Putney High Street is a steep climb from Putney Bridge over the river Thames to the crossroads with Upper Richmond Road. Under the name of Putney Hill, the artery continues its climb to Putney Heath and a pub called the Green Man, a common name for those public houses where in the past a herbal doctor would sell his wares. Beyond the business offices on the crossroad, the first house, dark, tall and stately, is of the kind built by wealthy Victorians, standing detached on its own plot of land. In front is a semi-circular drive for horses and carriage. The building has a basement where the cooks and servants used to toil. In the ground floor were certainly the dining- and reception-rooms, on the first above more private ones, and above that again the bedrooms. The mansard roof contained no doubt the servants’ bedrooms, where a mouse would get round-shouldered.

In the nineteen-thirties when we walked past, my grandfather would point out the house as the one where the poet Swinburne had lived. Like so many Victorians influenced by popularisation of the Aesthetic Movement, he held all historical personages and poets, writers and painters in solemn awe, only sometimes mixed with frowning disapproval of their more dubious inclinations. In fact the aura of respect did not imply any real understanding. But in any case I suppose my dear, innocent grandparent knew Swinburne only through what the poet wrote in his later years of respectability.

The latter part of the nineteenth century was the age of the Aesthetic Movement, which was launched in Paris but thanks to painters and poets who had enjoyed the brilliant conversation of the cafés there, such as Whistler, George Moore and Oscar Wilde, soon spread to London. In brief, starting with the Impressionists and culminating in modern abstract art, this meant that in painting what mattered was not the subject portrayed but the purely formal elements, mainly line and colour, In literature it meant that a book could not be moral or immoral but only good or bad according to its literary qualities. Here lay the conflict between the aesthetes, and the “Philistines”, the solid middle-class who wanted a picture to tell a story and a book or poem to teach worthy principles. This was a class that the aesthetes, surrounded by a fauna of adoring but not over-intelligent society ladies, enjoyed provoking.

But the aesthetes often over-reached themselves. British Victorian society was not light-heartedly tolerant of loose living and depravity among its geniuses as was French society. It was not a congenial home for a Baudelaire with his Fleurs du mal or a perverted genius such as Rimbaud. Oscar Wilde was to find this out to his cost when sent to prison after two trials at which all his wit and posing as a connoisseur served him little.

Swinburne was a young man carried away by the excitement of words. Which he poured out in a torrent with little attention to their real meaning or implication. He also sought in a romanticised view of Antiquity an excuse for sexual freedom. The word “vice” had a strong fascination for him:

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?

Men touch them and change in a trice

The lilies and languors of virtue

For the roses and raptures of vice.

Likewise the word “sin”. He spoke of “strange great sins” that were “seventy times seven”.

This one thing once worth giving

Life gave, and seemed worth living;

Sin, sweet beyond forgiving

And brief beyond regret…

Ah, one thing worth beginning,

One thread in life worth spinning,

Ah sweet, one sin worth sinning…

To say of shame—what is it?

Or virtue—we can miss it,

Of sin—we can but kiss it,

And it’s no longer sin.

(Before Dawn)

One may well wonder what possible crime a sin “seventy times seven” could possibly be. Four hundred and ninety times any of the acts of murder, torture and cruelty that go on in the world? But really it was just the words and the mysterious lure of evil they implied that turned the head of Swinburne. He himself never seems to have gone beyond a certain naughtiness, for example running about the house naked with his friend Simeon Solomon. When Simeon Solomon went further and ended up in prison, Swinburne was seriously alarmed and described him as “a thing unmentionable alike by men and women as equally abhorrent to either”. Again one may wonder why he should suggest that love for a woman was evil, in a time when marriage was an ideal and people married quite young to raise large and boisterous families. Victorian prudishness is often misunderstood; in fact in many ways Victorians were far less prudish than their modern descendants. But if one painted a nude man and woman and called the work Mr. and Mrs. Brown in their Garden in Twickenham, one might go to prison even although the two characters were supposed to be decently married; however, if one called it Ares and Aphrodite in a Garden in the Hesperides, one might have it exposed in the Royal Academy to be admired by the families of the general public. Certain sheltered ladies of the new upper-middle class, desperately determined to be respectable, certainly suffered from a mixture of the Calvinist tradition, which considered that God’s creation had become totally evil with Adam’s sin, and the romantic view of classical Greece that started with Goëthe.

It should be remembered that the young Algernon Swinburne had had dreams of becoming a dashing cavalry officer, but had been rejected because of his puny physique. So from the time he was at Oxford he had a grudge against the society, conventions and religion of the Industrial Age. He could be so carried away when reciting verse that once he fell in a fit. His exciting rhythms and alliteration, the latter a return to the old Anglo-Saxon poetry, gave magic to words when serious meaning was lacking, and the student youth of Oxford would march arm-in-arm reciting his daring lines.

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou shalt not take,

The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake.

But Swinburne is not to be judged merely by his eccentricity. Two plays published in 1860, Queen Mother and Rosamund, earned praise from the lordly John Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, patron of a distinguished circle of artists and after the success (or notoriety!) in 1865 of Atalanta in Calydon more fame came in 1866 with Chastelard and Poems and Ballads. It is true that his reputation led to him being “sent down” from Oxford, but Dr. Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, who remained his friend and admirer, did this in the most delicate way possible, simply suggesting that it might be in his interest not to resume his studies. In a century of great essayists and critics his studies of Shakespeare and Charlotte Brontë were outstanding. Here is an example of his prose, taken from an essay on Leonardo da Vinci:

Of Leonardo the samples are choice and few: full of that undefinable grace and grave mystery which belongs to his slightest and wildest work. Fair strange faces of women full of dim doubt and faint scorn, touched by the shadows of an obscure fate, eager and weary it seems at once, pale and fervent with patience and passion allure and perplex the thoughts and eyes of men.

At a time when writing in newspapers, magazines and newspapers has become so pedestrian, when reading has become a matter only of information and not of enjoyment, of delectation, one can only regret the belles lettres of a past age.

Sadly, Swinburne did not maintain his verbal magic to the end. Intoxication both literal and intellectual undermined his frail health and in 1879 his family handed him over to the tender care of Theodore-Watts Dunton, lawyer, literary critic and owner of the residence on Putney Hill. The poet was weaned off brandy and led through port, Burgundy, claret and vin du pays to homely British beer. Walks on Putney heath restored freshness to his countenance and health to his body. Harmless occupations were found for him that would not awake his old feverish excitement. Theodore Watts admired his genius but felt that it should be directed to morally uplifting ends. Swinburne became completely tame. The former admirer of France, imbued with French culture, could now write patriotic verse that any smug Victorian could approve but is, alas! best forgotten. In these days when “the noble, the nude, and the antique” are unlikely to make atheists of us, for Swinburne’s earlier magic we can be grateful to him.

N.B. For the artistic atmosphere of Victorian times, we warmly recommend The Aesthetic Adventure, by William Gaunt, Jonathan Cape and Pelican Books, from which we have drawn information.

This appeared in NDU Spirit, review of Notre Dame University, Kesrouan, Lebanon