the seasons, scents also of life. We shall have many opportunities to notice this characteristic of Swinburne, even in his descriptions of human beauty. What the French call theparfum de jeunesseor odour of youth, the pleasant smell of young bodies, the perfume that we notice, for example, in the hair of a healthy child, is something which English writers very seldom venture to treat of; but Swinburne has treated it quite as delicately at times as a French poet could do, though sometimes a little extravagantly. You must think of him as one whom no quality of beauty escapes,whether of colour, odour, or motion; and as one who believes, I think rightly, that whatever is in itself beautiful and natural is worthy of song. You will be able to imagine, from what I have already quoted, how he feels in the presence of wild nature. How he considers human beauty is a more difficult matter to illustrate by quotation, at least by quotation before a class. But I shall try to offer some illustrations from the "Masque of Queen Bersabe." You all know what a masque is. The masque in question is a perfect imitation, for the most part, of a mediæval masque, both as to form and language. But there is one portion of it which is mediæval only in tone, not in language, since there never lived in the Middle Ages any man capable of writing such verse. It is from this part that I want to quote. But I must first explain to you that the name Bersabe is only a mediæval form of the Biblical name Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, whom King David caused to be murdered. It is an ugly story. The King committed adultery with Bathsheba; then he ordered her husband to be put into the front rank during a battle, in such a place that he must be killed. Afterwards the King married Bathsheba; but the prophet Nathan heard of the wickedness, and threatened the King with the punishment of God. This was the subject of several mediæval religious plays, and Swinburne adopted it for an imitation of such play. The first part of his conception is that at the command of the prophet the ghosts of all the beautiful and wicked queens who ever lived come before Bathsheba, to reproach her with her sin, and to tell her how they had been punished in other time for sins of the same kind. Each one speaks inturn; and though I cannot quote all of what they said, I can quote enough to illustrate the magnificence of the work. Each verse is a portrait in words, uttered by the subject.
CLEOPATRAI am the queen of Ethiope.Love bade my kissing eyelids opeThat men beholding might praise love.My hair was wonderful and curled;My lips held fast the mouth o' the worldTo spoil the strength and speech thereof.The latter triumph in my breathBowed down the beaten brows of death,Ashamed they had not wrath enough.. . . . . . . . .AHOLAHI am the queen of Amalek.There was no tender touch or fleckTo spoil my body or bared feet.My words were soft like dulcimers,And the first sweet of grape-flowersMade each side of my bosom sweet.My raiment was as tender fruitWhose rind smells sweet of spice-tree root,Bruised balm-blossom and budded wheat.. . . . . . . . .SEMIRAMISI am the queen Semiramis.The whole world and the sea that isIn fashion like a chrysopras,The noise of all men labouring,The priest's mouth tired through thanksgiving,The sound of love in the blood's pause,The strength of love in the blood's beat,All these were cast beneath my feetAnd all found lesser than I was.. . . . . . . . .PASITHEAI am the queen of Cypriotes.Mine oarsmen, labouring with brown throats,Sang of me many a tender thing.My maidens, girdled loose and bracedWith gold from bosom to white waist,Praised me between their wool-combing.All that praise Venus all night longWith lips like speech and lids like songPraised me till song lost heart to sing.. . . . . . . . .ALACIELI am the queen Alaciel.My mouth was like that moist gold cellWhereout the thickest honey drips.Mine eyes were as a grey-green sea;The amorous blood that smote on meSmote to my feet and finger-tips.My throat was whiter than the dove,Mine eyelids as the seals of love,And as the doors of love my lips.ERIGONEI am the queen Erigone.The wild wine shed as blood on meMade my face brighter than a bride's.My large lips had the old thirst of earth,Mine arms the might of the old sea's girthBound round the whole world's iron sides.Within mine eyes and in mine earsWere music and the wine of tears,And light, and thunder of the tides.
