Men who to-day have not passed middle age can scarcely form an impression of what the name and fame of Algernon Charles Swinburne meant forty years ago to those who were then young and enthusiastic candidates for apprenticeship in the fine arts. Criticism now looks upon his work-and possibly it is right in so lookingrather as closing than as opening a great poetic era. The conception is of a talent which collects all the detonating elements of a previous illumination, and lets them off, once and for all, in a prodigious culminating explosion, after which darkness ensues. But such a conception of Swinburne, as the floriated termination of the romantic edifice, or again to change the image, as one who brought up the rear of a long and straggling army, would have seemed to his adorers of 1869 not merely paradoxical but preposterous. It was not doubted by any of his admirers that here they held an incomparable poet of a new order, "the fairest first-born son of fire," who was to inaugurate a new age of lyric gold.

This conception was shared alike by the few who in those days knew him personally, and by the many who did not. While the present writer was still in that outer class, he well remembers being told that an audience of the elect to whom Swinburne recited "Dolores," had been moved to such incredible ecstasy by it that several of them had sunk on their knees, then and there, and adored him as a god. Those were blissful times, when poets and painters, if they were attached to Keats' "little clan," might hope for honors which were private, indeed, and strictly limited, but almost divine. The extraordinary reputation of Swinburne in the later 'sixties was con

structed of several elements. It was built up on the legend of his mysterious and unprecedented appearance, of the astonishing verbal beauty of his writings, but most of all of his defiance of the intellectual and religious prejudices of his age and generation. He was not merely a poet, but a flag; and not merely a flag but the Red Flag incarnate. There was an idea abroad, and it was not ill-founded, that in matters of taste the age in England had for some time been stationary, if not stagnant. It was necessary to wake people up; as Victor Hugo had said: "Il faut rudoyer le genre humain," and in every gesture it was believed that Swinburne set forth to "rudoyer" the Philistines.

This was welcome to all young per sons sitting in bondage, who looked up to Swinburne as to the deliverer. He also enjoyed, in popular belief, the advantage of excessive youth. In point of fact, his immaturity was not SO dazzling as was reported by the newspapers, or alas! as he then himself reported. When Poems and Ballads appeared, he was in his thirtieth year, yet he was generally understood to be only twenty-four. This is interesting merely because there are five or six years of Swinburne's early manhood which seem to be without any visible history. What did he do with himself between 1860, when The Queen-Mother was still-born, and 1865, when he flashed into universal prominence as the author of Atalanta in Calydon? On the large scale, nothing; on the small scale the bibliographer (aided by the indefatigable Mr. Thos. J. Wise) detects the review of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal in the "Spectator" (1862), and a dim sort of short story in prose, called Dead Love (1864). No

doubt this was a time of tremendous growth in secret; but, visibly, no flame or even smoke was ejected from the crater of the young volcano. Swinburne told me that he wrote the Baudelaire in a Turkish bath in Paris. (There were stranger groves of Academe than this.) No doubt the biographers of the future, intent on rubbing the gold-dust off the butterfly's wings, will tell us everything, day by day. Meanwhile, these early years continue to be delightfully mysterious, and he was nearly thirty when he dawned in splendor on London.

Swinburne's second period lasted from 1865 to 1871. This was the blossoming-time of the aloe, when its acute perfume first filled the literary salons, and then emptied them; when, for a very short time, the poet emerged from his life-long privacy and trod the social stage. The experiment culminated, I suppose, in his solitary public utterance. He might be called "Single-Speech Swinburne," since positively his only performance on his legs was an after-dinner oration, in May, 1866, when he responded to the toast of "The Imaginative Literature of England" at Willis's Rooms. This, I conjecture, was the occasion, of which I remember Browning telling me, when Sala coupled with a toast "the names of the moral (though I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper, and the clever (though I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne." I believe this not unpleasing anecdote to be ben trovato, but it is quite in the 1866 manner.

This second period was brilliant, but stormy. Swinburne was constitutionally unfitted to shine in mixed society. The events in his career now came fast and thick. The Atalanta, acclaimed in 1865, had been followed later in the same year by Chastelard, which made old men begin to dream dreams, and in 1866 by Poems and Ballads, which roused a scandal unparalleled since

Byron left England exactly half a century before. Then, when the fury of the public was at its height, there was a meeting between Jowett and Mazzini, at the house of Mr. George Howard (now the Earl of Carlisle), to discuss "what can be done with and for Algernon." And then there came the dedication to the Republic, "the beacon-bright Republic far-off sighted," and all the fervor and intellectual frenzies were successfully diverted from "such tendrils as the wild Loves wear" to the luminous phantasms of liberty and tyrannicide, to the stripping of the muffled souls of kings, and to all the other glorious, generous absurdities of the Mazzini-haunted Songs before Sunrise (1871). This was the period when, after an unlucky experience of London society, the poet fled to the solitudes again, and nearly lost his life swimming in the harbor of Etretat. The autumn of 1870 saw him once again in London. It is at this moment, when Swinburne was in his thirty-fourth year, that the recollections which I venture to set down before they be forgotten practically begin. They represent the emotional observations of a boy on whom this mysterious and almost symbolical luminary turned those full beams which were then and afterwards so thriftily withdrawn from the world at large.

