Studies in Literature and History Part 13

We may so far agree with Mr. Davidson that most of the sublime pa.s.sages in English poetry are in blank verse, though it may be noticed that the four lines which he quotes from _Macbeth_,[36] as containing the 'topmost note in the stupendous agony of the drama,'

are rhymed. The management of rhyme is a difficult and very delicate art; it is an instrument that requires a first-cla.s.s performer, like Mr. Swinburne, to bring out its potency; to this art the English lyric, the ode and the song, owe their musical perfection. Mr.

Swinburne, in an essay upon Matthew Arnold's _New Poems_ (1867), has said, truly, that 'rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in England'; and that 'to throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is a wilful abdication of half the charm and half the power of verse.' To this general rule he might possibly admit one exception--Tennyson's short poem beginning with 'Tears, idle tears,'

which is so delicately modulated that the absence of rhyme is not missed. At any rate it is certain that all popular verse needs this terminal note; for a ballad in blank verse is inconceivable. On the other hand, the proper use of rhyme demands a fine ear, which is a rare gift; for our language has no formal rules of prosody, so that in maladroit hands rhyme becomes an intolerable jingle. At the present day, however, there is a tendency to run into excessive elaboration, largely due to superficial imitation of such masters of the poetic art as Tennyson, and especially Swinburne, so that we have a copious outpouring of feeble melodies.

Mr. Swinburne, on the contrary, is never feeble; he combines technical excellence with the power of vehement, often much too violent, expression. His character may be defined by the French word 'entier'; he is uncompromising in praise or blame. He insists (to quote his own words) that 'the wors.h.i.+p of beauty, though beauty be itself transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be simple and absolute'; nor will he tolerate reserve or veiled intimations of a poet's inmost thought.

'Nothing,' he has written, 'in verse or out of verse is more wearisome than the delivery of reluctant doubt, of half-hearted hope and half-incredulous faith. A man who suffers from the strong desire either to believe or disbelieve something he cannot, may be worthy of sympathy, is certainly worthy of pity, until he begins to speak; and if he tries to speak in verse, he misses the implement of an artist.'

He is pained by Matthew Arnold's 'occasional habit of harking back and loitering in mind among the sepulchres.... Nothing which leaves us depressed is a true work of art.' Yet, it may be answered, the habit of musing among tombs has inspired good poetry; and when doubt and dejection, perplexed meditation over insoluble problems, are in the air, a poet does well to express the dominant feelings of his time; and a modern Hamlet is no inartistic figure.

In this respect, however, Mr. Swinburne may have found reason to qualify, latterly, the absoluteness of his poetic principles. He has been from the first a generous critic of those contemporary poets whom he recognised as kindred souls. He awards unmeasured praise to Matthew Arnold, while of his defects and shortcomings he speaks plainly. He does loyal homage to Browning in a sequence of sonnets, and his tribute to Tennyson was paid in a lofty 'Threnody,' when that n.o.ble spirit pa.s.sed away. For Victor Hugo he proclaimed, as all know, nothing short of unbounded adoration--he is 'the greatest writer whom the world has seen since Shakespeare'; though it may be doubted whether in his own country Hugo now stands upon so supreme a pinnacle.

To other eminent men of his time his poetry accords admiration, chiefly to the champions of free thought and of resistance to oppression; and, in a poem ent.i.tled 'Two Leaders,' he salutes two antagonists as he might do before crossing swords with them. The leaders are not named; the first is evidently Newman:

'O great and wise, clear-souled and high of heart, One the last flower of Catholic love, that grows Amid bare thorn their only thornless rose, From the fierce juggling of the priest's loud mart Yet alien, yet unspotted and apart From the blind hard foul rout whose shameless shows Mock the sweet heaven whose secret no man knows With prayers and curses and the soothsayers' art.'

The second is

'Like a storm-G.o.d of the northern foams Strong, wrought of rock that b.r.e.a.s.t.s and breaks the sea,'

in whom we recognise Carlyle. They are the powers of darkness, doomed to fall and to vanish before the light; yet their genius commands respect and even sympathy.

