character in the first of these Spectator articles will be noted. The young reviewer moves stiffly, and it is not until his pen has warmed to the use of prose that it learns to express its master's will. But the later pages of this study are among the best which Swinburne ever wrote, inspired with enthusiasm, and not yet spoiled by bombastic fulness and riot of antithesis. These articles, as they appeared, he sent to Victor Hugo, who acknowledged them with much graciousness, with so much, indeed, that the critic was shocked at his own excess of boldness. Algernon wrote to Milnes, with whom he often corresponded in French: "Si j'eusse su qu'il (V. H.) deviat les lire, j'aurais craint de lui avoir déplu en m'attaquant aux philosophes; j'ai aussi un peu nargué en passant la vertu publique, et la démocratie vertueuse." The majestic bonhomie of "le maître qu'on a toujours vénéré" completed the subjugation of Swinburne, and never again had he the audacity to treat Victor Hugo as an ordinary mortal. The unsigned study of Baudelaire which occupied so inordinate a space in the Spectator for September 1862 is a critical work of still higher importance. It marks Swinburne's earliest excursion into the analysis of modern French poetry. It required high intellectual courage to champion in an English periodical the merits of any new volume of French verse, not, to speak of such a volume as Les Fleurs du Mal. England had not yet emerged from its long attack of Podsnappery, and there was hardly a critic of authority who ventured to advance the claims of French poetry. Victor Hugo's fame was that of a dramatist and a novelist, Lamartine's that of a politician; to the average cultivated Englishman Vigny was absolutely unknown, and the British notion of French lyric was bounded by the fame of Béranger and Musset, whose sentimentality Swinburne hated. It is not certain by what means he met with the poems of Baudelaire, which had been issued in June 1857, and withdrawn from circulation, after a violent controversy and a prosecution, in August of the same year. The original edition of Les Fleurs du Mal had at once become an exceedingly rare book, and I think that Swinburne had not seen a copy of it. If he had, he could scarcely have avoided mentioning some of the suppressed pieces, Les Épaves, in particular "Les Femmes Damnées." A small second edition, with Les Épaves omitted, was issued in Paris in 1861, and I feel no doubt that this is the form in which Swinburne first read Baudelaire, as it is certainly that in which he reviewed him for startled subscribers to the Spectator. He did not know the edition of 1857 until 1864, when W. M. Rossetti procured a copy, which he gave him.1 The facts regarding the relations of these two great poets, who were in some aspects of their genius closely allied to one another, have hitherto been extremely obscure. The discovery of some papers in a desk, in 1912, enables me to record 1 This copy was sold for £11:10s. in June 1916, when it formed lot 44 in the Catalogue of Swinburne's Library. The Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris of 1861 sold for £15 in the same sale, lot 40. Those seem to have been the only works by Baudelaire which Swinburne possessed at the time of his death. what little there is to tell. Swinburne, when his article appeared in the Spectator, sent it, with a letter, to Baudelaire. Of this letter and missive Baudelaire, for a whole year, from indolence or failing health, made no acknowledgment whatever. Swinburne expressed surprise to Whistler, who rallied the French poet on his discourtesy. Baudelaire expressed, in reply, "tout mon repentir de mon oubli et de mon apparent ingratitude,' but still could not shake off his apathy far enough to write to his English admirer. At last, on the 10th of October 1863, he managed to write a long and most interesting letter to Swinburne, which he entrusted to a French friend who was visiting London; this the friend neglected to deliver, and it was lately found, unopened, in a drawer in Paris. It is a great pity that this communication from the noble poet for whom he entertained, and continued to entertain, so exalted an esteem, never reached him, since the words which Baudelaire uses in it were calculated to give Swinburne acute pleasure. The author of Les Fleurs du Mal told his unknown English reviewer, "Je n'aurais jamais cru qu'un littérateur anglais pût si bien pénétrer la beauté française, les intentions françaises et la prosodie française." To close this episode a little prematurely, Baudelaire presently forwarded to Swinburne his brochure on Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris, and this appears to have been the only communication Swinburne ever received from him. In April 1867 Fantin-Latour mentioned the rumour that Baudelaire was dead, and Swinburne immediately composed his grandiose elogy, "Ave atque Vale," to which we shall return in due course. Baudelaire, however, survived until August 31st of that year, never having seen Poems and Ballads, in which there was so much that would have appealed to his peculiar artistic temperament. The anonymous essays contributed to the Spectator of 1862 present us with a valuable opportunity of judging Swinburne's early prose style. We find it strong and pure, moving already with a certain formal magnificence; it is related to the prose of Landor, which is its obvious model, as closely as Landor's is to the movement of Cicero. The moderation of the stateliness is agreeable; there is as yet no trace, or hardly a trace, of the faults which were to invade the prose of Swinburne, the bluster and the strut, the wild exaggeration of irony, the abuse of alliteration and antithesis. These characteristics are found, however, beginning to protrude themselves in the letter on Meredith's Poems, where we read that "all Muses are to bow down before her who babbles, with lips yet warm from their pristine pap, after the dangling delights of a child's coral, and jingles with flaccid fingers one' knows not whether a jester's or a baby's bells." This is the structure and the colour which we learn to dread, for with Swinburne as a prosewriter suspecta sunt semper ornamenta. For the time being, however, and under the editorial repression, it would have been difficult to find in England at that moment a critic more learned, more dignified, or more graceful than the un named and unknown reviewer of Victor Hugo and Baudelaire. The defence of George Meredith has been mentioned. That writer, already valued within a very narrow circle as the author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington, had been drawn, by a vivid sympathy rather than by complete conviction, to join the Pre-Raphaelites in the course of 1861, and had impressed Swinburne with his power of character and depth of imagination. But Meredith was not the elder by nine years for nothing, and he was not so implicitly delighted by Swinburne. He wrote of him: "He is not subtle and I don't see any internal centre from which springs anything that he does. He will make a great name, but whether he is to distinguish himself solidly as an artist, I would not willingly prognosticate.' prognosticate." In this In this dubious attitude, Meredith remained during the rest of his life; in fact, why should it be concealed that the two men ultimately "got upon the of each other? Nevertheless, in 1862, they still had much in common, and Swinburne was a frequent visitor at Corsham, while Meredith had his own room in Tudor House. : The Spectator, in an article violently unjust, "slated" Meredith's Modern Love, thus provoking from Swinburne the long, generous, and rather redundant "Letter to the Editor," which really amounted to a second review of the book, cancelling the first. It is very interesting to note that in printing this defence of Meredith (June 7th, 1862), the editor (doubtless R. H. Hutton himself) described Swinburne, whose name, let 1 |