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A BUNDLE OF MEMORIES

I
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

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Never again shall we see that strange figure, working its fixed way along the edge of Wimbledon Common, to and fro, from the hideous villa at the bottom of Putney Hill to the Rose and Crown and the bottle of stout, and back again. Time after time I have caught sight of it--twitching zealously along, with odd jerky motions, the head thrown far back, the long back rigidly set, the long arms reaching to the knees, like Buddha’s, with the hands wagging and out-splayed, and the very short legs, and the short crumpled trousers, ending somehow above the funny boots. Everything was queer and rather uncanny, until you were close enough to catch sight of the fine grave eyes above the elusive chin, and the splendid brow. No one could ever induce him to speak a word. If adventurous people asked him the time of day, he would silently hold out his watch for them to see. In silence he passed into the Rose and Crown: in silence drank his fixed amount: in silence deposited the charge: and in silence emerged to work his way home. He always moved as if engaged on a strenuous task. Only now and then a baby in a perambulator, with its rose-leaf face, would arrest him: and he would turn to feast on the sight that he loved. Now and again it would disappoint him by shrinking into a scream of fright at its worshipper.

So for thirty years and more he had lived out his life, trying to obey the French novelist who said that a poet should “live like a bourgeois and think like a God.” Did ever such a house hold for thirty years such a poet? Could anything more commonplace, more formal, more Philistine, more hopelessly suburban be imagined than that semi-detached villa, with its stucco porch and its Victorian meanness? It was a squat denial that there had ever been such a thing as romance, or music, or song in the world. If there ever had been, obviously, it could not have been built. Yet there it stood, in blind protest. And there he lived in peace and content--living out days that were regular and uneventful and humdrum to a degree that surprised even the humdrum monotony of a suburb. Something very domestic and quiet there was, after all, in his nature. He asked for so little to make him happy, if he had his books and his thoughts. We know how intense his home affections were--how deep was his love for his mother and his sister; how strong his attachment to home memories, to Bonchurch, to Northumberland; how passionate his adoration of childhood and babies. All this recalls to me the verdict of Bishop Stubbs, to whose country vicarage Swinburne retired for six months in order, according to our Balliol legend, to learn where Ramoth-Gilead was, for ignorance of which he had been ploughed in “Divinity.” There he sat on the ground at Mrs. Stubbs’s feet, and read to her “Queen Mary,” to her great dislike and astonishment. The Bishop judged him to be not a man of strong or vehement passions, but of intense intellectual imagination. It was an intellectual interest which prompted him to imagine morbid sensual situations from which real passion would have recoiled, disgusted. For him it was an imaginative feat; and the more repellent the situation, therefore, the more exciting the feat. This agrees with what he once said to an Oxford friend, I believe--that he wrote best about what he had never personally experienced. This would explain much that shocked in the famous volume of Poems and Ballads.

For the thirty years at Putney he had ceased to have any helpful message to give. His politics became at last an acrid scream. So he no longer counted among the forces at work upon us. But since he has gone the old memories have stirred again, and we have been haunted again by that amazing magical music which swept us all off our feet so long ago. Never, surely, was there such magic given to our English tongue. Who could have imagined that it held in it the splendour, and the motion, and the cadence, and lilt of those enthralling refrains?

“Dream that the lips once breathless

Can quicken if they would:

Say that the soul is deathless:

Dream that the Gods are good.

“Say March may wed September,

And time divorce regret:

But not that you remember

And not that I forget!”

We sang them: we shouted them: we flung them about, to the skies and to the winds. It was like becoming possessed of a new sense. And then the wonder of recognizing that that astonishing Bible of ours was the quarry from which he had dug! The finest lilt of all that he wrote was the lilt of the Prophets and the Psalms. The most vibrant music was the music of the Song of Solomon: and the passion and the melancholy were but echoes of the Son of Sirach.

“We have seen thee, O Love, thou art fair: Thou art goodly, O Love!

Thy wings make light in the air, as the wings of a Dove.

Thy feet are as winds that divide the stream of the sea:

Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the garment of thee:

Thou art swift and subtle and blind as a flame of fire.

Before thee the laughter, behind thee the tears of desire.”

Biblical England pricked up its ears at the strange translation of its familiar language. It was troubled at this bold spoiling of the Hebrews by the Egyptians, as it saw its finest jewels prostituted to the service of the goddesses of mud and slime. Yet the secret sway of this new song over our souls came from out of this reverberation in it of ancient vibrant melodious refrains which belonged to the deepest experiences of the spirit. That sway over the lilt of delicate refrains Swinburne never lost: but at last it ceased to disguise the fact that he had nothing much to say to us. Beyond the sweet sorrow at the passing of beautiful things he had no motive, no theme on which to dwell.

“We know not whether death be good:

But life at least it will not be:

Men will stand saddening as we stood,

Watch the same fields and skies as we--

And the same sea.”

He could shout glorious hymns of praise to the sea, or to the heroes whom he delighted to honour. But these high lyrics only told us that he loved the sea, and loved great men: and that it was worth while to love, in spite of all that death could do. A good theme, but it could not bear the strain of all this majestic rhetoric for ever. And there was nothing more. So it is still the wonderful musical cadences that came to us as a new revelation of what words could be made to do, when first he let them loose upon our hearts--it is still only these that we can recall or care for. They were his peculiar gift to us. He could but repeat them over and over again. He had no other gift to give. The music of these phrases will never be forgotten. For the elemental emotion at the simple thought that fair things perish, they will remain as the most perfect and delicate expression ever given to it. And there it ends.

“Time takes them home that we loved, fair names and famous,

To the soft long sleep, to the broad sweet bosom of death:

But the flower of their souls he shall not take away to shame us,

Nor the lips lack song for ever that now lack breath.

For with us shall the music and perfume that die not dwell,

Though the dead to our dead bid welcome, and we farewell.”