June 21, 1917 
i^AINU & WATER 
ij 
A Residue 
By J. G. Squire 
THE poet Swinburne, wlien lii^ table was covered 
with papers, would sweep them into a heap, tie them 
up in a current newspaper, and deposit them on a 
high shelf never again to be disturbed. After his 
death these parcels were searched for manuscript by Mr. 
Gosse, Mr. Thomas VVise (one of the greatest of living biblio- 
j)hiles), and Watts-Duntoa, whose " interest in the matter " 
{.says Mr. Gosse), " had become entirely a financial one." 
iManusciipts were found ; Watts-Dunton disgorged them 
for a very large sum of money ; and some of them are now 
IJublishcd in Poslhimions Poems by Algernon Charles Swin- 
burne, edited by Edmund Gosse, C.B., and Thomas James 
Wise (Hcinemiinn, 6s. net). The publisher's note, which 
comes to the reviewer, describes them as " Pothumous." 
The word has an agreeably Bacchanalian air. One is led 
hiilf-consciously, to expect lively verses : perhaps, as 
Swinburne was a classical scholar, translations of 
Anacrcon into English Alcoholics. The expectation 
is defeated. Such verses exist apparently : Swinburne 
seems to have recited some of them to Jowett in a cab. But 
l)ublication of these is postponed. What we have here is 
eleven early Border Ballads, thirty-five miscellaneous poems 
of all periods, a long Ode to Mazzini (1H5-), and parodies on 
Tennsyon and Swinburne himself. 
***** 
Mr. Gosse, who writes an interesting introduction, attaches 
very great importance to the Border Ballads, which, he 
guesses, were only not published by Swinburne, because they 
were too much like the real rough primitive ballads to please 
Kossetti. Whatever one may have to say about publishing 
posthumous works as a rule, one certainly cannot but wel- 
come these ballads. They are not — many of the old ballads 
in Professor Child's great collection arc not — great poetry. 
But they are the most superbly skilful exercises in the whole 
history of literary imitation. Swinburn'e was a modern man, 
reproducing an old form and employing an archaic language : 
he could not feel his themes as the" best of the old balladists 
felt them ; he could not rise to the heights of Clerk Saunders 
or 'I'lie Wife 0/ Usher's Well. But there arc very few lapses 
in J'/ic Worm of Spindclstonhciigh and Lord Soidis which 
would betray their date. He has every trick at his com- 
mand : and n;ore than once he actually moves one. 
***** 
The miscellaneous poems are in a different category : about 
most of them there is no question but that Swinburne sup- 
pressed them on their merits and not in deference to his 
friends. The poem on Sir John Pranklin, with which he 
failed to win the Newdigate, is well worth having ; almost all 
the others arc variations of familiar tunes. Who, hearing 
this, would know whether it came from Swinburne's published 
or from his unpublished works ? : 
All the noise of the night. 
All the thunder of things. 
All the terrors be hurled 
01 the blind bnite-forcc of the wurld, 
All the weight of the light, 
All men's violent might. 
All the confluence of Kings. 
The truth is that Swinburne's few masterjiieces are already so 
swamped by the great mass of his imperfect work, work 
vitiated by his diffuseness, his looseness of phraseology, and 
his subordination of sense to sound, that any new poems, 
however skilful, which are merely " characteristic," n,uist 
be regretted. " It's plain as a newspaper leader," he says ' 
That a rhymester who seribliles like me 
May feel perfectly sure that his reader 
Is sick of the sea. 
It is quite true : and the same thing may be said of Mazzini, 
Hugo, Landor, token, broken, spoken, light, bright, might, 
light and jight ; for half his time he was using these things 
merely as counters. He writes a poem on the death of 
Browning. Presumably, he felt that deatii : but he cannot 
communicate his emotion because he cannot escape from his 
rhetoric. He begins with a sunset : 
All the west, whereon the sunset sealed the dead year's 
gforious grave 
Fast with seals of light aiul lire and cloud that light and 
tire illume. 