'With all our hearts we praise you whom ye hate, High souls that hate us; for our hopes are higher,

Honour not hate we give you, love not fear, Last prophets of past kind, who fill the dome Of great dead G.o.ds with wrath and wail, nor hear Time's word and man's: "Go honoured hence, go home, Night's childless children; here your hour is done; Pa.s.s with the stars, and leave us with the sun."'

The concise energy of these lines, their slow metrical movement, invest them with singular weight and dignity. The poet is confronting two representatives, in principle, of Force and Authority, whose prototypes in bygone times would undoubtedly have sent him to the scaffold or to the stake; nor is it improbable that both Carlyle and Newman, though in all other opinions they differed widely, would have agreed that a revolutionary firebrand and a pestilent infidel deserved some such fate. The poet might console himself with the reflection that they must have abhorred each other's principles quite as much as they detested his own.

In his later verse Mr. Swinburne still continues to wield his flaming sword against priests and despots, against intellectual and political servility. What may be termed the historical plea, the excuse for ideas and inst.i.tutions that they are the relics of evil days long past, is no palliation for them to his mind; he would stamp them out and utterly destroy them. In this respect his temperament has unconsciously a strong tincture of the intolerance which he denounces; he would sweep away Christianity as Christianity swept away polytheism. Toward its Founder, as the type of human love and purity, he is uniformly reverential; there is nothing in that supreme figure that jars with that Religion of Humanity, which 'The Altar of Righteousness' proclaims with high dithyrambic enthusiasm:

'Christ the man lives yet, remembered of man as dreams that leave Light on eyes that wake and know not if memory bids them grieve.

Far above all wars and gospels, all ebb and flow of time, Lives the soul that speaks in silence, and makes mute the earth sublime.'

But of theology reigning by force and terror he is the implacable enemy; and his intemperate violence leaves a stain on the bright radiance of his poetry. It amounts to an artistic fault, undiminished even in the later years which should have brought the philosophic mind. Moreover, it has materially lessened the influence which so fine a poetic genius should have exercised over the present generation, among whom polemical ardour and bitterness may be thought to have perceptibly cooled down, and to have become much less aggressive, in science, philosophy, and literature, than among the preceding generation. An age of tacit indifference, content with rationalistic explanations, with the slow working of disillusion, dislikes and discountenances outrageous scorn poured upon things that are traditionally sacred; and to the English character extremes are always distressing.

Mr. Swinburne's dramatic work, at any rate, takes us out of the strife and turmoil of theologic war; we are on firm historic ground, dealing with authentic events and persons. The plays of _Chastelard_, _Bothwell_, and _Mary Stuart_ form a trilogy in which the most romantic and eventful period of Scottish history is presented; they const.i.tute the epic-drama of Scotland, to adopt a definition applied by Victor Hugo to the tragedy of _Bothwell_. It is impossible, in this article, to find s.p.a.ce for an adequate criticism of these remarkable productions. Every leading poet of the nineteenth century has made excursions into the dramatic field. We doubt whether any of them has come out of the adventure much better than Mr. Swinburne. All of them have given us, each in his own way, fine poetry, and, if we except Byron, they have shown that the masters of lyrical music can strike with power the high chords of blank verse. None of them have produced plays that took any hold of a theatrical audience; in most cases they were not intended for the stage.

The play of _Chastelard_ is too deeply saturated with amorous essences throughout to be forcibly dramatic. The hero is in a high love-fever from first to last, the pa.s.sionate strain becomes monotonous, and though he dies to save the Queen's honour, our minds are not purged with much pity for him. In the long historical drama of _Bothwell_, which has twenty-one scenes in its two acts, we have spirited portraits of the fierce n.o.bles who surrounded Mary Stuart during her brief and distracted reign. The love pa.s.sages are pauses in a course of violent action, the a.s.sa.s.sination of Rizzio, the murder of Darnley are not overcoloured melodramatically, and the scenes in and about the Kirk of Field are darkened with the shadow of Darnley's imminent fate.

