barbare. What else could they be? And if I may be allowed to carry the Frenchman's criticism. a little further I will say that they seem to me to be French verses written by a man who could not speak French. I cannot help thinking that his French verses wear the same sort of deadly pallor that the Latin of a mediaeval poet would wear if a great poet had written in the Middle Ages. I never saw Swinburne but once, and I cannot remember whether it was before or after the publication of the sestina. We were all carried away on the hurricane winds of Swinburne's verses in the 'seventies, and I think it was the ambition of everybody who wrote verses to see the poet. Rossetti, William Michael it must have been, told me that all I had to do was to go and present myself and that I should find Swinburne very agreeable and pleased to see me. It was William Michael who gave me the address. As well as I can recollect he said Bedford Row. You tell me that he lived in Great James Street, which is near Bedford Row; that may be so, no doubt is so. I remember that one entered the house by an open doorway, as in the Temple, and that I went upstairs, and on the first floor began to wonder on which Swinburne lived; thinking to see a clerk engaged in copying entries into a ledger I opened a door and found myself in a large room in which there was no furniture except a truckle bed. Outside the sheets lay a naked man, a strange, impish little body it was, and about the head, too large for the body, was a great growth of red hair. The fright that this naked man caused me is as vivid in me to-day as if it had only occurred yesterday, possibly more vivid. I had gone to see Swinburne, expecting to find a man seated in an arm-chair reading a book, one who would probably ask me if I smoked cigarettes or cigars, and who would talk to me about Shelley. I had no idea what Swinburne's appearance was like, but there was no doubt in my mind that the naked man was Swinburne. How I knew it to be Swinburne I cannot tell. I felt that there could be nobody but Swinburne who would look like that, and he looked to me like a dreadful caricature of myself. The likeness was remarkable, at first sight; if you looked twice I am sure it disappeared. We were both very thin, our hair was the same colour, flaming red; Swinburne had a very high forehead and I had a very high forehead, and we both had long noses, and though I have a little more chin than Swinburne, mine is not a prominent chin. It seemed to me that at the end of a ball, coming downstairs at four o'clock in the morning, I had often looked like the man on the bed, and the idea of sitting next to that naked man, so very like myself, and explaining to him that I had come from William Michael Rossetti frightened me nearly out of my wits. I just managed to babble out, "Does Mr. Jones live here?" The red head shook on a long thin neck like a tulip, and I heard, "Will you ask downstairs?" I fled and jumped into a hansom, and never heard of Swinburne again until he wrote wrote to Philip Bourke Marston a letter about A Mummer's Wife which Philip Bourke Marston had sent him. Of that letter I remember a phrase: "It was not with a chamber pot for buckler and a spit for a spear that I charged the Philistines." He afterwards wrote to me explaining away this letter which did not annoy me in the least. The absurd epithets that he piled up in his prose could not annoy anybody; they merely amused me. He wrote the worst prose every written by a great poet. Now, my dear Gosse, I have sent you the note which you asked for. It seems to me to be without any interest, but that is not my affair, it is yours. It may, however, induce you to go to Paris and try to persuade Mallarmé's daughter to give you copies of Swinburne's letters to her father; or if you like I will go there as a missionary on your behalf. Very sincerely yours, GEORGE MOORE. APPENDIX IV SWINBURNE'S POSTHUMOUS WRITINGS WHEN Swinburne died, he left no directions, verbal or testamentary, with regard to the publication of any MSS. which might be found among his papers. Some final reflections on Shakespeare, written in 1905, although not published by the Oxford University Press until 1909, had been arranged for by their author some time before his fatal illness. Watts-Dunton had nothing whatever to do with either the genesis or completion of this book, which was composed in response to a request from