doubtless because he was of Huguenot upbringing. His tone about a licentious Papist would have been very different.

The dramatic movement of Chastelard and its curious facility of style make it unique in the poetry of the nineteenth century. It has not the weight of Bothwell nor the ethical intensity of Erechtheus, but as a piece of literature for the study it has the extraordinary merits of speed and lightness. There are no heavy passages, or very few, and it proceeds on its flowery and fatal course without interruption. Of all Swinburne's dramas it is the easiest to read, the most amusing, the most lucid. Nevertheless, it has never been favoured by the critics, nor much appreciated by the public. The reason is probably to be found in its attitude towards life and morals. It is well known that it was objected to from the first on the ground that it was "immoral" in tendency, and this charge was brought against it not in consequence of any coarseness in the language, but because the whole tone of it was out of sympathy with the sentimental conception of love that prevailed in the English literature of its time. The reading public was satisfied with the way in which Tennyson, particularly in the Idylls of the King, treated the emotions in the rude stories of a mythical antiquity which he rehearsed, and as it were adapted, for a strictly modern use. His Elaines and Enids were conventional women of the reign of Victoria, travestied against a romantic background of semi-barbarous romance, but preserving all their latter-day prejudices.

K

Swinburne, on the other hand, having selected for his background the strange mixture of refinement and brutality which characterised FrancoScottish court-life in the sixteenth century, determined to present his characters as faithfully as he dared, without any concession to sentimentality. We have seen, and shall have occasion to see again, that his imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum, between the north and the south, between Paganism and Puritanism, between resignation to the instincts and an ascetic repudiation of their authority. With him, to an unceasing extent, the influences of childhood were ever present, and he saw existence in terms, now of the grim moors and stern summits of the Cheviot Hills, now of the rich gardens of the Isle of Wight, glimmering southward down to burnished seas of summer. In Chastelard a

little group of delicate exotic women, rustling in their bright emptiness like so many dragonflies, are presented to us caged in a world of violent savages and scarcely less acrid ascetics. Swinburne was profoundly read in the pages of Brantôme and Knox, in the amorous novels of the French and the minatory sermons of the Scottish preachers. He was as much at home in the meadows of the Pays du Tendre as in the dark and perilous roads that led away from Holyrood, and was not less familiar with The Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women than with the divagations of Desportes in Les Amours d'Hippolyte.

Having it, therefore, upon his dramatic conscience to present lovers not as seen in Trollope

and Patmore, or even in George Eliot and Browning, but in a condition of entire relaxation to the "precious" ideal of the French sixteenth century, Swinburne created a figure which shocked the British public of 1865, and has been unsympathetic to it since. In Chastelard, to use the well-known phrase of Corneille, love is not the ornament,' as it is in most English plays, but the "body" of the tragedy. All relates to it, all else is molten in the breath of it; all sentiments, all responsibilities, all ties of religion and patriotism and duty wither where it blows.

Readers were offended with the hero in Swinburne's third act, because his attitude to life was totally foreign to a generation which had pastured on The Angel in the House; but perhaps the most salient lines in the whole play are those in which the infatuated Chastelard says to the Queen, in the act of behaving to her in a manner which we justly regard as abominable and dishonourable:

No, by God's body;

You will not see? how shall I make you see?

Look, it may be love was a sort of curse

Made for my plague and mixed up with my days
Somewise in their beginning; or indeed

A bitter birth begotten of sad stars

At mine own body's birth, that heaven might make
My lip taste sharp where other men drank sweet;
But whether in heavy body or broken soul,

I know it must go on to be my death.
There was the matter of my fate in me

When I was fashioned first, and given such life
As goes with a sad end; no fault but God's.
Yea, and for all this I am not penitent.

This was the exact morality of those who

dwelt in Tendre-sur-Inclination, and worshipped Love as an insatiable Moloch, "a sort of curse made for man's plague." And, as Brantôme says in his wonderful account of Chastelard's execution, which Swinburne must have deeply studied, "c'est la fin de l'histoire."

CHAPTER V

POEMS AND BALLADS

(1866)

THE success of Chastelard, following upon the still more brilliant success of Atalanta, encouraged Algernon's friends to press for the publication of his miscellaneous lyrics. Not a few among his associates had long believed that, interesting and eloquent as his dramas might be, it was his songs and ballads and odes that really placed him, as they contended, on the very topmost peak of Parnassus. There were remarkable scenes in the early 'sixties; Swinburne in the studio of some painter-friend, quivering with passion as he recited "Itylus" or "Félise" or "Dolores" to a semicircle of worshippers, who were thrilled by the performance to the inmost fibre of their beings. It used to be told that at the close of one such recital the auditors were found to have slipped unconsciously to their knees. The Pre-Raphaelite ladies, in particular, were often excessively moved on these occasions, and once, at least, a crown of laurel, deftly flung by a fair hand, lighted harmoniously upon the effulgent curls of the poet. Rossetti looked askance at these private rites of deification, and was anxious that