Aspects and Impressions Part 4

He praises Congreve's verses, and then goes on to say, in lines of conspicuous warmth and sincerity:

Nor does your Verse alone our Pa.s.sions move; Beyond the Poet, we the Person love.

In you, and almost only you, we find Sublimity of Wit and Candour of the Mind.

Both have their Charms, and both give that delight.

'Tis pity that you should, or should not write.

He proceeds, enthusiastically, in this strain, and closes at last in words which still carry a melodious echo:

Here should I, not to tire your patience, end, But who can part so soon, with such a Friend?

You know my Soul, like yours, without design, You know me yours, and I too know you mine.

I owe you all I am, and needs must mourn My want of Power to make you some return.

Since you gave all, do not a part refuse, But take this slender Offering of the Muse.

Friends.h.i.+p, from servile Interest free, secures My Love, sincerely, and entirely yours.

This is by no means the only occasion on which Charles Hopkins proclaimed his grat.i.tude and affection. As early as 1694 he paid a tribute of friends.h.i.+p to Congreve, who wrote a prologue to Hopkins's first tragedy, _Pyrrhus King of Epirus_ (1695). I think we may presume that it was owing to the greater poet's influence that Pyrrhus was put on the stage, for Congreve wrote a prologue, in which he warmly recommended it, saying:

'Tis the first Flight of a just-feather'd Muse,

adding, to the audience:

Then spare the Youth; or if you'll d.a.m.n the Play, Let him but first have his, then take your Day,

words which Congreve would hardly have used unless he had been responsible for the production.

It is odd that Hopkins should speak so humbly and Congreve dwell on his friend's inexperience, since Hopkins was at least six years older than Congreve, who was now twenty-seven and pretended to be only twenty-five.

He enjoyed no further advantage from the devoted attachment of Charles Hopkins, who retired immediately to his father's home in Londonderry.

Already he felt the decay of "a weak and sickly tenement," and his last play, pathetically ent.i.tled _Friends.h.i.+p Improv'd_ (1697), was sent to London from Londonderry with a preface that bewailed his broken health.

According to Giles Jacob, he was "a martyr to the cause of hard drinking, and a too Pa.s.sionate fondness for the fair s.e.x." The same authority says that Hopkins "was always more ready to serve others than mindful of his own Affairs," and we can well believe it. An hour before his death, which took place in 1700, Charles Hopkins, "when in great pain," wrote a last copy of verses, which have been preserved. And so Congreve lost this most faithful henchman at the very moment when his own last and perhaps greatest play, _The Way of the World_, failed on the stage, and when he was most in need of sympathy.

Now for a white sheet to wrap both Congreve and myself. In 1888 I took credit, and not unjustly, for having discovered that Congreve prefixed verses to the first edition of a little rare book called _Reliquae Gethinianae_, which were never reprinted until I restored them, and that these were entirely different from those he prefixed to the third edition of the same book in 1703, the latter alone having been always since reprinted among Congreve's verses. Both poems are conceived in a Donne-like spirit of hyperbole. Grace, Lady Gethin, about whom I have found out more since my _Life of Congreve_ was published, was a young Irish lady, Miss Norton, who married an Irish baronet, Sir Richard Gethin, and died at the age of twenty-one in 1697. She secured a wide reputation for learning and piety, and she was actually buried in Westminster Abbey. Her essays--with mortuary folding-plates, again in the spirit of Donne--were posthumously published and produced a favourable sensation. But to my great confusion Leslie Stephen, who had (marvellously) studied Lady Gethin, pointed out to me, when he read my biography, that she was a fraud, conscious or unconscious. Her so-called works were cribbed out of several seventeenth-century writers of morality, but particularly out of Bacon. She had copied them into her commonplace book, doubtless without guile. My dear friend and master grimly remarked, "I wonder neither you nor Congreve spotted 'reading makes a full man'!" But he never said a word in print about our negligence, which deepens my remorse. I suspect that Congreve, like myself, did not read the _Reliquiae_ very carefully, but it is strange that no other of Lady Gethin's numerous contemporary admirers discovered the mare's-nest.

In 1888 I was not able to describe Congreve's ode on the Taking of Namur in its original form, but since then I have secured a copy of the first edition of 1695. The t.i.tle is _A Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer'd to the King, On His Taking Namure. By Mr. Congreve._ There are many differences of text, showing that the poet subjected the poem to careful revision.

In this first form, the King, afterwards spoken of as "William," is described and addressed as "Na.s.saw"; perhaps the poet was advised that His Majesty did not care to be incessantly reminded of his Dutch origin.