So pass the strange phantoms of dead pride and lust and power, together with many more of whom the descriptions are not less beautiful and strange, though much less suitable for quotation. I have made the citations somewhat long, but I have done so because they offer the best possible illustration of two things peculiar to Swinburne, the music and colour of his verse, and the peculiar mediæval tone which he sometimes assumes in dealing with antique subjects. These descriptions are quite unlike anything done by Tennyson, or indeed by any other poet except Rossetti. They represent, in a certain way, what has been called Pre-Raphaelitism in poetry. Swinburne was, with Rossetti, one of the great forces of the new movement in literature. Observe that the illustrations are chiefly made by comparisons—that the descriptions are made by suggestion; there is no attempt to draw a clear sharp line, nothing is described completely, but by some comparison or symbolism in praise of a part, the whole figure is vaguely brought before the imagination in a blaze ofcolour with strange accompaniment of melody. For example, you will have noticed that no face is fully pictured; you find only some praise of the eyes or the mouth, the throat or the skin, but that is quite enough to bring to your fancy the entire person. But there is another queer fact which you must be careful to notice—namely, that no comparison is modern. The language and the symbolism are Biblical or mediæval in every case. The European scholar who had made a special study of the literature of the Middle Ages would notice even more than this; he would notice that the whole tone is not of the later but of the earlier Middle Ages, that the old miracle plays, the old French romances, and the early Italian poets, have all contributed something to this splendour of expression. It is modern art in one sense, of course, but there is nothing modern about it except the craftsmanship; the material is all quaint and strange, and gives us the sensation of old tapestry or of the paintings that were painted in Italy before the time of Raphael.
Here I must say a word about the Pre-Raphaelite movement in nineteenth century literature. To explain everything satisfactorily, I ought to have pictures to show you; and that is unfortunately impossible. But I think I can make a very easy explanation of the subject. First of all you must be quite well aware that the literature of all countries seeks for a majority of its subjects in the past. The everyday, the familiar, does not attract us in the same way as that which is not familiar and not of the present. Distance, whether of space or time, lends to things a certain tone of beauty, just as mountains look more beautifullyblue the further away they happen to be. This seeking for beauty in the past rather than in the present represents much of what is called romanticism in any literature.
Necessarily, even in this age of precise historical knowledge, the past is for us less real than the present; time has spread mists of many colours between it and us, so that we cannot be sure of details, distances, depths, and heights. But in other generations the mists were heavier, and the past was more of a fairy-land than now; it was more pleasant also to think about, because the mysterious is attractive to all of us, and men of letters delighted to write about it, because they could give free play to the imagination. Such stories of the past as we find even in what have been called historical novels, were called also, and rightly called, romances—works of imagination rather than of fact.
But still you may ask, why such words as romance and romantic? The answer is that works of imagination, dealing with past events, were first written in languages derived from the Latin, the Romance languages; and at a very early time it became the custom to distinguish work written in these modern tongues upon fanciful or heroic subjects, by this name and quality. The romantic in the Middle Ages signified especially the new literature of fancy as opposed to the old classical literature. Remember, therefore, that this meaning is not yet entirely lost, though it has undergone many modifications. "Romantic" in literature still means "not classical," and it also suggests imagination rather than fact, and the past rather than the present.
When we say "mediæval" in speaking of nineteenth century poetry, we mean of course nineteenth century literature having a romantic tone, as well as reflecting, so far as imagination can, the spirit of the Middle Ages. But what is the difference between the Pre-Raphaelite and Mediæval? The time before Raphael, the Pre-Raphaelite period, would necessarily have been mediæval. As a matter of fact, the term Pre-Raphaelite does not have the wide general meaning usually given to it. It is something of a technical term, belonging to art rather than to literature, and first introduced into literature by a company of painters. The Pre-Raphaelite painters, in the technical sense, were a special group of modern painters, distinguished by particular characteristics.
