He came into the world in 1837; at points in the 1860s he seemed almost certain to drink himself out of it; at his death in 1909 he had outlived the Queen against whose morality he had once been a figurehead of opposition. He was, and remains, a fascinating figure, combining a hundred contradictory traits and living a life that rose and fell from extreme to extreme: today, of course, he is remembered for three things. First, his sadomasochism; second, his very red hair;2 third, and least, his verse:
Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?Nor can I be hypocritical and claim that it anything but prurience that led me, in the first instance, to take an interest in Swinburne. The truth is that mentions of his name in connexion with sexual perversion are far commoner than any other, even in academic texts: it’s difficult to read any historical treatment of perversion (more particularly of sadomasochism (more particularly still, of sadomasochism’s flagellatory aspects)) without coming across mention of his name, and his amatory obsessions have probably made the gap in numbers between those who have heard of him and those who have read him wider than is the case for any other poet.
Men touch them and change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice;
Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,
These crown and caress thee and chain,
O splendid and sterile Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.3
Obsession, by the way, is most decidedly the mot juste. Although there is no doubt that Swinburne actually enacted – or had enacted upon him – part of his fantasies, fantasy is for the most part exactly what they were: it was in imagination that Swinburne conducted most of his sex life. Not all of his openly published poetry dwells upon sadomasochistic themes: his one-and-a-half serious novels, and a great deal of his correspondence, and almost all of the poetry he produced anonymously or for restricted circulation, were concerned with little else. The raw material was his school days, as it was for so many of his contemporaries in an age whose education system prefigured in its inculcation of sadomasochistic tastes the production line methods of modern industry.
Even in the realm of recollection, however, Swinburne’s imagination was at work. He lived vividly, and imagined vividly. It is to imagination, at least, Donald Thomas, one of the best of his modern biographers, attributes the Des Essentesian embellishments of the description Swinburne gives of his initiation into algolagnia by James Joynes, his tutor at Eton. Joynes, according to Swinburne, would seek to excite the gluteal nerves of the victim to an even more agonizing pitch by conducting the floggings in a secluded glade in nearby countryside, or, in a more conventional indoors setting, by preparing the flogging room with incense and drenching his pupil’s face with eau-de-cologne; but Swinburne reported that these refinements intensified pleasure simultaneously with pain.
To most present-day sensibilities the single-minded concentration of the Victorian sadomasochist on flagellation is at best mildly titillatory, at worst, as in a flagellation passage reproduced in Spencer Ashbee’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum,4 revolting. Often too, it is tedious; above all, of course, it is absurd.
And Swinburne was in many ways an absurd figure. The hilarity with which he marked his first reading of the works of the Marquis de Sade, whom he had adopted beforehand on a no more than nominal acquaintance as “prophet, preacher and poet”, must be echoed by many of those who read his story. Other than by “farcical”, how else could one adequately describe such episodes as that in which he, in a Dionysiac frenzy of drunkenness, flung to the floor and stamped flat all the top hats in the cloakroom of one of his London clubs, or that in which he drove furiously from his chambers a terrified would-be acquaintance who had surprised him in the act of dancing naked in front of a full-length mirror?
But if he was often absurd, it’s difficult to believe that he wasn’t aware of it himself. Like that of many great eccentrics, much of his behaviour must have been conscious caricature of himself; just as no-one produced more effective parodies of the occasionally over-lush verbiage of his poetry than he did himself,5 no-one could exploit the comic possibilities of Swinburne’s personality quite like Swinburne. Although the hysteria of his enthusiasms and hatreds may have been at least partly founded on some neurological disorder – epilepsy is a possible reading of the diagnosis of “an excess of electric energy” from a doctor called in by parents worried at their son’s inability, both physical and mental, to be still6 – it can more easily be seen as a natural consequence of his two most deeply rooted characteristics: a need for stimulus that amounted almost to an addiction, and a deep hatred of authority.
Poetry has been described as a drug. For many poets that is all too clearly a metaphor; in Swinburne’s case it approaches literal truth as closely as it is ever likely to. His verse is not simply meant to be read, but read aloud; not simply to be read aloud, but chanted. After the appearance of Poems and Ballads (First Series) in 1866, the students of Oxford and Cambridge would link arms and walk four and five abreast along pavements, declaiming its verses as they swept fellow pedestrians into the road. A rather milder form of hooliganism than we are used to today, but the cause might have been the same: intoxification. Swinburne exploited all the resources of the poetic idiom of his day to their full, sometimes beyond the point of parody. He was in love with words; more particularly, with the sound of words, with the consequence that his verse is often spine-tinglingly beautiful – and quite meaningless. At the beginning of his “Hymn to Proserpina”, for example, he confidently affirms
Thou are more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;while toward the end of the poem he avers just as confidently
For these give joy and sorrow, but thou, Proserpina, sleep.