Here is a cancelled pa.s.sage, describing the horrors of the attack:

Cataracts of Fire Precipitate are driv'n On their Adventurous Heads, as Ruin rain'd from Heaven...

Echoes each scalding step resound, And horrid Flames, bellowing to be unbound, Tumble with hollow rage in Cavern'd Ground.

Perhaps Congreve thought this was too boisterous. In the Namur ode there are curious reminiscences of the battle of the angels in Paradise Lost.

There was no half-t.i.tle to this folio, let collectors take notice.

The complete neglect which has overtaken the minor writings of Congreve is regrettable. His odes and pastorals are deformed by a too-conscious rhetoric, and his imagery is apt to be what is called "artificial," that is to say, no longer in fas.h.i.+on. But they bear evidence of high cultivation and an elevated sense of style. When Dr. Johnson said that _The Mourning Muse of Alexis_ (1695) was "a despicable effusion" he fell into the sin of over-statement. I admit that this agony of regret for the death of good Queen Mary II may not have been very sincere, and that the imagery is often vapid. Yet the poem is an interesting and a skilful exercise in a species of art which has its place in the evolution of our literature. It is not so good as Marvell would have made it earlier or as Collins later. But in 1695 I know not who could have done it better except Dryden, and even he, if more vigorous, was not commonly so melodious. That Congreve could not write a tolerable song I frankly admit. To book-collectors, however, the separate minor publications of our poet seem to offer a field which is still unharvested. With Mr.

Wise's new discovery, and with the posthumous _Letter to Viscount Cobham_, there are some nine or ten separate publications, besides the four (or five, with _The Judgment of Paris_ of 1701) quarto plays. When to these we add the controversial pamphlets and _Squire Trelooby_, in its two forms of 1704 and 1734, we have quite an interesting little body of first editions for the bibliophile to expend his energy in collecting.

Lovers of pleasure will think small beer of these desultory annotations.

But in the case of a great dramatist like Congreve, whose career is very imperfectly known to us, I hold that all information is welcome, even though the separate details of it seem to be trivial. I present these glimmerings in the hope that they may not be useless to the future editor and biographer, whoever he may be, whose lamp will throw my taper into the shade.

THE FIRST DRAFT OF SWINBURNE'S ANACTORIA

No modern poet offers a more interesting field for critical examination in his MSS. than Swinburne does, and in perhaps no other can the movement of mind, under changes of mood, be so accurately followed. His prose MSS. have a somewhat heavy uniformity, from which little is to be gathered, but the aspect of his written verse is so diverse as to be almost bewildering in its changes of form, not merely from one group of years to another, but even in the effusions of a single day. After long consideration, and a study of a mult.i.tude of MSS. written between 1857 and 1909, I have come to the conclusion that the critical value of Swinburne's drafts depends very much upon the spirit in which he happened to compose his poems. There were evidently three methods in his use. Some time ago there turned up a large number of dramatic and lyrical exercises, written by Swinburne as an undergraduate. These have greatly modified our conception of his early work, and they reveal in the apparently idle youth an amazing persistence in self-apprentices.h.i.+p to the craft of verse. I hope to find leisure on a future occasion to describe these interesting and voluminous papers: in the meantime I only mention them here, in order to point out that they are written, with curious uniformity, and with very few corrections, in a hard, angular handwriting which Swinburne presently abandoned, but which resembles the formal script in which his later Putney poems appear to be composed.

I say "appear to be," because I am convinced, and my conviction is supported by the evidence of those who lived with him, that he adopted in later life the practice of composing and practically finis.h.i.+ng his poems in his head before he put anything down on paper. He used to be heard walking up and down his room at The Pines, and then pausing awhile, evidently to write down what he had polished in his head. This accounts for the "clean" look of most of his later MSS., which appear to be first drafts, and yet have few corrections. What we now discover from the undergraduate MSS. of which I have spoken above is that, apparently, he adopted in early youth the plan to which he was to revert in old age.

But of this plan there might be two varieties; Swinburne might work up his stanzas to perfection in his brain before writing anything, or he might be inspired with such a flow of language that the finished poem would slip smoothly from his brain. Doubtless there was something of both these in his practice, but I incline to think the former by far the most frequent. From neither can we obtain much impression of the mechanism of his invention.