So much being clear, I may say that there was a school of painting before Raphael of a very realistic and remarkable kind. This school came to existence a little after the true religious spirit of the Middle Ages had begun to weaken. It sought the emotion of beauty as well as the emotion of religion, but it did not yet feel the influence of the Renaissance in a strong way; it was not Greek nor pagan. It sought beauty in truth, studying ordinary men and women, flowers and birds, scenery of nature or scenery of streets; and it used reality for its model. It was much less romantic than the school that came after it; but it was very great and very noble. With Raphael the Greek feeling, the old pagan feeling for sensuous beauty, found full expression, and this Renaissance tone changed the whole direction and character of art. After Raphael the painters sought beauty before all things; previously they had sought for truthand sentiment even before beauty. Raphael set a fashion which influenced all arts after him down to our own time; for centuries the older painters were neglected and almost forgotten. Therefore Ruskin boldly declared that since Raphael's death Western art had been upon the decline and that the school of painters immediately before Raphael were greater than any who came after him. Gradually within our own time a new taste came into art-circles, a new love for the old forgotten masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was discovered that they were, after all, nearer to truth in many respects than the later painters; and then was established, by Rossetti and others, a new school of painting called the Pre-Raphaelite school. It sought truth to life as well as beauty, and it endeavoured to mingle both with mystical emotion.
At first this was a new movement in art only, or rather in painting and drawing only, as distinguished from literary art. But literature and painting and architecture and music are really all very closely related, and a new literary movement also took place in harmony with the new departure in painting. This was chiefly the work of Rossetti, Swinburne, and William Morris. They tried to make poems and to write stories according to the same æsthetic motives which seem to have inspired the school of painters before Raphael. This is the signification of the strange method and beauty of those quotations which I have been giving to you from Swinburne's masque. They represent very powerfully the Pre-Raphaelite feelings in English poetry.
I know that this digression is somewhat long, butI believe that it is of great importance; without knowing these facts, it would be impossible for the student to understand many curious things in Swinburne's manner. Throughout even his lighter poems we find this curious habit of describing things in ways totally remote from nineteenth century feeling, and nevertheless astonishingly effective. Fancy such comparisons as these for a woman's beauty in the correct age of Wordsworth:
I said "she must be swift and white,And subtly warm, and half perverse,And sweet like sharp soft fruit to bite,And like a snake's love lithe and fierce."Men have guessed worse.
Or take the following extraordinary description of a woman's name, perhaps I had better say of the sensation given by the name Félise, probably an abbreviation of Felicita, but by its spelling reminding one very much of the Latin wordfelis, which means a cat:
Like colors in the sea, like flowers,Like a cat's splendid circled eyesThat wax and wane with love for hours,Green as green flame, blue-grey like skies,And soft like sighs.
The third line refers to the curious phenomenon of the enlarging and diminishing of the pupil in a cat's eye according to the decrease or increase of light. It is said that you can tell the time of day by looking at a cat's eyes. Now all these comparisons are in the highest degree offences against classical feeling. The classicalpoet, even the half-classical poet of the beginning of our own century, would have told you that a woman must not be compared to a snake or a cat; that you must not talk about her sweetness being like the sweetness of fruit, or the charm of her presence being like the smell of perfume. All such comparisons seemed monstrous, unnatural. If such a critic were asked why one must not compare a woman to a snake or a cat, the critic would probably answer, "Because a snake is a hateful reptile and a cat is a hateful animal." What would Ruskin or Swinburne then say to the critic? He would say simply, "Did you ever look at a snake? Did you ever study a cat?" The classicist would soon be convicted of utter ignorance about snakes and cats. He thought them hateful simply because it was not fashionable to admire them a hundred years ago. But the old poets of the early Middle Ages were not such fools. They had seen snakes and admired them, because for any man who is not prejudiced, a snake is a very beautiful creature, and its motions are as beautiful as geometry. If you do not think this is true, I beg of you to watch a snake, where its body can catch the light of the sun. Then there is no more graceful or friendly or more attractively intelligent animal than a cat. The common feeling about snakes and cats is not an artistic one, nor even a true one; it is of ethical origin, and unjust. These animals are not moral according to our notions; they seem cruel and treacherous, and forgetting that they cannot be judged by our code of morals, we have learned to speak of them contemptuously even from the physical point of view. Well, this was not the way in the early Middle Ages. People wereless sensitive on the subject of cruelty than they are to-day, and they could praise the beauty of snakes and tigers and all fierce or cunning creatures of prey, because they could admire the physical qualities without thinking of the moral ones. In Pre-Raphaelite poetry there is an attempt to do the very same thing. Swinburne does it more than any one else, perhaps even too much; but there is a great and true principle of art behind this revolution.
