The days in which Swinburne died, it was remarked by all, were days peculiar to the air and to the landscape which had inspired his verse. One riding in those days upon the high ridges of the New Forest saw before him in the distant hills of Dorset and of Wilts, in the very clear line of the Island, in the belt of sea, and in the great billows of oak woods and of beech that lift up from the hollows, in the clear wind and the new large clouds of spring before it, everything which his poetry meant to those who were of one tongue with him, and all that part of it which, though not incommunicable to foreigners, made him the least translatable of modern writers. Nowhere was it easier to understand what influences had made, or rather driven, his form of expression than on those heights looking towards those hills, and under such a sky, feeling that wind come right from off the English sea.

For it is the chief characteristic of Swinburne's work, and the one which will be noted of him throughout whatever changes the future may bring to our taste, that his motive (if one may use this[Pg 55] metaphor) was the landscape and the air of England—especially of South England and of that very roll of land from the chalk to the chalk, from the northern Avon of Wiltshire to the cliffs of the Island which a man surveys from the ridges of which I speak.

Let it not be forgotten that revolutions in taste are among the most certain as they are among the most mysterious proofs of the power of rapid change combined with unity which is peculiar to Europe, and which has been discovered in no other civilisations than that of the Europeans. Only some very few have escaped the chastening of that reflection. There are indeed some classics—one might count them upon the fingers of both hands—which no transition of taste much raises or much diminishes, and chief among these is the sovereignty of Homer. But almost all the others do suffer violent neglects, nay, may be for a generation and more violently despised; or again, violently adored. And so rapid are these fluctuations of opinion—and so sincere while they remain—that we must always approach with extreme care the criticism of a contemporary. The fluctuations of opinion will at last decide an average. Truth will be plotted out, a clear and intellectual thing, from the welter of mere stimulus. Criticism will acquire, and with every new critic acquire further, certitudes and fixed points of judgment; and the reputation of a great poet is moulded and informed by the process of time, as all other worthy[Pg 56] things are moulded and informed by the process of time. Let us attempt then to stand apart from the feeling of the moment and to ask ourselves what certainly was present in the work of the great writer who died in this uprush of new weather, and this invitation to life that was sweeping over his own land. It is by qualities which, whether we approve them or disapprove, are certainly present in a writer that his reputation with posterity will be made, not by the emotions of the moment which those qualities arouse; nor is any great writer (nor any small one, for that matter) to be judged in general terms, but in particular—since writing is like a man's voice, and always has in it, no matter who produces it, if it be closely examined, characters not general but individual. A man who should have resisted the wave of enthusiasm for Lord Byron, but who should carefully have noted what at any rate he was, what his verse was and what it was not, who should have distinguished between what he certainly did easily and what he as certainly could not do, might have praised too much or too little, but that which his analysis had distinguished would enable him to know more or less what kind of posterity would judge Byron, and how. He would have been able to guess, for instance, that a time of youth and of largesse would have drunk him in great draughts, a time of age and of exactitude would have found in him a mere looseness of words; he would have been able to see why foreigners especially could discover his greatness;[Pg 57] why the reading of him was proper to a time of active and physical combat against oppression, was improper to any nation which a long peace had corrupted, or to any class which the opportunity for every licence and the power through wealth to approach every enjoyment had satiated and cloyed.

If we so examine Swinburne we shall, as I have said, first notice that in all his work the mere nature of South England drives him. It is the expression often uncontrolled, always spontaneous, of an intense communion with that air, those colours, such hills and such a sea. In this Swinburne, wholly novel as was his medium of expression, was peculiarly and rigidly national. Whoever best knows that landscape and that sky best feels him. Whoever in the future most neglects it or knows it least will least fully appreciate or will perhaps even neglect his work. In whatever times the inspiration of that belt of land weakens in the men who inhabit it (it weakened in the Eighteenth Century, for instance), in such a time the influence of Swinburne's work will weaken too.

Next there must be noted that in him much more than in any other writer of the language, or, at any rate, much more than in any other modern writer of prominence, words followed rhythm, and the poem, though an organised and constructed thing, went bowling before the general music of its metre as a ship over-canvased goes bowling before the general gale. That music underlies all lyrical expression,[Pg 58] and for that matter poetry of every other kind as well, all critics have always known. But it is modern to make of it, as it were, the necessary and conscious substructure of the work, and Verlaine, who put it in his Poetic Art as the chief rule to consider "Music and always Music," was, in laying down such a law, the extreme expression of his time. Sense is not sacrific............