to encourage or discourage

Algernon Charles Swinburne to the 18 year old Edmund Gosse

Holmwood,

Shiplake,

Henley-on- Thames.

September 14th, 1867.

Sir,

I have received your letter and its enclosure. I have not much time for correspondence, but I answer it at once, as you desire my advice. I certainly do not urge you to resign the habit of writing if it gives you pleasure without interfering with other things; I have no right to give such counsel. What prospect of growth and advance in the art you may have is impossible to say. Less promising verses than yours have perhaps been the forerunners of success, and more promising ones of ultimate failure. A man's first attempts can never possibly afford reasonable ground for pronouncing decisively whether he is qualified or disqualified for the attainment of his hope.

One thing, while sympathising with your wishes, I do advise you against: too much thinking and working in one channel. Neither you nor I can tell what kind of work you will in the long run be able to accomplish; but it is certain that good or ill success in this matter of poetry need neither make nor mar a man's work in life. I understand the impulse to write of which you speak, and the pain of checking or suppressing it; nor do I tell you to suppress or check it: only not to build upon it over-much. To fret yourself in the meantime with alternations of hope and fear is useless if you are to succeed, and more than useless if you are not: I always thought so for myself, before I had sent anything to press. One wishes of course for success as for other pleasant things; but the readier we hold ourselves to dispense with it, if necessary, the better. I am not old enough to preach, but I am old enough to tell you how I thought at your age of this matter, which of course was to me as serious an aspiration as to you now. To encourage or discourage another is a responsibility I cannot undertake, especially as I think one ought to need or heed neither encouragement nor discouragement,

With good wishes, Yours truly,

A. C. Swinburne.

[ Edmund Gosse was a young assistant in the department of printed books in the British Museum; it was the following year that the youthful librarian caught his first sight of Swinburne. The year 1868 was a difficult year for Swinburne for both health and creativity, his heavy drinking and carousing with the likes of Richard Burton and company had begun to take its toll. The poet had fainted in the Reading Room of the British Museum and was in a most pathetic condition as related by Gosse : It was in the evening of July 10, 1868, that I first cast eyes on the poet who was at that time the divinity, the object of feverish worship, to every budding artist and faltering singer in England. The occasion was accidental, the circumstances painful; it is enough to say that the idol was revealed to the juvenile worshipper at a startling moment of physical suffering and distress, and that the impression was one of curious terror, never, even under happier auspices, to be wholly removed. I shall not lose that earliest, and entirely unanticipated, image of a languishing and pain-stricken Swinburne, like some odd conception of Aubrey Bcardsley, a Cupido cnicifixiis on a chair of anguish. [Portraits and Sketches (London: William Heinemann, 1913) p. 18.] (pepys)

[music - Johannes Brahms - Hungarian Dance No. 1]

-from The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne Edited by Edmund Gosse, G.B. and Thomas James Wise (London : William Heinemann, 1918.) vol. 1.

It is very jolly here

Algernon Charles Swinburne (visiting Lord Lytton at Knebworth) to Charles Augustus Howell

Knebworth, Stevenage, Herts.

[August, 1866.]

My Dear Howell,

You never turned up on Wednesday night, and kept my unhappy old female sitting up for you till three, and on Thursday I was very seedy and awaited you in vain. O monstre! homme infame!

I want you to get for me two Chastelards and a Byron, and send them here at once if possible. Excuse my troubling you about my errands, but I know you won't mind, and I can't write to Moxons. I've had a note from Hotten which I must answer at once. Lord Lytton advises my reissuing the Poems and Ballads at once with him, and breaking off wholly with Payne*, which is satisfactory. He says either Hotten should buy the surplus copies of the edition in his own interest, which would be impaired if Payne sold it as waste paper; or I must buy them up under a friend's name. Or, Payne must be compelled to destroy them instead. This is his advice as a man of business. Will you tell Hotten this, and let him act on it? Please, too, find out what Hotten proposes about my Blake, which is nearly all in type. If he offers to buy it up I shall not allow Payne to publish it or anything more of mine. Please ask also about the remainders and next edition of Chastelard, Atalanta, and The Queen Mother. Lytton thinks Hotten's offers very fair, and advises me to arrange in the same way about the other books. So if Hotten likes to offer for them and arrange with Payne separately, well and good. I will reply as soon as he makes his offer. With Payne I will hold no further communication except through a third party.