Now we can study Swinburne in some other moods. I want to show you the splendour of his long verse, verse of fourteen and sixteen syllables, of a form resurrected by him after centuries of neglect; and also verse written in imitation of Greek and Roman measures with more success than has attended similar efforts on the part of any other living poet. But in the first example that I shall offer, you will find matter of more interest than verse as verse. The poem is one of Swinburne's greatest, and the subject is entirely novel. The poet attempts to express the feeling of a Roman pagan, perhaps one of the last Epicurean philosophers, living at the time when Christianity was first declared the religion of the Empire, and despairing because of the destruction of the older religion and the vanishing of the gods whom he loved. By law Christianity has been made the state-religion, and it is forbidden to worship the other gods; the old man haughtily refuses to become a Christian, even after an impartial study of Christian doctrine; on the contrary, he is so unhappy at the fate of the religion of his fathers that he does not care to live any longer without his gods. And he prays to the goddess of death to take him out of this world, fromwhich all the beauty and art, all the old loved customs and beliefs are departing. We cannot read the whole "Hymn to Proserpine"; but we shall read enough to illustrate the style and feeling of the whole. At the head of the poem are the wordsVicisti,Galilæe!—"Thou hast conquered, O Galilean"—words uttered by the great Roman Emperor Julian at the moment of his death in battle. Julian was the last Emperor who tried to revive and purify the decaying Roman religion, and to oppose the growth of Christianity. He was, therefore, the great enemy of Christianity. His dying words were said to have been addressed to Christ, when he felt himself dying, but it is not certain whether he really ever uttered these words at all.
I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh orthat weep;For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove:But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.
After speaking to the goddess of death, he speaks thus to Christ:
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs inthe brake;Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire.More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things?Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years?Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey fromthy breath;We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fulness of death.
Or, in other words, the pagan says: "O Christ, you would wish to take everything from us, yet some things there are which you cannot take: not the inspiration of the poet, nor the spirit of art, nor the glory of heroism, nor the dreams of youth and love, nor the great and gracious gifts of time—the beauty of the seasons, the splendour of night and day. All these you cannot deprive us of, though you wish to; and what is better than these? Can you give us anything more precious? Assuredly you cannot. For these things are fitted to human life; and what do we know about any other life? Life passes quickly; why should we make it miserable with the evil dreams of a religion of sorrow?Short enough is the time in which we have pleasure, and the world is already full enough of pain; wherefore should we try to make ourselves still more unhappy than we already are? Yet you have conquered; you have destroyed the beauty of life; you have made the world seem grey and old, that was so beautiful and eternally young. You have made us drink the waters of forgetfulness and eat the food of death. For your religion is a religion of death, not of life; you yourself and the Christian gods are figures of death, not figures of life."
And how does he think of this new divinity, Christ? As a Roman citizen necessarily, and to a Roman citizen Christ was nothing more than a vulgar, common criminal executed by Roman law in company with thieves and murderers. Therefore he addresses such a divinity with scorn, even in the hour of his triumph:
O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods!O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end!