That I may escape as quickly as possible from the necessity of speaking for myself, and yet may detail the credentials of my reminiscences, let me say that my earliest letter from Swinburne was dated September 14th, 1867, when I was still in my eighteenth year, and that I first saw him about that time, or early in 1868. I was not presented to him, however, until the last week in 1870, when, in a note from the kind hostess who brought us together, I find it stated: "Algernon took to you at once, as is seldom the case with him." In spite of this happy

beginning, the acquaintance remained superficial until 1873, when, I hardly know how, it ripened suddenly into au intimate friendship. From that time, until he left London about 1878, I saw Swinburne very frequently indeed, and for several years later than that our intercourse continued to be close. These relations were never interrupted, except by his increasing deafness and general disinclination to leave home. I would, then, say that the memories I venture to bring forward deal mainly with the years from 1874 to 1880, but extend a little before and after that date.

I.

The physical conditions which accompany and affect what we call genius are obscure, and have hitherto attracted little but empirical notice. It is impossible not to see that the absolutely normal man or woman, as we describe normality, is very rarely indeed an inventor, or a seer, or even a person of remarkable mental energy. The bulk of what are called entirely "healthy" people add nothing to the sum of human achievement, and it is not the average navvy who makes Darwin, nor the typical daughter of the plough who develops into an Elizabeth Barrett Browning. There are probably few professional men who offer a more insidious attack upon all that in the past has made life variegated and interesting than the school of robust and old-fashioned physicians who theorize on eccentricity, on variations of the type, as necessarily evil and obviously to be stamped out, if possible, by the State. The more closely we study, with extremely slender resources of evidence, the lives of great men of imagination and action since the beginning of the world, the more clearly we ought to recognize that a reduction of all the types to one stolid uniformity of what is called "health" would have the effect of de

priving humanity of precisely those individuals who have added most to the beauty and variety of human existence.

This question is one which must, in the near future, attract the close and sympathetic attention of the medical specialist. At present, there seems to be an almost universal confusion between morbid aberration and wholesome abnormality. The presence of the latter amongst us is, indeed, scarcely recognized, and an unusual individuality is almost always treated as a subject either of disease or of affected oddity. When the physical conditions of men of the highest celebrity in the past are touched upon, it is usual to pass them over with indifference, or else to account for them as the results of disease. The peculiarities of Pascal, or of Pope, or of Michelangelo are either denied, or it is presumed that they were the result of purely morbid factors against which their genius, their rectitude, or their common sense more or less successfully contended. It is admitted that Tasso had a hypersensitive constitution, which cruelty tortured into melancholia, but it is taken for granted that he would have been a greater poet if he had taken plenty of outdoor exercise. Descartes was of a different opinion, for though his body was regarded as feeble and somewhat abnormal, he considered it a machine well suited to his own purposes, and thought the Cartesian philosophy would not have been improved, though the philosopher's digestion might, by his developing the thews of a ploughboy.

These reflections are natural in looking back upon the constitution of Swinburne, which I believe to have been one of the most extraordinary that has been observed in our time. It would be a pity if its characteristics should be obscured by caricature on the one hand or by false sentiment ou the other. In the days when I

watched him closely, I found myself constantly startled by the physical problem: What place has this singular being in the genus homo? It would easily be settled by the vague formula of "degeneration," but to a careful eye there was nothing in Swinburne of what is known as the debased or perverse type. The stigmata of the degenerate, such as we have been taught to note them, were entirely absent. Here were, to the outward and untechnical perception at least, no radical effects of disease, hereditary or acquired. He stood on a different physical footing from other men; he formed, as Cowley said of Pindar, "a vast species alone." If there had been a planet peopled by Swinburnes, he would have passed as an active, healthy, normal specimen of it. All that was extraordinary in him was not, apparently, the result of ill-health, but of individual and inborn peculiarity.

The world is familiar, from portraits and still better from caricatures, with his unique appearance. He was short, with shoulders that sloped more than a woman's, from which rose a long and slender neck, surmounted by an enormous head. The cranium was out of all proportion to the rest of the structure. His spine was rigid, and though he often bowed the heaviness of his head, lasso papávera collo, he seemed never to bend his back. Except in consequence of a certain physical weakness, which probably may, in more philosophical days, come to be accounted for and palliated-except when suffering from this external cause, he seemed immune from all the maladies that pursue mankind. He did not know fatigue; his agility and brightness were almost mechanical. I never heard him complain of a headache or of a toothache. He required very little sleep, and occasionally when I have parted from him in the evening after saying "Good-night," he has sim

ply sat back in the deep sofa in his sitting-room, his little feet close together, his arms against his side, folded in his frock-coat like a grasshopper in its wing-covers, and fallen asleep, apparently for the night, before I could blow out the candles and steal forth from the door. I am speaking, of course, of early days; it was thus about 1875 that I closely observed him.

He was more a hypertrophied intelligence than a man. His vast brain seemed to weigh down and give solidity to a frame otherwise as light as thistledown, a body almost as immaterial as that of a fairy. In the streets he had the movements of a somnambulist, and often I have seen him passing like a ghost across the traffic of Holborn, or threading the pressure of carts eastward in Gray's Inn Road, without glancing to the left or the right, like something blown before a wind. The present writer then held a humble post at the British Museum, from which he was freed at four o'clock, and Swinburne liked to arrange to meet him half-way between that monument and his own lodgings. One of Swinburne's peculiarities was an extreme punctuality, and we seldom failed to meet on the deserted northern pavement of Great Coram Street. But although the meeting was of his own making, and the person to be met a friend seen every day, if I stood a couple of yards before him silent, he would endeavor to escape on one side and then on the other, giving a great shout of satisfaction when at length his eyes focussed on my face.

He was very fond of talking about his feats of swimming and riding as a boy, and no one has written about the former exercise with half so much felicity and ardor:

As one that ere a June day rise
Makes seaward for the dawn, and tries
The water with delighted limbs