New-York tribune., 1919-05-03
Swnburnes Character Reueazed Nw Edition Of Letters

except poetry, riding and swimming.
Being bred by the sea | am a
good cragsman and am vain to this day
OF having scaled well-known cliff on
the South Coast; ever before and ever
since reputed to be inaccessible. Per-
haps l may be forgiven for referring
to such puerilitics, having read
bitterly, contemtpuous remarks on nv
physical debility and puny proportions
am much afraid this looks like an
echo of poor Byron notorious and very
natural soreness about his personal de.
feet; but really, if l were actually Of
powerless or deformed body / am Ger
tam should not care though all men
(and women) on earth remarked on it.
AS my Antitheism has been so
much babbled about, perhaps NAV saw
here what l really do think on rcli,
gious matters. I ALWAYS felt by
instinct and perceived by reason that
no man could conceive of personal
God except by crude superstition or
else by true supernatural revelation.
But we who worship no material in
carnatlon OF any qualities may worship
the divine humanity, the ideal of hu-
man perfection and aspiration, without
worshipping any god, any person. anv
fetish at all Therefore 1 might cail cal
myself, if l wished, a kind of Christian
COT the church Of Blake and Shellev).
but assuredly in no sense a Theist."
Most of these letters reflect Swim
burne's deep preoccupation with his
alone with his own writing but in as
great measure with the work of
those from whom he derived his in
spiration. The high gods of his temple
were the Ellzabethan dramatists. And
not far below them he ranked Shelley
and Blake. To these he did devo
tion increasingly and valued the oppor-
tunity to further their honor more
greatly than an opportunity for his
own. But the living gods who gripped
his imagination and left a deep i'm
press on his character and his work
we're Walter Savage Landor, Victor
Hugo and the Italian patriot, Mazzini.
He met them all in early and impress
slonable youth, and they were the
touchstones by which he judged all life
and art. There were inches in his
temple too for Lamb and Coleridge
and Poe and Baudelaire, and he sang
their praises in season and out.
A great many of the letters in
Volume II are addressed to Edmund
Gosse, between whom and Swinburne
there sprang up a strong friendship
in the later seventies. This is pre-
ceded, however, by an interesting en-
counter in 1867, when Gosse, an un-
known youth of eighteen, sent some
OF his etfusions to SwinbuNe, then
at the rising tide of his success,
with timid request for ad-,
vice. In a charmingly sympathetic
letter Swinburne leads Gosse to
understand that his poetry is not of
the most promising sort-and this
with kindness that Gosse never
forgot
There is bleakness of personal re-
lationships in these letters and only
one hint of love affair There gathers
an impression that all Swinburne's
his passions we're literary A process
sion of names Of great contemporaries
passes through these letters-Brown-
ing, TennNson, Meredith, Carlyle and
Ruskin, but with none of them did
Swinburne establish a vivid relation
ship.
AS he grew older he became more
and more engrossed in the past, and he
added no new gods to his temple So
that though his era overlapped the rise
Of the modernist movement in poetry
anu eho Ha acui allsIlc movement IN prose,
he was entirely out of touch with both.
He regarded Zola and the realists with
abhorrence. In the end Time played out
the eternal comedy with him. From be-
ing mathematical as an insurgent, he
came to be measured by an arrogant
young generation as an academican.
Their revolt in turn was away from
him and the music of his rhythming
and the spell of his words. Apprais-
ing his ecstacies, they judged them
th ose of @ challicist