To understand the terrible bitterness of this scorn, it is necessary for the student to remember that a Roman citizen could not be tortured or flogged or gibbeted. Such punishments and penalties were reserved for slaves and for barbarians. Therefore to a Roman the mere fact of Christ's death and punishment—for he was tortured before being crucified—was a subject for contempt; accordingly he speaks of such a divinity as the "leavings of racks and rods"—that is, so much ofa man's body as might be left after the torturers and executioners had finished with it. Should a Roman citizen kneel down and humble himself before that? A little while, some thousands of years, perhaps, Christianity may be a triumphant religion, but all religions must die and pass away, one after another, and this new and detestable religion, with its ugly gods, must also pass away. For although the old Roman has studied too much philosophy to believe in all that his fathers believed, he believes in a power that is greater than man and gods and the universe itself, in the unknown power which gives life and death, and makes perpetual change, and sweeps away everything that man foolishly believes to be permanent. He gives to this law of impermanency the name of the goddess of death, but the name makes little difference; he has recognised the eternal law. Time will sweep away Christianity itself, and his description of this mighty wave of time is one of the finest passages in all his poetry:
All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are castFar out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:. . . . . . . . .Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas aswith wings,And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;With light of ruins and sound of changes, and pulse of years:With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour:And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots ofthe sea:And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air:And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time ismade bare.
When the poet calls this the wave of the world, you must not understand world to mean our planet only, but the universe, the cosmos; and the wave is the great wave of impermanency, including all forces of time and death and life and pain. But why these terrible similes of white eyes and poisonous things and shark's teeth, of blood and bitterness and terror? Because the old philosopher dimly recognises the cruelty of nature, the mercilessness of that awful law of change which, having swept away his old gods, will just as certainly sweep away the new gods that have appeared. Who can resist that mighty power, higher than the stars, deeper than the depths, in whose motion even gods are but asbubbles and foam? Assuredly not Christ and his new religion. Speaking to the new gods the Roman cries:
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.. . . . . . . . .Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall godown to thee dead.
Here follows a beautiful picture of the contrast between the beauty of the old gods and the uninviting aspect of the new. It is a comparison between the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, and Venus or Aphrodite, the ancient goddess of love, born from the sea. For to the Roman mind the Christian gods and saints wanted even the common charm of beauty and tenderness. All the divinities of the old Greek world were beautiful to look upon, and warmly human; but these strange new gods from Asia seemed to be not even artistically endurable. Addressing Christ, he continues:
Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around;Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen sheis crowned.Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these.Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas,Clothed around with the world's desire as with raiment and fair asthe foam,And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess and mother of Rome.For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours,Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers,White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame,Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name.For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but sheCame flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot onthe sea.And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wist that ye should not fall.Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all.
Why, by what power, for what reason, should the old gods have passed away? Even if one could not believe in them all, they were too beautiful to pass away and be broken, as their statues were broken by the early Christians in the rage of their ignorant and brutal zeal. The triumph of Christianity meant much more than the introduction of a new religion; it meant the destruction of priceless art and priceless literature, it signified the victory of barbarism over culture and refinement.Doubtless the change, like all great changes, was for the better in some ways; but no lover of art and the refinements of civilisation can read without regret the history of the iconoclasm in which the Christian fanatics indulged when they got the government and the law upon their side. It is this feeling of regret and horror that the poet well expresses through the mouth of the Roman who cares no more to live, because the gods and everything beautiful must pass away. But there is one goddess still left for him, one whom the Christians cannot break but who will at last break them and their religion, and scatter them as dust—the goddess of death. To her he turns with a last prayer:
But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end;Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.. . . . . . . . .Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath;For these give labour and slumber, but thou, Proserpina, death.Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I knowI shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.