All this you may shew or read to Hotten if you please. Pardon for the trouble my friendship entails on you, and believe me, Your affectionate

A. C. Swinburne.

P.S. I hope your cousin is well; please remember me to her. It is very jolly here, people, place, and weather. The furniture would at once cause Gabriel to attempt murder of the owner through envy so rich are the cabinets, etc., in every hole and corner.

[bibliography for A. C. Swinburne]

* J. Bertrand Payne, successor of Edward Moxon who died in 1858.

[ music - Richard Wagner - Rienzi - Ouverture]

-from The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne Edited by Edmund Gosse, G.B. and Thomas James Wise (London : William Heinemann, 1918.) vol. 1.

deserting one's colours

Algernon Charles Swinburne to Lord Lytton

22a, Dorset Street W.

August 13th [1866].

Dear Lord Lytton,

I am much obliged by the letter of advice you wrote me, and if Lord Houghton had not gone off to Vichy, I should certainly take counsel with him. As it is, I am compelled to decide without further help. I have no relation with Messrs. Moxon except of a strictly business character, and considering that the head of this firm has broken his agreement by refusing to continue the sale of my poems, without even speaking to me on the matter, I cannot but desire, first of all, to have no further dealings with anyone so untrustworthy. The book is mine. I agreed with him to issue an edition of 1,000 copies, he undertaking to print, publish and sell them, and if the edition sold off, I was to have two-thirds of the profits. He does not now deny the contract which he refuses to fulfil; he simply said to a friend who called on him as my representative, that on hearing there was to be an article in The Times attacking my book as improper, he could not continue the sale. As to the suppression of separate passages or poems, it could not be done without injuring the whole structure of the book, where every part has been as carefully considered and arranged as I could manage, and under the circumstances, it seems to me that I have no choice but to break off my connection with the publisher.

I have consulted friends older than myself, and more experienced in the business ways of the world, and really it seems to me I have no alternative. Before the book was published, if my friends had given me strong and unanimous advice to withdraw or to alter any passage, I should certainly have done so in two instances I did, rather against my own impulse, which is a fair proof that I am not too headstrong or conceited to listen to friendly counsel. But now to alter my course or mutilate my published work seems to me somewhat like deserting one's colours. One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one's arms, except under compulsion, remains intolerable. Even if I did not feel the matter in this way, my withdrawal would not undo what has been done, nor unsay what has been said.

Yours truly,

A. C. Swinburne.

[ music - Johannes Brahms - Double Concerto]

-from The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne Edited by Edmund Gosse, G.B. and Thomas James Wise (London : William Heinemann, 1918.) vol. 1.

filial shortsightedness

Algernon Charles Swinburne to Paulina, Lady Trevelyan

Turf Hotel, Newcastle. Monday [December 1862],

My Dear Lady Trevelyan,

I hope you are prepared for one thing, the natural consequence of your unnatural conduct; viz. to come and bail me out when the hated minions of oppressive law have haled me to a loathsome dungeon for inability to pay a fortnight's unlooked-for hotel expenses. Nothing on earth is likelier; and all because I relied with filial shortsightedness on that rather fallacious letter of invitation which carried me off from Fryston. If I had but heard in time, I should have run down to London, and come up later. As it is I see Destitution and Despair ahead of me, and have begun an epitaph in the Micawber style for my future grave in the precincts of my native County's jail.

If by any wild chance--say by offering the head waiter a post-obit, or a foreclosure, or a mortgage, or a bill payable at three months, or a Federal bond, or an African loan, or a voucher, or something equally practicable I can stave off the period of my incarceration so as to get to Wallington on Wednesday, I shall take the train that leaves Morpeth at 2.15 and gets to Scotus's Gap* at 2.50. But I cannot disguise for myself, and will not for you, that this contingency is most remote. It is far more probable that posterity will appear, a weeping pilgrim, in the prison-yard of this city, to drop the tear of indignant sympathy on a humble stone affording scanty and dishonourable refuge To The Nameless Dust of A. C. S.

* Scott's Gap is the name of the station which serves Wallington.

[ music - Hector Berlioz - La Damnation de Faust: Hungarian March]

-from The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne Edited by Edmund Gosse, G.B. and Thomas James Wise (London : William Heinemann, 1918.) vol. 1.

dolorous expedient

Algernon Charles Swinburne to Richard Monckton Milnes

16, Grafton Street, Fifzroy Square.