But Darnley's dream, presaging his coming doom, inevitably recalls the dream of Clarence, and cannot but suffer from the reminiscence. We might have something to say on the metrical construction of Swinburne's blank verse, for he shares with Tennyson, though in a minor degree, the distinction of having enlarged its scope and varied its measure. But the subject would demand careful comparative examination and a.n.a.lysis of different styles, such as is to be read, with profit to all students of the art poetic, in Mr. J. B. Mayor's _Chapters on English Metres_.

It will be understood that this article attempts no more than to review the salient characteristics of Mr. Swinburne's poetry, to indicate in some degree their connexion and development. It cannot but fall far short, obviously, of being a comprehensive survey of his contributions to English literature. We have made no reference, for lack of s.p.a.ce, to his treatment of chivalrous romance in _Tristram of Lyonesse_, which Mr. Swinburne has rightly called 'the deathless legend,' though, since its fascination has made it a subject for three other contemporary poets, a comparison of their diverse manners of handling the story would be interesting. It is with regret that we have been compelled, also, to refrain from any adequate notice of Mr.

Swinburne's prose writings, for in regard to the poetry of his own period the dissertations and judgments of one who combines high imaginative faculty with scientific mastery of the metrical art must have special value. Of the ordinary untrained criticism, the 'chorus of indolent reviewers,' to use Tennyson's phrase, he is, we think, too impatient. From a pa.s.sage in his Dedicatory Epistle we gather that some of the tribe have ventured so far as to insinuate that poetry ought not to become a mere musical exercise. Mr. Swinburne's rejoinder is that

'except to such ears as should always be closed against poetry, there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient fulness and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of thought, to abide the a.n.a.lysis of any other than the purblind scrutiny of prepossession or the squint-eyed inspection of malignity.'

Apart from the wrathful form, the substance of what is here said merits consideration, for undoubtedly the most musical of our poets, from Shakespeare and Milton to Coleridge and Sh.e.l.ley, are those whose verse has embodied the richest thought and has been instinct with the deeper emotions. We must muster up courage to remark, nevertheless, that while in Mr. Swinburne's finest poems the musical setting accompanies and illuminates the thought or feeling, in some others the underlying idea is too unsubstantial; its real presence is only visible to the eye of implicit faith. Toward his fellow poets, his equals and contemporaries, Mr. Swinburne's att.i.tude is that of generous enthusiasm, not excluding outspoken, yet courteous, indication of defects, as may be seen in the essay[37] on Matthew Arnold's _New Poems_, which is full of important observations on poetry in general, beside some well-deserved strictures on Arnold's shortcomings, in criticism as well as in verse. For Victor Hugo he has nothing but panegyric. His articles on Byron and Coleridge are luminous appreciations of the very diverse excellences belonging to two ill.u.s.trious predecessors; while in his _Notes on the Text of Sh.e.l.ley_, high-soaring and incomparable, an unlucky emendation of a line in 'The Skylark--the insertion of a superfluous word conjecturally--by an editor whose work he commends on the whole, provokes him to sheer exasperation:

'For the conception of this atrocity the editor is not responsible; for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial fire would be insufficient expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and desperate head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of Sh.e.l.ley with this d.a.m.nable corruption.'

'Fas est et ab hoste doceri.' Mr. Swinburne has borrowed the style of sacerdotal anathema from his mortal enemies, and p.r.o.nounces it no less inexorably. But these Notes were written nigh forty years ago, so we may hope that by this time he has cast out, or at least subdued by diligent exorcism, that same hyperbolic fiend which entered in and rent him at certain seasons of his youth.

Mr. Swinburne has, indeed, the defects of his qualities. He is an ardent friend and an unflinching adversary, but we have seen that in prose no less than in poetry, in polemics as in politics, his style is liable to become overheated and thunderous. He has no patience with mediocrity in art; he disdains the _via media_ in thought and action.