The third line from the end, "a little soul for a little," is a translation from the philosopher Epictetus. It is the Epicurean philosophy especially which speaks in this poetry. The address to the goddess of death as the daughter of earth, cannot be understood without some reference to Greek mythology. Proserpina was the daughter of the goddess Ceres, whom the ancients termed the Holy Mother—queen of the earth, but especially the goddess of fruitfulness and of harvests. While playing in the fields as a young girl, Proserpina was seized and carried away by the god of the dead, Hades or Pluto, to become his wife. Everywhere her mother sought after her to no purpose; and because of the grief of the goddess, the earth dried up, the harvests failed, and all nature became desolate. Afterwards, finding that her daughter had become the queen of the kingdom of the dead, Ceres agreed that Proserpina should spend a part of every year with her husband, and part of the year with her mother. To this arrangement the Greeks partly attributed the origin of the seasons.
Incidentally in the poem there is a very beautiful passage describing the world of death, where no sun is, where the silence is more than music, where the flowers are white and full of strange sleepy smell, and where the sound of the speech of the dead is like the sound of water heard far away, or a humming of bees-whitherthe old man prays to go, to rest with his ancestors away from the light of the sun, and to forget all the sorrow of this world and its changes. But I think that you will do well to study this poem in detail by yourselves, when opportunity allows. It happens to be one of the very few poems in the first series of Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads" to which no reasonable exception can be made; and it is without doubt one of the very finest things that he has ever written. I could recommend this for translation; there are many pieces in the same book which I could not so recommend, notwithstanding their beauty. For instance, the poem entitled "Hesperia," with its splendid beginning:
Out of the golden remote wild west where the sea without shore is,Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fulness of joy.
There is nothing more perfect in modern literature than the beginning of this poem, which gives us an exact imitation in English words of the sound of the Greek hexameter and pentameter. But much of this work is too passionate and violent for even the most indulgent ears; and though I think that you ought to study the beginning, I should never recommend it for translation.
The comparison of the wave in the hymn to Proserpina must have given you an idea of Swinburne's power to deal with colossal images. I know of few descriptions in any literature to be compared with that picture of the wave; but Swinburne himself in another poem has given us descriptions nearly as surprising, if not as beautiful. There is a poem called "Thalassius," a kindof philosophical moral fable in Greek form, that contains a surprise of this kind. The subject is a young man's first experience with love. Walking in the meadows he sees a pretty boy, or rather child, just able to walk—a delicious child, tender as a flower, and apparently needing kindly care. So he takes the child by the hand, wondering at his beauty; and he speaks to the child, but never gets any reply except a smile. Suddenly, at a certain point of the road the child begins to grow tall, to grow tremendous; his stature reaches the sky, and in a terrible voice that shakes everything like an earthquake, he announces that though he may be Love, he is also Death, and that only the fool imagines him to be Love alone. There is a bit both of old and of new philosophy in this; and I remarked when reading it that in Indian mythology there is a similar representation of this double attribute of divinity, love and death, creation and destruction, represented by one personage. But we had better read the scene which I have been trying to describe, the meeting with the child:
That wellnigh wept for wonder that it smiled,And was so feeble and fearful, with soft speechThe youth bespake him softly; but there fellFrom the sweet lips no sweet word audibleThat ear or thought might reach;No sound to make the dim cold silence glad,No breath to thaw the hard harsh air with heat,Only the saddest smile of all things sweet,Only the sweetest smile of all things sad.And so they went together one green wayTill April dying made free the world for May;And on his guide suddenly Love's face turned,And in his blind eyes burnedHard light and heat of laughter; and like flameThat opens in a mountain's ravening mouthTo blear and sear the sunlight from the south,His mute mouth opened, and his first word came;"Knowest thou me now by name?"And all his stature waxed immeasurable,As of one shadowing heaven and lightening hell;And statelier stood he than a tower that standsAnd darkens with its darkness far-off sandsWhereon the sky leans red;And with a voice that stilled the winds he said:"I am he that was thy lord before thy birth,I am he that is thy lord till thou turn earth;I make the night more dark, and all the morrowDark as the night whose darkness was my breath:O fool, my name is sorrow;Thou fool, my name is death."