Glows at heart and kindles earth''aiid heaven with joyous 
blush and bloom, 
Warm and wide as life, and glad ol death whicii only 
slays to save. 
As a tide-reconquered sea-rock lies aflush with the influent 
wave. 
Lies the light aflush with darkness, lapped about with 
lustrous gloom. 
.Swinburne undoubtedly saw that sunset ; but his reader has 
to struggle again and again through his magnificent verbiage 
before discovering what sort of suilset it was. Swin- 
burne persistently attempted description, but very seldom 
described. And more of his failures nobody can conceivably 
vvant. The new collection contains nothing worse than 
his worst, but nothing'as good as his best. 
***** 
The editors promise, or half-promise, more. It (hey do 
not bring them out somebody else will. Almost every iiim;- 
tcenth century poet has had this posthumous e.\i)crience. 
Fragments of Shelley were dribbled out tiiroughout the 
nineteenth century, and Mr. W. M. Kossetti has several 
times added a little more to the works of his brother^ 
without, however, inducing anyone to say " the little more 
and i'low much it is." In the last two or three years we 
have had Miss Morris's additional poems of William Morris, 
Sir Sidney Colvin's new Keats poems (one of which was 
deplorable). Sir Frederick Kenyon's almost voluminous 
collection of unpublished poems by Robert and Elizabeth 
Barrett Browning, and Mr. A. C. Benson's new poeirts by 
the Brontes. Where unpublished works are not accessible, 
editors' devote themselves to the exhumation of poems that 
their authors have published and thei> suppressed. An 
interesting and little known volume of this kind is Tlia 
Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, edited by J. C. 
Tiiomson (Sands and Co., 1910), a liundred and sixty pages of 
verse, from the Prize Poem Timbucloo onwards, of which the 
poet thought better. It is very rarely that anything approacli- 
ing a masterpiece is discovered after a man's works have been 
once issued in a competent collected edition. As a rule, 
these ferretings-out of scraps of paper only result in swelling 
the volume of the poet's inferior work, usually (luitc largo 
enough for comfort already. One cannot blame the editors, 
as given an opportunity oneself would probably act as they 
do. The excitement of discovery is great : and the man who 
should find a new sonnet by Keats and not print it would 
have to have the tenacious austerity of a S. Anthony. The 
only possible conclusion is that authors must learn to look 
after themselves. 
***** 
I would, therefore, tender the following advice to any 
eminent or prospectively eminent poets who may be 
reading these lines. If you have about your house 
metrical tokens of affection addressed by you to your 
Nurse at the age of Seven, destroy them. If you are 
in the. habit of enclosing verses in your letters to your 
friends, think twice before you send them, for you may end 
by regretting them, and once they are out of your hands 
no menaces, no imprecations in your last Will and Testament 
will prevent posterity from giving them immortality. If 
there are pages in your manuscript books which contain 
lyrics that you consider worthy only of Mrs. Ella Wheeler - 
Wilcox or trial stanzas which have been rejected as failures, 
tear those pages out. Put them in the fire. Watch them 
take the flame. Stare at them as they cris]) and blacken 
and roll up and blow to pink and tinkle into fragment;. 
' Then, as you contemplate the ])allid marks on the asheu 
fragments in the j,'rate, take pleasure in thinking that here at 
least is something you have done which will never " out." 
No spectacled grubber after your sillier or incompleter 
thoughts will ever be able to get at them. No triumphant 
"scholar," by burrowing in your chests of drawers, will be 
able to produce an Only Complete Edition SuiX'iseding All 
Others, at the same time making you look a fool. You 
are bound to produce weeds. If you do not burn them 
l)ostciity will go about wearing them in its buttonholes. So 
u|) now ; search; ruthlessly destroy. And when thy mortal 
body has gone to its last rest, thy shade shall hover, serenely 
smiling, above- thy library, whilst thy e.xecutois, hunting for 
thy literary remains, shall find nothing but letters, the unpaid 
bills of thy butcher and thy laundress, and copies of thy best- 
known works written out in a fair round hand. These last 
they may, should, and will sell. 