the publishers, and was delivered to the press many months before its posthumous appearance. The publishers held it back, until the poet's death incited them to a hasty publication. But Watts-Dunton discovered various writings, both in verse and prose, several of which were essentially more important than the little treatise on Shakespeare. All were found at The Pines, although in different places. They belong to widely different epochs in the poet's life; some, no doubt, had been rejected by him, and yet preserved, perhaps with some lingering idea of future adaptation or resuscitation. Soon after Swinburne's death, Watts-Dunton consulted Mr. Thomas J. Wise, whose Swinburne collection is the finest in existence, as to the best manner of preserving the unpublished MSS., until the time should be ripe for their regular publication in suitable collected volumes. It was decided that it would be a pity to disperse them in magazines, while at the same time it was highly desirable to preserve them in type, the more so as all the originals presently passed out of Watts-Dunton's possession, into that of Mr. Wise, who purchased from Watts-Dunton both the MSS. and the copyrights of them. The result of the discussion was that Mr. Wise, in collaboration with Watts-Dunton, proceeded to print, in an extremely limited issue, a series of posthumous Swinburne pamphlets, these pamphlets being provided, when it was necessary, with introductions signed by Watts-Dunton or by myself. It was recognised both by Mr. Wise and Watts-Dunton that this mode of permanent preservation of the scattered remnants of the poet's work would have appealed strongly to Swinburne himself, who avowed himself to be "a bit of a bibliomaniac," and who on many occasions was eager to embrace the opportunity of circulating particular poems in that limited pamphlet-form which appeals to the lover of rare books. With the advance of years, Watts-Dunton found the task of reading Swinburne's crabbed handwriting increasingly painful, and in fact the text of the whole of the unpublished writings was deciphered by Mr. Wise, with my help. After the unpublished compositions had been satisfactorily disposed of, the question had to be considered of what should be done with the very numerous articles and letters to the Press, printed by Swinburne in magazines and newspapers, but not yet collected. A similar plan was adopted. Mr. Wise collected the scattered writings, I furnished the necessary critical introductions, and under Watts-Dunton's sympathetic auspices, these also were privately printed in a suitable and uniform shape. It was Mr. Wise's intention, in collaboration with Watts-Dunton, who had promised his assistance, to make from these articles such judicious selections as might be given to a wider public, but death removed Watts-Dunton before the project had been carried out. As a matter of fact the selections had already been completed by Mr. Wise, and only awaited are Watts-Dunton's introductions. The only uncollected articles not included in these private these private booklets the short monographs upon some of the Elizabethan Dramatists which Swinburne intended to use in a Second Series of The Age of Shakespeare. These have been arranged by Mr. Wise, who had purchased the MSS. from Watts-Dunton, and the volume is ready for press. It now remains for me to describe the most important of the posthumous MSS. PRIVATELY PRINTED VERSE 1. Ode to Mazzini, pp. 22, 1909, 4to. 6. Burd Margaret, pp. 15, 1909, 8vo. 7. The Worm of Spindlestonheugh, pp. 21, 1909, 8vo. 8. Lady Maisie's Bairn and other Poems, pp. 41, 1915, 8vo. 9. The Triumph of Gloriana, pp. 16, 1916, 8vo. 10. The Death of Sir John Franklin, pp. 21, 1916, 8vo. In our opinion the most valuable portion of the hitherto unpublished work of Swinburne in verse consists of the Border Ballads, which were found by Watts-Dunton among the poet's papers. No fewer than eight of these ballads, all lengthy and all highly finished, were discovered at different times, and were submitted to us to be deciphered. The opinion of Watts-Dunton was that others had existed, but that "many were destroyed." PRIVATELY PRINTED PROSE 1. The Portrait, pp. 19, 1909, 8vo. 2. The Marriage of Monna Lisa, pp. 16, 1909, 8vo. 3. The Chronicle of Queen Fredegond, pp. 74, 1909, 8vo. 4. M. Prudhomme at the International Exhibition, pp. 25, 1909, 8vo. 5. Of Liberty and Loyalty, pp. 21, 1909, 8vo. |