In these respects he stands alone among the Victorian poets, most of whom antic.i.p.ate with misgivings the evaporation of faith in the supernatural, while they acknowledge that for themselves such faith has little meaning, and are inclined to melancholy musing over the 'doubtful doom of human kind' which haunted the imagination of Tennyson. And his att.i.tude is still further apart from the intellectual tendencies discernible at the present moment in pure literature, which is now less concerned, we think, with these questions than when Mr. Arnold wrote _Literature and Dogma_, and seems more disposed to leave theology in the hands of the physical scientists and the professional metaphysicians. However this may be, it is to be seriously regretted that Mr. Swinburne's peremptory, unscrupulous manner of dealing with religious forms and beliefs which the world, perhaps, would not unwillingly let die, though by painless extinction rather than by violence, has alienated reverent minds from him, and has tarnished the brilliancy of his strenuous verse. The sensuous frenzy of his juvenile poems is still remembered against him; it betrayed a lack of moral dignity, of what the Greek poets, whom he so much admired, meant by the word [Greek: aidos]. But we very willingly acknowledge that of these excesses hardly a trace is to be found in the very numerous pieces that fill the later volumes of his collected poetry.

From these causes it has resulted that Mr. Swinburne does not, in our opinion, now hold the position or command the influence which would otherwise be accorded to one who may be reckoned the chief lyrical poet of the second half of the nineteenth century; for after the publication, in 1855, of _Maud_, Tennyson had pa.s.sed his lyrical climax, and Mr. Swinburne's superiority, as a lyrist, over all other writers of that period is incontestable. His neo-paganism, moreover, jars upon the realistic modernity of a generation for whom primitive symbolism is obsolete as a form of expression, and whose prevailing thought is too profoundly rationalistic to be attracted by a pagan paradise. All this is to be regretted, since Mr. Swinburne undoubtedly has the pagan virtues. His aspirations are concentrated on ideals that enn.o.ble the present life, on justice, inflexible courage, patriotism, the unsophisticated intelligence; he loves liberty and he hates oppression in all their shapes. He is throughout an optimist, who believes and predicts that a clearer and brighter prospect is before humanity. To Mr. Swinburne, in short, may be applied the words with which Matthew Arnold summed up his essay upon Heine: 'He is not an adequate interpreter of the modern world; he is a brilliant soldier in the liberation war of humanity.' And future generations may remember him as the poet who pa.s.sed on to them the message of his spiritual forefather, Sh.e.l.ley:

'O man, hold thee on in courage of soul Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way; And the billows of clouds that round thee roll Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day, When heaven and h.e.l.l shall leave thee free To the universe of destiny.'

FOOTNOTES:

[31] _The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne._ In six volumes. With a dedicatory epistle to Theodore Watts-Dunton. London, Chatto and Windus, 1904.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1906.

[32] 'Out, hyperbolic fiend! how vexest thou this man?'--_Twelfth Night._

[33] Dedicatory Preface.

[34] Dedicatory Preface.

[35] _Holiday and Other Poems_, 1906.

[36] Note on Poetry, p. 144.

[37] _Essays and Studies_, 1867.

FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN[38]

It may be doubted whether many students of history are aware that the demarcation of frontiers, of precise lines dividing the possessions of adjacent sovereignties and distinguis.h.i.+ng their respective jurisdictions, is a practice of modern origin. At the present time it is the essential outcome of territorial disputes, it is the operation by which they are formally settled at the end of a war: it registers conquests and cessions; and occasionally it has been the result of pacific arbitration. Among compact and civilised nationalities an exterior frontier, thus carefully defined, remains, like the human skin, the most sensitive and irritable part of their corporate const.i.tution. The slightest infringement of it by a neighbouring Power is instantly resented; to break through it violently is to be inflicting a wound which may draw blood; and even interference with any petty State that may lie between the frontiers of two great governments is regarded as a serious menace.