By the term "darkness" in the third line from the end of the above quotation, we must understand the darkness and mystery out of which man comes into this world, and comes only to die. This monstrous symbolism may need some explanation, before you see how very fine the meaning is. Love, that is the attraction of sex to sex, with all its emotions, heroisms, sacrifices, and nobilities, cannot be understood by the young. To them, love is only the physical and the moral charm of the being that is loved. In man the passion of love becomes noble and specialised by the development in him of moral, æsthetic, and other feelings that are purely human. But the attraction of sex, that is behind all this, is a universal and terrible fact, a tremendous mystery,whose ultimate nature no man knows or ever will know. Why? Because if we knew the nature and origin of the forces that create, we could understand the whole universe, and ourselves, and everything that men now call mystery. But all that we certainly do know is this, that we come into the world out of mystery and go out of the world again back into mystery, and that no mortal man can explain the Whence, the Why, or the Whither. The first sensations of love for another being are perhaps the most delicious feelings known to men; the person loved seems for the time to be more beautiful and good than any one else in the world. This is what the poet means by describing the first appearance of love as a beautiful, tender child, innocent and dumb. But later in life the physical illusion passes away; then one learns the relation of this seeming romance to the awful questions of life and death. The girl beloved becomes the wife; then she becomes the mother; but in becoming a mother, she enters into the very shadow of death, sometimes never to return from it. Birth itself is an agony, the greatest agony that humanity has to bear. We come into the world through pains of the most deadly kind, and leave the world later on in pain; and what all this means, we do not know. We are only certain that the Greeks were not wrong in representing love as the brother of death. The Oriental philosophers went further; they identified love with death, making them one and the same. One cannot help thinking of the Indian statue representing the creative power, holding in his hand the symbol of life, but wearing around his neck a necklace of human skulls.
The poem that introduces the first volume of Swinburne's poems, as published in America, gave its name to the book, so that thousands of English readers used to call the volume by the name of this poem, "Laus Veneris," which means the praise of Venus. I do not think that there is a more characteristic poem in all Swinburne's work; it is certainly the most interesting version in any modern language of the old mediæval story. Without understanding the story you could not possibly understand the poem, and as the story has been famous for hundreds of years, I shall first relate it.
After Christianity had made laws forbidding people to worship the old gods, it was believed that these gods still remained wandering about like ghosts and tempting men to sin. One of these divinities especially dreaded by the Christian priests, was Venus. Now in the Middle t Ages there was a strange story about a knight called Tannhäuser, who, riding home one evening, saw by the wayside a beautiful woman unclad, who smiled at him, and induced him to follow her. He followed her to the foot of a great mountain; the mountain opened like a door, and they went in, and found a splendid palace under the mountain. The fairy woman was Venus herself; and the knight lived with her for seven years. At the end of the seven years he became afraid because of the sin which he had committed; and he begged her, as Urashima begged the daughter of the Dragon King, to let him return for a little time to the world of men. She let him go; and he went to Rome. There he told his story to different priests, and asked them to obtain for him the forgiveness of God. But each of the priests made answer that the sin wasso great that nobody except the Pope of Rome could forgive it. Then the knight went to the Pope. But when the Pope heard his confession, the Pope said that there was no forgiveness possible for such a crime as that of loving a demon. The Pope had a wooden staff in his hand, and he said, "Sooner shall this dry stick burst into blossom than you obtain God's pardon for such a sin." Then the knight, sorrowing greatly, went back to the mountain and to Venus. After he had gone, the Pope was astonished to see that the dry staff was covered with beautiful flowers and leaves that had suddenly grown out of it, as a sign that God was more merciful than his priests. At this the Pope became sorry and afraid, and he sent out messengers to look for the knight. But no man ever saw him again, for Venus kept him hidden in her palace under the mountain. Swinburne found his version of the story in a quaint French book published in 1530. He represents, not the incidents of the story itself, but only the feelings of the knight after his return from Rome. There is no more hope for him. His only consolation is his love and worship for her; but this love and worship is mingled with fear of hell and regret for his condition. Into the poem Swinburne has put the whole spirit of revolt of which he and the Pre-Raphaelite school were exponents. A few verses will show you the tone. The knight praises Venus:
Lo, this is she that was the world's delight;The old grey years were parcels of her might;The strewings of the ways wherein she trodWere the twain seasons of the day and night.Lo, she was thus when her clear limbs enticedAll lips that now grow sad with kissing Christ,Stained with blood fallen from the feet of God,The feet and hands whereat our souls were priced.Alas, Lord, surely thou art great and fair.But lo her wonderfully woven hair!And thou didst heal us With thy piteous kiss;But see now, Lord; her mouth is lovelier.She is right fair; what hath she done to thee?Nay, fair Lord Christ, lift up thine eyes and see;Had now thy mother such a lip—like this?Thou knowest how sweet a thing it is to me.