Thou art more than the gods who number the days of our temporal breath;His technical mastery and his facility for producing verse were incredible. The forty-one verses of “Faustine”, his hymn to a Roman Empress8 of decidedly Sadean tastes –
For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.7
She drank the steaming drift and dust– were said to have been composed on a short train journey as part of a competition with friends to see who could produce the greatest number of rhymes to the poem’s eponym; thirteen stanzas of “Laus Veneris” were similarly produced in an ecstatic sixty-minute burst under the stimulus of an afternoon’s reading of Fitzgerald’s “Omar Khayyam”.
Blown off the scene;
Blood could not ease the bitter lust
That galled Faustine
And yet if his verse intoxicated others, it intoxicated its creator even more, and when inspiration failed him his craving for mental stimulus could only be quietened by drink.
For one, long period of his life, Swinburne was an alcoholic. There is further farce in the descriptions of how during his worst excesses he was constantly captured by friends and relatives in a drunken stupor, and as constantly escaped to return to the state from which he was rescued. His bouts of hysteria and childish petulance increased, and he began to suffer physically, affected in his early thirties with the dullness of eye and skin of the middle-aged, and enduring chronic bouts of dysentery:9 there is little doubt that his drinking would have killed him in short order.
In this, as in so many other things, the wilfulness of his behaviour was that of a child, and in the end his salvation was, effectively, a kid-napping. From 1879 until the end of his life, Swinburne lived at Number 10, the Pines, Putney, in the home of Theodore Watts-Dunton, who fulfilled the role partly of friend, partly of acolyte, partly of psychotherapist, and partly of jailer. From brandy, Swinburne was weaned by way of wine and porter to beer; from recipient of algolagnic lashings in the luxurious flagellation brothels of St John’s Wood, he was converted into a patter of the heads of the babies (amongst them the infant Robert Graves) he met on his afternoon constitutionals on Wimbledon Common; in the greatest transmogrification of all, the firebrand responsible for the incandescent anti-authoritarianism of the lines
When the devil’s riddle is masteredbecame the choleric imperialist who threatened to kick downstairs an Irish nationalist who called upon him to request “An Ode on the Proclamation of an Irish Republic” (not unreasonably in view of the fact that Swinburne had once denounced the executions of the Irish nationalists responsible for the so-called “Fenian” bomb outrages of 1867).
And the galley-bench creaks with a Pope,
We shall see Buonoparte the bastard
Kick heels with his throat in a rope.10
This last transformation was indeed the supreme irony of Swinburne’s life. In early manhood he had shown a tendency towards hero-worship, but he had always selected the objects of this from an impeccably radical pantheon: the Italian revolutionary Mazzini; the English poets Blake and Landor (to the latter of whom he dedicated the work that first made his name, “Atalanta in Calydon”); most importantly, and most self-parodyingly of all, the Marquis de Sade. To these rulers of imagination and the poetic impulse, Swinburne accorded respect and adulation, and, when he was able to meet the first-named of them in the flesh, literal homage; for those who ruled in actuality, he reserved emotions of equal if opposite violence.
While he was at Oxford, the coming into residence of the Prince of Wales provoked him into making an impassioned defence of tyrannicide at the Oxford Union; his views on Napoleon III and the Pope are summed up very adequately in the couplets above; at home, the milder pricks of Queen Victoria’s reign were kicked against in the form of an unrelentingly iconoclastic novel and play in which, amongst other things, Prince Albert attempts a coup d’état with the aid of the lecherous Bishop of London and Queen Victoria is revealed as having an identical twin who has been brought up as a prostitute and shares with her sister a ravening nymphomania that was awakened in the case of the Queen by a maidenhead-hungry poet called Wordsworth.
These particular literary endeavours were, for obvious reasons, carried out in private; in public he fired his shafts just as fiercely but fletched them somewhat more conventionally. In “The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell”, he caught and twisted with merciless accuracy the earnest mysticism of Tennyson’s “The Higher Pantheism”
Two and two may be four; but four and four are not eight:And beside mocking Tennyson, he of course was mocking religion; in particular, that manifestation of religion with which he came into the most intimate contact. Christianity was for Swinburne, just as it was for de Sade and a thousand other free-thinkers and rebels, the supreme enemy. Swinburne was not an atheist in any conventional sense but, atheist or no, he opposed himself fully to the morality of the God of the Victorian Church of England.
Fate and God may be twain: but God is the same thing as fate.
Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what he feels:
God, once caught in the fact, shows you a clean pair of heels.
Today, when we have, in this country at least, witnessed the final ebbing of the tide of faith,11 it is difficult to appreciate the passion of Swinburne’s opposition; difficult too, when our knowledge of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer is not honed week in and week out by attendance at church services, to appreciate fully the means by which he appropriated the language of the Church to mock Her.