The whole continent of Europe has now been laid out upon this system of strict delimitation. Yet it may be maintained that among the kingdoms of the ancient world no such exact and recognised distribution of territory existed; and, further, that up to a very recent period none of the great empires in Asia had any boundaries that could be traced on a map. Their landmarks were incessantly s.h.i.+fting forward or backward as their military strength rose or fell; and where their territories marched with some rough mountainous tract inhabited by warlike tribes, they were perpetually plagued by petty warfare on a zone of debateable land. On both sides some temporary intrusion upon or occupation of country held by a neighbour, which would now be the signal for mobilising an army, was treated as a trespa.s.s of small importance, to be resented and rectified at leisure.

It is true that in earlier times the Romans marked off distinct frontiers, and guarded them by military posts; but their policy was to acknowledge no frontier power with equal rights, and their actual political jurisdiction usually extended far beyond their lines of defence, which were advanced or withdrawn as political or military considerations might require. In fact, the Roman empire, like the British empire in Asia, was a great organised State, surrounded, for the most part, by small and weak princ.i.p.alities, or by warlike tribal communities, and it grew by a natural process of inevitable expansion.

The emperors were often reluctant to enlarge their possessions; but the raids and incursions of intractable barbarians, or the revolt of some protected chiefs.h.i.+p, frequently left them no option but to conquer and annex. They soon found themselves compelled to overstep the limits of empire prescribed by the policy of Augustus, and to lay down an advanced frontier in the lands beyond the Rhine and the Danube.

In Europe, where, as we have said, all national frontiers are now fixed and registered, the position of a civilised government entangled in chronic border warfare has long been unknown; the tradition of such a state of things is preserved in popular recollection mainly by local records and old ballads. Yet for Englishmen the subject possesses peculiar interest, since it is connected with their earlier history; and moreover our dominion in India invests it with special importance, for it is there a matter of immediate experience and active concern.

We may recollect, in the first place, that Britain was an outlying province of the Roman empire, for at this moment we are excavating the ruins of the wall built by the Romans to protect their northern frontier from the incursions of the warlike tribes beyond it, by the first administration that established, for a time, peace and civilisation in England. Then, in the middle ages, and long afterwards, the border between the kingdoms of England and Scotland which ran northward of the old Roman line, was for centuries the scene of plundering raids, punitive expeditions, and internecine feuds that often laid waste the countryside with fire and sword. We may observe, in this instance, how s.h.i.+fting and indeterminate was the exact frontier line between the two kingdoms, and how the local fighting, the inroads from one side or the other, did not necessarily involve a rupture of their formal relations. The wardens on each side executed rough justice upon marauding clans; they wasted and slaughtered in reprisal for raids; the great n.o.bles engaged in a kind of private warfare; but all this might go on without embroiling the two governments in a national war. On the western English border the Welsh hillmen kept the neighbouring counties in continual alarm; and their chiefs played an important part in the civil wars and rebellions of England. They were at last quieted by Edward I., who succeeded in subduing Wales though he failed in Scotland. Lastly, though the union of the two kingdoms brought peace to the Anglo-Scottish border, the Highland line along the Forth river still kept up, though in a much less serious degree, the troubles of a regular government in contact with restless tribes. Nor was it until the middle of the eighteenth century that these relics of an archaic condition of society, which had long ago disappeared in other parts of western Europe, were finally effaced in Great Britain. Long afterwards, in the nineteenth century, when the conquest of the Punjab carried the north-western frontier of British India up to the slopes of the Afghan mountains, the scene of perpetual strife between a strong settled administration and turbulent borderers which had pa.s.sed away on the Tweed or the Forth, and on the Welsh Marches, reappeared in the districts beyond the Indus.

