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then the stand of the individual against immensities, a stand always hazardous, becomes a gesture of incredible power and pride, an attitude of almost impossible heroism, the lonely uprising of a naked pigmy between overpowering hordes and the abyss.

This is the ultimate test of the poet. This must be his attitude today between the forces of life and death-between the embattled nations sweeping decrepit and rotten things into the gulf, and those invisible rangers of the air whose breath is the future. Puny unit of the unconquerable will, he must hold up his little torch between the old and new

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Unhurt amid the war of elements,

The wreck of matter and the crash of worlds!

REVIEWS

SWINBURNE VERSUS BIOGRAPHERS

H. Monroe,

The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne by Edmund
Gosse, C. B. The Macmillan Co.

Gosse's Life of Swinburne is merely the attempt of a silly and pompous old man to present a man of genius, an attempt necessarily foredoomed to failure and not worth the attention of even the most cursive reviewer. Gosse has written one excellent book: Father and Son, prompted according to gossip by his wife's fear that Mr. George Moore, having been rashly allowed access to Mr. Gosse's diaries, proposed to steal the material. Mr. Gosse has also held divers positions of trust under the British government, in

one of which, at least, he has fulfilled his functions with great credit and fairness. Apart from that he resembles many literary figures of about his age and generation, who coming after the more or less drunken and more or less obstreperous real Victorians, acquired only the cant and the fustiness.

Tennyson, "so muzzy that he tried to go out through the fire-place;" Morris (William, not Lewis) lying on the floor biting the table-leg in a rage because Gabriel had gone off before he, Morris, had finished what he was saying; Swinburne at the Madox Browns' door in a cab, while the housekeeper lectures the cabman: "Wot! No, sir, my marster is at the 'ead of 'is table carving the j'int. That's Mr. Swinburne taike 'im up to the barth:" were all vital and human people. The real pre-raphaelites lived with Ford Madox Brown's hospitable address sewn inside their coats, in case of these little events. Tennyson, personally the North-country ox, might very well take refuge from his deplorable manners in verbal patisserie; Thackeray might snivvel over not being allowed to write with desirable openness: most of these people surround themselves with extenuations, but for the next generation there is not much to be said save that they go like better men toward extinction. We do not however wish a Swinburne coated with veneer of British officialdom and decked out for a psalmsinging audience.

Gosse in the safety of his annual pension of £666, 16 shillings, 8 pence, has little to fear from the slings of fortune

or from the criticisms of younger men. If he preferred to present Swinburne as an epileptic rather than as an intemperate drinker, we can only attribute this to his taste, a taste for kowtowing.

The "events at the art club," which he so prudishly glozes over, were the outcome of alcohol, and the story is worth while if only for the magnificent tanning that Whistler administered to the Arts Club committee: "You ought to be proud that there is in London a club where the greatest poet of your time can get drunk if he wants to, otherwise he might lie in the gutter."

There is more Swinburne, and perhaps more is to be told of his tragedy, in a few vignettes than is to be found in all Gosse's fusty volume. Swinburne's tragedy was that he ended as a deaf, querulous old man in Putney, mediocre in his faculties. W. H. Davies tells the story of the little old man looking into a perambulator in front of a pub, and a cockney woman hastily interposing herself and pulling the clothes over her infant's head with, "Narsty old man, 'e sharn't look at my baby."

Thus departed his mundane glory, the glory of a red mane, the glory of the strong swimmer, of the swimmer who when he was pulled out of the channel apparently drowned, came to and held his French fishermen rescuers spellbound all the way to shore declaiming page after page of Hugo.

As George Moore, in his writings, nearly always attributes to himself the witty remarks wherewith other men have

extinguished him in conversation, we may be pardoned for another tale, which may as likely as not contain verity. It is said that Moore desired greatly to look upon Swinburne, and having obtained his address repaired to the Temple, and heavily climbing the stairs heard noises

come fa mar per tempesta.

They proceeded from Swinburne's rooms. Moore knockedthe door was already open. No answer was given. The booming increased and diminished and increased. Moore entered the room was empty; he proceeded to the next open door, and to still another. He stood aghast; Swinburne, hair on end and stark naked, strode backwards and forwards howling Aeschylus. Moore stood paralyzed. Swinburne after some moments caught sight of him; thundered "What the hell do you want?" Moore summoned his waning powers of expression, and with mountainous effort brought forth the verbal mouse: "Please, sir, are these Mr. Jones' chambers?"

"No, sir!"

Whereat Mr. George Moore departed.

It is impossible that a self-respecting biographer should not have found many such tales of Swinburne. The anaemic Gosse prefers the epileptic version. Any poet might be justified in taking to drink on finding himself born into a world full of Gosses, Comstocks, and Sumners.

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Swinburne's art is out of fashion. The best imitations of him are by the Germans. The nineties refined upon him,

and Kipling has set his 'cello-tunes to the pilly-wink of one banjo.

Swinburne recognized poetry as an art, and as an art of verbal music. Keats had got so far as to see that it need not be the pack-mule of philosophy. Swinburne's actual writing is very often rather distressing, but a deal of his verse is no worse written than Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. He habitually makes a fine stanzaic form, writes one or two fine strophes in it, and then continues to pour into the mould strophes of diminishing quality.

His biography is perfectly well written in his work. He is never better than in the Ballad of Life, the Ballad of Death, and the Triumph of Time. To the careful reader this last shows quite clearly that Swinburne was actually broken by a real and not by a feigned emotional catastrophe early in life; of this his later slow decline is a witness. There is a lack of intellect in his work. After the poems in the Laus Veneris volume (not particularly the title poem) and the poems of the time when he made his magnificent adaptations from Villon, he had few rallies of force, one of them in Sienna.

He neglected the value of words as words, and was intent on their value as sound. His habit of choice grew mechanical, and he himself perceived it and parodied his own systemization.

Moderns more awake to the value of language will read him with increasing annoyance, but I think few men who read him before their faculty for literary criticism is awak

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