His verse is replete with the language and imagery of Christian texts:
Seven sorrows the priests give their Virgin;These lines could only possess the blasphemous piquancy that Swinburne surely intended for one familiar with Christian iconography. Two his most famous poems are hymns – hymns, but hymns to all-powerful pagan Goddesses, in complete reversal of the conventions of Christian patriarchy. “Dolores” is a hymn to a Madonna figure, but a Madonna figure quite unlike the meek subordinate mother of the Christ-child:
But thy sins, which are seventy times seven,
Seven ages would fail thee to purge in,
And then they would haunt thee in Heaven;12
When thy lips had such lovers to flatter;And if the laudatory reference here to the persecution of the early Christians is too oblique for you, you may be satisfied by the more explicitly anti-Christian sentiments of these lines from “Hymn to Proserpina”:
When the city lay red from thy rods,
And thine hands were as arrows to scatter
The children of change and their gods;
When the blood of thy foemen made fervent
A sand never moist from the main,
As one smote them, their lord and thy servant
Our Lady of Pain.
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;For Swinburne, Christianity had apotheosized a spirit of repressive morality, creating a cold and gloomy god whose worship dulled the bright sensations of pleasure and pain alike. In reaction against this grey faith, he espoused paganism, but a carefully selective paganism that he never felt inclined to translate from poetry into reality. The Hellenism of Victorian England was a perfectly respectable enthusiasm: how indeed could it be otherwise when most of its adherents used it as an adjunct to or buttress of a strictly conventional Anglicanism? In Swinburne’s case, however, it was the foundations of a non-existent superstructure, and he sought in it not a system of life but mythic justification for his erotic enthusiasms.
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Sadomasochism represents an eroticizing of the relationships of power, and what is eroticized is also subverted, one might even say satirized. Authority represent the imposition of one will upon another: to the powerless or the rebel, sadomasochism can represent a means of at once subverting and mocking this imposition. Sadism in its purest form demands that the patient be an unwilling one, and the notion that pleasure can be derived on both sides by the imposition of authority is inimical to it, as is demonstrated by the following passage from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Visited, in which the homosexual aesthete Anthony Blanche describes how he responds to the menaces of a gang of drunken “hearties”:
‘“Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind...” ‘[and d]o you know, they all looked a little foolish at that? ...’13Swinburne’s opposition to authority, most particularly as represented by the Christian Church, found sexual expression in sadomasochism precisely for this reason. The Church said him “nay”, and he found refuge, in word if never, so far as is known, in deed, in a passionate adherence to the Rabelaisian precept Fay que ce vouldras.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, and for Swinburne, in imagination at least, it was. Elected in 1876 to a minor seat in his pantheon of heroes was a Turkish official called Sadick Bey, who had taken the opportunity on his nation’s invasion of Bulgaria, it was reported in the English press, to rape more than a hundred girls. To Swinburne, the rapes were a matter of envious hilarity, not reproach, and his enthusiasm was further heightened by the speculation that the locale, coupled with first name of the official, which was suggestive of a reincarnation of the divine Marquis, pointed to only one form of violation as appropriate.14
That the absolute sexual freedom of the official was predicated on pain and an absolute denial of the freedom of others did not trouble him. The Sadean response to the raising of this point is obvious, but Swinburne was never a conventional Sadean, just as he was never a conventional atheist, or indeed a conventional agnostic. His reaction to Christian morality was not negative but nihilistic: he opposed it absolutely, but had nothing to put in its place, not even the inversion of it proposed by de Sade. His opposition was instinctual rather intellectual, like so much of his poetry.
In light of this, perhaps, his transformation from rebel to reactionary was not so much ironic as inevitable. As of many rebels, it could be said that Swinburne did not oppose the notion of authority, but the fact of its imposition upon himself. His early genius had been a weapon that could find no worthier target than the powerful, both in an literal and an abstract sense: the Church, the literary establishment, bourgeois morality itself. Once his name was made, and his genius dimmed by his alcoholism and encroaching shadows of premature middle age, he had in some way become part of the targets against which he had once fulminated.
His old erotic enthusiasms never left him – at least one biographer suggests that his massive output in old age of turgid “childhood” verse indicates that their number was swelled by the addition of paedophilia, but this may be regarded at worst (or at best, depending on your point of view) as “not proven” – but they had long since been translated from the realm of action into the realm of fantasy, and even here became an increasingly private indulgence.
Indeed, this form of sexual rebellion, particularly in the realm of fantasy, depended for its continued existence on the continued existence of the system he had once opposed. If the mores of Eton College were shaped by the religious and political establishment, then the desire for a photograph of its flogging block expressed by one of its ageing alumni can hardly have represented a wholehearted desire to see that establishment overthrown. Although he adopted it at least partly as a weapon against authority, in the end his sadomasochism may have contributed to the fervour with which he espoused reactionary ideals.