To Englishmen, therefore, whose experience of this situation is long, varied, and actual, Mr. Baddeley's book on the Russians in the Caucasus should be of exceptional interest. It is indeed well worth studying by those upon whom, whether at home or in India, has been imposed the arduous duty of superintending our policy in dealing with the Afghan tribes for the protection of our Indian districts. It is true that the conditions and circ.u.mstances, military and political, under which Russia prosecuted her long war with the Caucasian mountaineers, rendered her position in many respects different from that in which the English found themselves when they first came into contact with Afghanistan, and which has changed very little in the course of sixty years. The aims and purposes of the two governments were by no means the same. Yet in both cases we have a story of the obstinate resistance opposed by fierce and free clans to the arms of a powerful empire, of perilous campaigns amid rugged hills and pa.s.ses, of the hazards and misfortunes to which disciplined troops are always liable when they encounter resolute and fanatical defenders of a difficult country.

Mr. Baddeley's book contains an authentic narrative, founded on diligent study of official doc.u.ments and on the accounts of those who took part in the fighting, of the operations by which the Mohammedan tribes of the Caucasus were finally subdued, after fierce and protracted resistance, by Russian armies, and their country was annexed to the dominions of the Czar. His knowledge of this region is evidently derived from personal exploration; and in the Introduction to his book he has spared no pains to explain to his readers its geographical position, its topography, its physical features, and the extraordinary diversity of races and languages which it contained. We learn that the chain of mountains which was originally known by the name of the Caucasus stretches, with a total length of 650 miles, from the Caspian to the Black Sea. Toward the north is a tract of dense forest, intersected by numerous streams flowing down from the mountains; and beyond lies the high plateau of Daghestan, 'through which the rivers have cut their way to a depth often of thousands of feet, the whole backed and ribbed, south and west, by mountain ranges having many peaks often over 13,000 feet in height.' In the forest tract, to which the Russians gave the name of Tchetchnia, their armies were constantly entangled; and their difficulties in reducing the inhabitants to subjection were quite as great as in conquering the highland tribes of Daghestan. Throughout the eighteenth century, and even earlier, the Russians had been pus.h.i.+ng southward toward the Black Sea and the Caspian, and had gradually taken under their authority and protection the Cossack tribes who were settled on the steppes that spread along the northern border of the Caucasus. On this border they had established by the end of the century the Cossack line of forts, military colonies and plantations of armed cultivators, linked together to form a barrier against the incursions and marauding raids of the wild folk in the woods and mountains in front of them, and gradually strengthened and supported by stations of regular troops in the background. On the south of the central mountain ranges the Russians held Georgia, inhabited by Christian races whom the Russians had liberated from the Turkish or Persian yoke before the close of the eighteenth century, and who ever afterwards remained loyal subjects of the Czar. The Georgian road which traversed the whole Caucasian region from north to south, formed a most important line of communication which was never seriously interrupted. To the south-east, when the nineteenth century opened, lay Mohammedan khanates, va.s.sals of Persia; on the south-west were the semi-independent pachaliks of the Ottoman empire.

We must pa.s.s over, reluctantly, Mr. Baddeley's very interesting sketch of the gradual approach made by Russia toward the Caucasus during the eighteenth century, which may be said to have begun in earnest with the expedition of Peter the Great, who led an army to the Caspian sh.o.r.e and captured Derbend about 1722. This threatening movement upon the confines of Asia inevitably involved Russia in war with the Turks and with the Persians, for whom the Caucasian mountains represented a great fortress, barring the onward march of a powerful Christian empire toward their dominions. For the Russians, on their side, it became of vital importance to break through the barrier that separated them from Georgia, to occupy the country between the two seas, and to make an end of the perpetual warfare with the tribes, who kept their frontier on the Cossack line in unceasing agitation and disorder, and were a standing menace to the Christian population of Georgia. It should be understood, however, that the Cossacks discharged their duties of watch and ward after a very rough fas.h.i.+on, raiding and fighting on their own account, making incursions upon their Mohammedan neighbours in retaliation for attacks and forays, and laying waste the enemy's country with the bitter vindictiveness of antagonistic races and religions.