The Tadpole Poet

THE NOVELS OF A. C. SWINBURNE (377 pp.)--Edited by Edmund Wilson--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($6.50).

By the ravenous teeth that have smitten

Through the kisses that blossom and

bud,

By the lips intertwisted and bitten

Till the foam has a savor of blood

By the pulse as it rises and falters,

By the hands as they slacken and strain,

I adjure thee, respond from thine altars,

Our Lady of Pain.

Verses like this, which today would hardly cause a raised eyebrow were they to appear in the Sweet Briar College literary magazine, burst like a sinful star shell in the stodgy gloom of Victorian England. Mothers clutched their daughters. Fathers bethought themselves of horsewhips. Staid critics, resorting to apoplectic prose, apostrophized the author as the "libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs." But a youthful public in London lapped up copies of Poems and Ballads when it came out in 1866, and Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne became famous and infamous almost overnight.

Certifiably Sinful. A versifying virtuoso, Swinburne molded English into exotic patterns, borrowing widely from the classic Greek to the French symbolists. The results, which ranged from strum-strumming stanzas to languorous rhythms, hinted at unimaginable pagan debaucheries, hymned the fashionable cause of freedom against tyranny. But constitutionally, though he sported a manelike shock of red hair, Swinburne was comically ill-equipped to live the Byronic life he longed for. Tadpole tall and squeaky-voiced, he was forever getting drunk on the dessert wine, and more often than not had to be carried home from dinner parties.

His only certifiably sinful relationship--with Music Hall Actress Adah Isaacs Menken--ended after six weeks. "I can't make Algernon understand," she ruefully explained, "that biting's no use." Eventually, he retired to the country for his health under the care of a proper Victorian solicitor-scholar named Theodore Watts-Dunton. And the world, learning that his poetic passions had been mainly pastiche, soon decided his passionate poetry was merely overblown.

Lese-Majeste. Today's trend toward wholesale restoration of time-tarnished Victorian literary reputations may not wholly reverse this judgment of Swinburne the poet. But antiquarians in England are now beginning to rediscover Swinburne as a writer of prose. In the U.S., Critic Edmund Wilson became fascinated with the new researches and the incidental light they threw on Swinburne's strange personality. In this volume Wilson presents two Swinburne novels, along with a gargantuan preface that includes an advance tour of other finds--letters, quips and critical writings--soon to come.

Swinburne in prose often displays what he most lacked in poetry--restraint and humor. His method was deadpan parody. According to Wilson's preface, his targets included Victorian bluenoses, stuffy fellow poets, and French romantic novelists. In one such parody of an imagined French historical novelist's handling of Victorian England, the Bishop of London gallantly seduces the heroine in a London cab. In another, Queen Victoria confesses a humiliating affair with a commoner. "It wasn't a prince," she sobs, "not even Sir R. Peel. It was one . . .called Wordsworth who recited to me verses from his Excursion of a sensuality so torrid that they shook me--and I fell."

Husk & Fangs. The two novels on display, Love's Cross Currents and Lesbia Brandon, both deal with the frustrated yearning of a young man for a close relative--a girl cousin in one case, a sister in the other. Swinburne, who alone of all Victorian writers belonged to the top aristocracy, has no trouble handling those extra comic confusions that come naturally in a society where everybody seems to be related to everybody else. When he is being funny--for example, minutely recording the malicious troublemaking of an old gorgon ("all husk and fangs") named Lady Midhurst--Swinburne is a pretty funny fellow.

Both stories are shadowed by raw autobiographical overtones, which Editor Wilson, as a licensed Freudian critic, delights in. Swinburne, clearly, is the original of the repulsed lover in each book. The girl is his real-life cousin Mary Gordon, whose rejection of the poet was one of the turning points of Swinburne's stunted emotional life. More horrifying is the explanation (in Lesbia Brandon) of the poet's lifelong fondness for being whipped. With subtle, sensual elegance, Swinburne records the slow, tragic perversion of a boy whose admiration for his severe tutor and love for his sister can be most suitably and directly expressed by learning to bear a birching without crying out.

The book is fragmentary, largely because Friend and Guardian Watts-Dunton stole the most purple chapters from Swinburne and would not give them back. Wilson laments the loss, through Victorian prudery, of a potential English prose master who might have done great things if encouraged. Bits of Lesbia Brandon justify his claim.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.