Yet, in the end, to demand consistency of Swinburne is futile: his life, like his poetry, was constant mostly in its inconstancy. The vividness of his appearance and behaviour once prompted an observer to compare him to a “scarlet macaw, quite unlike the drab English larks and nightingales”, and yet throughout his life he was beguiled by the themes of monotony and languor: thesis and antithesis that are nowhere better synthesized than in his own phrase “multitudinous monotone”.15 His sexual tastes were very decidedly the “red in tooth and claw” of Tennysonian nature, yet the impression given to those who met him for the first time was often that of a “perfect little gentleman”. Carried away by the recitation of his own poetry, he could bound and skip around a room to such an extent that the papers from which he was reading would fly from his hand “as in a gale”; at other times, he might fall asleep in the middle of conversation, a tiny figure perched on a heavy Victorian sofa “like a grasshopper folded up in its wing covers”.
Discussing lesbianism in a shrill voice over brandy with the infamously polymathic Sir Richard Burton; reacting with blimpish indignation to the sexual explicitness of Zola; performing lewd embraces with a male friend for the appalled edification of diners in an expensive restaurant; puffing and head-patting across the perambulator-strewn spaces of Wimbledon Common to a daily pint of mild beer: Swinburne’s life embraced all these contradictions and more. However, it is, perhaps, not that the principles by which he guided himself had no foundation, but that they were founded on nothingness: ex nihilo nihil – from nothing, nothing comes – cannot, in a sense, be applied to Swinburne, for it was of his nihilism that he crafted not only the fascinating paradoxes of his life, but also some of the most beautiful verses in the whole of English literature. Sex and rebellion mattered very much during his life, and drove much of his poetry; yet ultimately neither they, nor anything else, mattered at all.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.16
Ashbee, Henry Spencer: Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Sphere, 1969.
Findlay, L.M. (ed): Algernon Charles Swinburne: Selected Poems, Fyfield Books, 1987.
Ober, William B.: “Swinburne’s Masochism: Neuropathology and Psychopathology” in Boswell’s Clap and Other Essays, Carbondale, 1979.
Swinburne, A.C.: Poems and Ballads (First Series).
Thomas, Donald: Swinburne: The Poet in his World, Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1979.
Wilson, Colin: Chapter 7 of The Misfits, Grafton, 1988.
Editions of Swinburne’s poetry can still be picked up fairly easily in second-hand bookshops [there is also a good selection – though missing “Anactoria” – in the Wordsworth series]; unearthing his novels and plays is somewhat more problematical, and is probably best pursued at a University library.
Author’s note: This article was first written in 1992 under the influence of Donald Thomas and I find it verbose and EngLitty today. (Tautology? Yes.) I also disagree with its arguments and conclusions, so I’ll be writing another article on Swinburne, under the influence of William B. Ober this time [oh no I won’t].
1. “Anactoria”
2. Colin Wilson (see bibliography) describes it as “...a huge aureole of red-gold..”, and a contemporary of the poet’s at Eton as “...unmistakable, unpoetic carrots”.
3. “Dolores”, lines 65-72.
4. There are numerous examples in this book, a catalog, with quotations, of Ashbee’s voluminous collection of pornography.
5. See “Sonnet for a Picture” and “Nephelidia”.
6. For a fascinating, and highly persuasive, treatment of this topic, see the article listed in the bibliography under Ober, William B.
7. I was wrong to use this example: “sleep” and “slumber” have quite different connotations and the verses are meaningful.
8. “Faustina, the wife of Antonius Pius, rendered herself infamous by her debaucheries [...]”, Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary: a critic would later condemn Swinburne’s “Poems and Ballads” for the abundant evidences the book offered of “...a mind all aflame with the feverish carnality of a schoolboy over the dirtiest passages in Lemprière..”, and the Dictionary can still be heartily recommended to anyone who prefers his prurience with a classical seasoning.
9. Even this affliction was subsumed into his sadomasochism, however, for he claimed that it was the means by which a super-Sadean divine principle was torturing him for his opposition to It.
10. “A Song in the Time of Order”.
11. Fingers crossed.
12. “Dolores”, lines 9-12: the virgin possessor of seven sorrows is the Virgin Mary.
13. Chapter 2; pg. 50 of the 1984 edition of the Penguin paperback.
14. What another devotee of this form of sex, Aleister Crowley, was wont to describe as intercourse per vas nefandum (“through the unspeakable vessel”); more bluntly, “buggery”, which word is derived from the Old French “bougre”, meaning, ultimately, “Bulgarian”.
15. “A multitudinous monotone, Of dust and flower and seed and stone”. Lines 121-2 of “On the Downs”.
16. The closing lines of “The Garden of Prosperine”.