This calling upon God to admire Venus, this asking Christ whether his mother was even half as beautiful as Venus, was to religious people extremely shocking, of course. And still more shocking seemed the confession in the latter part of the poem that the knight does not care whether he has sinned or not, since, after all, he has been more fortunate than any other man. This expression of exultation after remorse appeared to reverent minds diabolical, the thought of a new Satanic School. But really the poet was doing his work excellently, so far as truth to nature was concerned; and these criticisms were as ignorant as they were out of place. The real fault of the poem was only a fault of youth, a too great sensuousness in its descriptive passages. We might say that Swinburne himself was, during those years, very much in the position of the knight Tannhäuser; he had gone back to the worship of the old gods because they were more beautiful and more joyous than the Christian gods; we may even say thathe never came back from the mountain of Venus. But all this poetry of the first series was experimental; it was an expression of the Renaissance feeling that visits the youth of every poet possessing a strong sense of beauty. Before the emotions can be fully corrected by the intellect, such poets are apt to offend the proprieties, and even to say things which the most liberal philosopher would have to condemn. It was at such a time that in another poem, "Dolores," Swinburne spoke of leaving
The lilies and languors of virtueFor the raptures and roses of vice,
—lines that immediately became famous. It was also at such a time that he uttered the prayer to a pagan ideal:
Come down and redeem us from virtue.
But on the other hand, if all poets were to wait for the age of wisdom before they began to sing, we should miss a thousand beautiful things of which only youth is capable, wherefore it were best to forgive the eccentricities for the sake of the incomparable merits. For example, in the very poem from which these quotations have been made, we have such splendid verses as these, referring to the worship of Venus in the time of Nero:
Dost thou dream, in a respite of slumber,In a lull of the fires of thy life,Of the days without name, without number,When thy will stung the world into strife;When, a goddess, the pulse of thy passionSmote kings as they revelled in Rome,And they hailed thee re-risen, O Thalassian,Foam-white, from the foam?
Thalassian means the sea-born, derived from the Greek word Thalatta, the sea. Here—Swinburne might be referring to the times of the Triumvirate, when Cleopatra succeeded in bewitching the great captain Cæsar and the great captain Antony, and set the world fighting for her sake. Then we have a reference to the great games in Rome, the splendour and the horror of the amphitheatre:
On sands by the storm never shaken,Nor wet from the washing of tides;Nor by foam of the waves overtaken,Nor winds that the thunder bestrides;But red from the print of thy paces,Made smooth for the world and its lords,Ringed round with a flame of fair faces,And splendid with swords.
The floor of the amphitheatre was covered with sand, which absorbed the blood of the combatants. But you will ask what had the games to da with the goddess? All the Roman festivities of this kind were, to a certain extent, considered as religious celebrations; they formed parts of holiday ceremony.