But there was a third method, of which I am about to describe a peculiarly interesting example, which the poet adopted in the hey-dey of his poetical career. Soon after he left Oxford, perhaps in 1860, his handwriting changed its character; it became less boyish, but more crabbed and careless. I think that the weakness of his wrist may have been the cause of this alteration. It is particularly marked in the period from 1862 to 1870. His later writing was emphatic in its stiff inelegance, but usually legible; the script of his middle period was, at its best, lax and straggling, at its worst almost indecipherable. But it varied extravagantly, so much so that it is often difficult to believe that the same pen, and still more that the same hour, could have produced such violently diverse exhibitions. It has gradually dawned upon me, while helping Mr. Wise to disentangle an acc.u.mulation of rough copies and fragments, that the cause of this diversity lay in the degree of excitement which Swinburne put into the act of composition. He was always paroxysmal, always the victim of excruciating intellectual excitement which descended upon him like the beak of the Promethean vulture. To discover the points at which, in a particular composition, this fury of inspiration fell upon him, is to get a little closer to the secret of Swinburne's astonis.h.i.+ng virtuosity, and is my excuse for the following observations.

So many of Swinburne's MSS. have been preserved, princ.i.p.ally in the newspaper bundles which he so oddly carried with him, without ever examining, through all his peregrinations from Oxford to Putney, that it is particularly vexatious that those which we could least afford to spare, those of his blossoming period from 1861 to 1868, are very exiguously represented. No sc.r.a.p of _The Queen Mother_ has turned up, nor of the published form of _Rosamond_ (an undergraduate sketch of this play remains). The original MS. of _Chastelard_ exists only in a few fragments, the MS. sold in New York in 1913 being a clean copy for the press. According to the evidence of George Meredith, the first draft of _Laus Veneris_ was written in red ink; the existing version, though containing corrections and cancelled pa.s.sages, is written in black ink, and shows no sign of the frenzy of composition; it is evidently a transcript. Of _Poems and Ballads_ no general MS. exists, but portions of the "copy" sent to the printers are in various collections. Most of these are transcripts, and show no sign of emotion or excitement.

Several first drafts of _Poems and Ballads_, however, have been preserved, and of these the most remarkable that I have examined is that of _Anactoria_, of which I will now give some account.

Swinburne's first drafts offer none of the attractions which collectors of autographs commonly desiderate. They are never signed and rarely headed. That of the long poem afterwards called _Anactoria_ has neither a t.i.tle nor the Greek epigraph from Sappho. It is written, or rather wildly scribbled, on both sides of six sheets of blue foolscap, the water-mark of one of which is 1863, doubtless the date of the composition of the poem. These sheets were thrown away, and came into our hands in a great disorder of papers, mostly worthless, which left The Pines after Watts-Dunton's death. As we turned them over, in the welter of ma.n.u.script, my eye caught the line

Lilies, and languor of the Lesbian air,

and I realized what lay before us. Scattered through the bundle, five sheets were identified, but unfortunately one sheet was missing. By a happy chance, this also turned up in another parcel three years later, and the first draft is now, I believe, complete, although one pa.s.sage in the published poem, as I shall presently show, is absent.

The text begins high up on the first sheet, and offers no peculiarity in the opening eight lines, which, with the slight exception of "Sting"

instead of "Blind" in line 2, are identical with the published version of 1866. The handwriting is the usual script of Swinburne in the 60's, crabbed, but plain and calm. Suddenly, with line 7, a sort of frenzy takes the poet's pen, and at the side of the paper, in lines that slope more and more rapidly downwards, and in such a stumbling and trembling hand that they are with great difficulty to be spelt out, are interpolated the lines:

Severed the bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves, And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves.

I feel thy blood against my blood; my pain Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.

Then, in very small clear script, opposite this outburst, is written, by itself, like a solo on a flute:

Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower, Breast kindle breast and either burn one hour.

To this immediately follows:

In her high place in Paphos,

which is the opening of line 64 in the published version. But the first draft stops here, leaving that half-line uncancelled, and proceeds quietly, in a large hand,

Saw love, a burning flame from crown to feet,

and so on for six lines which are now to be found in the middle of the poem. Thereupon follows a breathless interlude of six couplets, scribbled with extreme violence and so curiously interwoven that the only way to explain their relation is to quote them:

I would my love could slay thee; I am satiated With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead, Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache; Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill, Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill; I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat, And no mouth but some serpent's found thee sweet.

I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, Intense device, and superflux of pain, Relapse and reluctation of the breath, Dumb tunes and shuddering semitones of death.

If this pa.s.sage be compared with the published text, it will be observed that firstly, there are, with the single alteration of "kill" for "slay," no verbal modifications whatever: and that secondly the couplets are s.h.i.+fted about like counters in a game, or as if they were solid objects which might be put here, there, or anywhere in a liquid setting.

The first draft of _A Song of Italy_, now in the possession of Mr. Thos.

J. Wise, presents the same characteristics, though in a less degree.

We are still on the opening sheet of the draft of _Anactoria_, and it now presents to us, quietly and conscientiously written in the middle of the page: