April IQ, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
i5 
Life and Letters 
By J. C. Squire 
MR. EDMUND GOSSE'S Life of Algernon Charles 
Swinburne (MacmiUan, los. 6d. net), is a good 
book. You can read it at a sitting and begin it 
again at once ; the narrative flows with un- 
broken ease, and whenever a story is told or a scene 
painted it is done with the grace and the engaging Puckish 
gravity that are present in all Mr. Gosse's studies of his 
contenifwraries. At the same time, however enjoyable a 
book, it is not a perfect Life. In the first place, it is 
not quite satisfactorily proportioned. The wh(jle of the 
last thirty years of Swinburne's life is crowded into one 
chapter : Mr. Gosse seems to imply that when Swin- 
burne went to live at Putney with Watts-Dunton, he 
entered into a middle state of being between hfe and 
death. But though he may have " eaten like a caterpillar 
and slept like a dormouse," he did not lose interest in life at 
Putney, and the work he did there was far more important 
than Mr. Gosse suggests. And, secondly, the book suffers 
because it continually gives the impression that Mr. Gosse 
is holding himself in ; that, in fact, he frequently thinks of a 
vivid or amusing thing and then stops short with the thought 
" Oh, that wojuld not l)c dignified," or "Oh, that would scarcely 
be fair to Algernon." 
***** 
One can quite understand that Mr. Gosse was anxious that 
his errors in portraiture should be on the right side. He 
was writing an " official " life of an eminent friend ; and he 
naturally felt both a certain loyalty towards that friend and 
a desire to avoid the appearance of lampooning him. But 
he has gone too 'far in his anxiety to be correct. Nobody wants 
to be told how often the young Swinburne got drunk, and 
how many glasses (one was probably almost enough) it took 
to make him drunk : but since Mr. Gosse says he was near 
death when Watts-Dunton ]X)unced on him, like the roc on 
Sinbad, and carried him off to Putney, he need not have 
taken such pains to avoid saying why the poet's condition 
was so deplorable. You feel frequently that Mr. Gosse has 
written down a story and then cut off the tail of it in a sudden 
apprehension of being called unkind or irreverent. He says, 
f<jr example, that throughout the long twilight at Putney 
Swinburne always took a morning walk. But he really need not 
have studiously omitted — what everybody well knew — 
that the objective of the excursion was a public-house, and 
he might even have confirmed or contradicted the common 
rumour that Watts-Dunton doled out to ,his ward, each 
morning, an exact twopence for his half-pint. Take again, 
Mr. Gosse's treatment of the row with the Spectator in 1862. 
All Mr. Gosse says about that is that " a burlesque review 
of an imaginary volume of French poetry was refused, as 
indeed was inevitable." But this episode was one of the most 
comic and characteristic in Swinburne's early career, and 
should certainly have been told in full. The story, as 
ordinarily related, is that having secured the confidence of 
the sage and sober R. H. Hutton by his learned reviews of 
French poets, Swinburne invented a pair of them— called, 
say, Dubois and Dupont. He then composed a number of 
abominable extracts from their non-existent works and 
wr(jte two long reviews around these extracts, deploring 
with the utmost fervour the lamentable way in which modern 
French artists were misusing their talents. One of the 
reviews got into type ; and then Hutton, who was not a fool, 
smelt a rat. And another passage about which wc might 
well have had more is the celebrated exchange of compliments 
with Furnivall in 1880, when a controversy which had began 
with a difference of opiniim over the date and authorship of 
Henry y II I. ended in about of mud-slinging, never excelled 
in the history of Enghsh letters. Furnivall chastely 
informed Swinburne that his ear was a " poetaster's, 
hairy, thick and dull " and (as Mr. Gosse puts it), " took to 
parodymg Swinburne's name with dismal vulgarity, as 
' Pigsbrook,' " ; whilst Swinburne, who regarded the New 
Shakespeare Society, as "a blackguard's gang of block- 
heads," composed elaborately infuriating letters which he 
felt sure would make " Dunce Furnivall dance till the sweat 
pours down his cheeks." They did. But Mr. Gosse does 
not give enough specimens. "You feel that he is uneasv 
about it. And a biographer ought not to be. For when the 
thing IS all over and done w-'th, it is the biographer's business 
to tell us the whole truth about it : assuming that " it " is 
at all amusing or illuminating. One may regret that .yvin- 
burne did not kec]) himself under coiitr A': one may be sorry 
that a scholar so erudite as Furnivall should have possessed, 
and drawn upon, such resources of foul and abusive language. 