October 4th, 1860.

My Dear Mr. Milnes,

I send you to-morrow, as you wished, my article on Wells's Joseph and his Brethren which has been some time doing, but I wanted to make it as satisfactory as I could without transcribing half the book. It is still finer, I think, than it seemed in my recollection of it after the first reading, and I should be very glad if I had anything to do with helping it to a little of the credit it must gain in the end. I have consulted with Rossetti about the choice of extracts. How on earth a copy could now be got, I can't think. I was driven to the dolorous expedient of hunting up the British Museum copy (entered in the wildest way in that slough of a catalogue) so as to collate it with a MS. copy sent to Rossetti by the author. I ought to have thanked you before both for my parcel which came on safely to me at the Trevelyans', and for the invitation you sent me from Lady de Grey; I had a very nice week with them.

Since I came back to London about a fortnight since, I have done some more work to Chastelard and rubbed up one or two other things. My friend George Meredith has asked me to send some to Once a Week which valuable publication he props up occasionally with fragments of his own. Rossetti has just done a drawing of a female model and myself embracing I need not say in the most fervent and abandoned style, meant for a frontispiece to his Italian Translations.* Everybody who knows me already salutes the likeness with a yell of recognition. When the book comes out, I shall have no refuge but the grave.

I would also have kept another promise, and send you my De la Touche but until I know it will go straight to your hands I dare not trust La Reine d'Espagne out of my sight. Reserving always your corresponding promise that I am yet to live and look upon the mystic pages of the martyred Marquis de Sade, ever since which the vision of that illustrious and ill-requited benefactor of humanity has hovered by night before my eyes.

With best remembrances to Mrs. Milnes, I remain, yours most sincerely,

A. C. Swinburne.

* The Early Italian Poets, Translated by D. G. Rossetti. 8vo, 1861. The "drawing" in question, though duly engraved upon wood, was not ultimately employed for the purpose for which it had been prepared.

[ music - Johannes Brahms - Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15]

-from The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne Edited by Edmund Gosse, G.B. and Thomas James Wise (London : William Heinemann, 1918.) vol. 1.

elegant epistle

Algernon Charles Swinburne to Edwin Hatch

Oxford. April 26th, [1858].

My Dear Hatch,

I am very sorry to have missed seeing you, before you left us for the improving recreation of canes and chemistry, Gregorians and castigation. I trust you will some day have had enough, and set up the staff of your tent even among Philistines to whom the penetralia of Chambers' Magazine are unknown land. Have you yet seen Montegut's article on Kingsley in the Revue des Deux Mondes? Get it up when you have time, it is well worth while. Item: a review of Guenevere in The Tablet I believe by Pollen, certainly the best as well as most favourable review Morris has had.

That party has given us no signs of life as yet; in vain has the Oxford County Chronicle been crammed with such notices as the following:

"If W. M. will return to his disconsolate friends, all shall be forgiven. One word would relieve them from the most agonising anxiety why is it withheld?"

"If the Gentleman who left an MS. (apparently in verse) in George St. will communicate with his bereaved and despairing Publishers, he will hear of something to his advantage. Otherwise the MS. will be sold (to pay expenses) as waste paper, together with the stock in hand of a late volume of Poems which fell stillborn from the press."

Even this latter a touching effusion of the creative fancy and talented pen "which now traces these imperfect records with a faltering hand" has failed to move him. The town-crier is to proclaim our loss to-morrow:

"Lost, stolen, or strayed, an eminent artist and promising litterateur. (The description of his person is omitted for obvious reasons.) Had on when he was last seen the clothes of another gentleman, much worn, of which he had possessed himself in a fit of moral and physical abstraction. Linen (questionable) marked W. M. Swears awfully, and walks with a rolling gait, as if partially intoxicated."

Enough of so painful a subject. I hope you are not breaking your brains upon Sordello. Read the other poets now alive (whom it would be invidious to particularise too minutely) and you will outgrow your absurd veneration for "an author of some talent, but more extravagance" vide Saturday Review, Art. Men and Women. I shall be busy till Whitsuntide, so this elegant epistle is my last for some time.

Receive the assurance of my respectful consideration, and believe me Ever yours sincerely,

A. C. Swinburne.

[music - Franz Liszt - Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Flat]

-from The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne Edited by Edmund Gosse, G.B. and Thomas James Wise (London : William Heinemann, 1918.) vol. 1.