Swinburne: A Centenary Estimate
- SwinburneA Centenary Estimate
Footnotes
1. His subsequent Swinburne, A Literary Biography, is relatively disappointing.
1. Wainwright was Swinburne’s favourite example of the immoral artist. An admirer of Blake, himself a painter and critic, he murdered his sister-in-law to collect £18,000 of life-insurance.
2. It is significant that the critic who has most earnestly sought to vindicate Swinburne’s imagination is a Frenchman, M. Lafourcade. See La Jeunesse de Swinburne, II, pp. 542 ff.
3. The manuscript discloses that the first draft of the poem was entirely chaotic. The variants of this and other poems frequently suggest that for Swinburne the tonality of the word was the chief consideration. In the twenty-second stanza of “Ilieet” he rejected in succession “unprofitable,” “unperishable,” “unfathomable,” “inexorable,” “unconquerable,” “inevitable,” in favour of his final choice, “unalterable,” in the line “Of the old unalterable gods.”
1. M. Lafourcade has furnished unassailable evidence (La Jeunesse de Swinburne, I, p. 265, n. 109, and Swinburne, A Literary Biography, p. 196). English critics have been extremely reluctant to consider the question.
2. Even republican France was odious to him in tater years; he mistrusted French policy towards England.