Public personages should always (as we all know) behave 
in the most gentlemanly, civil and reasonable way ; and if 
one had been Professor Dowden or Mr. Gosse, one would 
have joined the rest in trying to dam the flowing tide of 
Billingsgate. But since Swinburne did let himself go in 
this pakuolithic way, we might as well be given some ex- 
tracts from his letters. As I write I receive Mr. Dobell's latest 
catalogue of second-hand books and notice a copy of Churton 
Collins 's Jonathan Swift. The bookseller's note is : 
With four lines of notes in the handwriting of A. C. Swin- 
burne. These notes are^very uncompHmentary. "Monstrous 
lie," ■' Unspeakable Churton Collins ! " etc. 
Mr. Gosse gives enough specimens to render impossible 
the charge of neglecting this aspect of his subject's character : 
but not enough to exhibit it in its full luxuriance. 
For Swinburne from a biographer's point of view, was some- 
thing more than a distinguished man with a career, whose 
"life " can merely record his friendships, his movements, 
and his works. He was a " character " : the oddest man who 
has written great English verse : an extraordinary being : 
a creature at once noble, pathetic and grotesquely funny, 
who would have given intense pleasure to a connoisseur hke 
his own idol Charles Lamb. Mr. Gosse knows this. He has 
the profoundcst affection for him and admiration for his 
powers ; yet he is never able to describe his appearance or 
gestures without making him seem ridiculous, like some 
character Dickens forgot to create. The enormous " pear- 
shaped " head, the tousled red hair ; the little body, the 
sloping shoulders, fluttering hands, tiny feet ; the ecstatic 
voice in which he would recite endless verses to exhausted 
listeners, and which rose to a scream when he was excited ; 
whatever the occasion Mr. GosSe's descriptions can never 
escape the appearance of caricature, though no caricature is 
there. One of the quaintest glimpses we get is supplied by Lord 
Haldane (not, one imagines, a man who has established fre- 
quent contact with the Muse) who 
tells me tliat he happened to go into a London restaurant 
one day in 1877. When he had given his order for luncheon, 
the waiter leaned do\vn and wJiispered, " Do you see that 
gentleman, Sir ? " Haldane then perceived a little gentleman 
sitting bolt upright at a table by himself, with nothmg 
before him but a heaped-up dish of asparagus and a Ixiwi of 
melted butter. His head, with a great sliock of red hair 
round it, was bent a little on one side, and his eyes were 
raised in a sort of unconscious rapture, while he held the 
asparagus, stick by stick, above his face, and dropped it 
clown as far as it would go. " That's the poet Swinburne, 
Sir! " the waiter said, "and he comes here on purpose to 
enjoy the asparagus." 
It has been given to few men, perhaps, to "manipulate ■ 
asparagus with entire aplomb ; but we feel at once that 
Swinburne was something out of the ordinary. 
One feels, as I say, that Mr. Gosse's portrait of the outer 
man, the astonishing tropical bird (as he calls him) of the 
early days and the eccentric recluse of Putney suffers through 
the biographer'.s discretion : the inner man wc hardly get at 
all, in the almost complete absence of intimate conversations 
and letters. To some extent Mrs. Disnej' Leith's recent 
volume The Boyhood of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Chatto 
and Wuidus, 5s. net), is useful as a supplement to the Life. 
It contains a large number of letters from the poet to his 
relatives. These are not like the letters he wrote to his 
friends ; they are geptle, tender and domesticated, full of 
reverence for the good and pretty stories about childreil. 
The most striking thing about them is their [constant revela- 
tion of Swinburne's dependence on other people. Long before 
he used Watts-Dunton as a physical ]irop he had habituated 
himself to spiritual props. The man who knelt before 
Landor, who kissed Mazzini's hand, and who cried with 
gratitude when Hugo did him a little favour, was a man who 
could not exist without some stronger personality to lean 
upon. He had to worship, to pour himself out. It is a 
proof of his essential healthiness of instinct that [almost all 
his heroes were men of undoubted moral grandeur. Watts- 
Dunton was not that. But close contiguity witli him made 
Swinburne almost his slav(^ intellectually. His letters are 
full of "Watts and I think," " I think, and so does Walter," 
and so on. It is a strange fate for an enfant terrible. He 
had no God and was forced to find human substitutes. 
