Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/474

 little sleep, seemed impervious to fatigue, was heedless of the ordinary incentives of physical life; he inherited a marvellous constitution, which he impaired in early years, but which served his old age well. His character was no less strange than his physique. He was profoundly original, and yet he took the colour of his surroundings like a chameleon. He was violent, arrogant, even vindictive, and yet no one could be more affectionate, more courteous, more loyal. He was fierce in the defence of his prejudices, and yet dowered with an exquisite modesty. He loved everything that was pure and of good report, and yet the extravagance of his language was often beyond the reach of apology. His passionate love for very little children was entirely genuine and instinctive, and yet the forms of it seemed modelled on the expressions of Victor Hugo. It is a very remarkable circumstance, which must be omitted in no outline of his intellectual life, that his opinions, on politics, on literature, on art, on life itself, were formed in boyhood, and that though he expanded he scarcely advanced in any single direction after he was twenty. If growth had continued as it began, he must have been the prodigy of the world, but his development was arrested, and he elaborated during fifty years the ideas, the convictions, the enthusiasms which he possessed when he left college. Even his art was at its height when he was five and twenty, and it was the volume and not the vigour that increased. As a magician of verbal melody he impressed his early contemporaries to the neglect of his merit as a thinker, but posterity will regard him as a philosopher who gave melodious utterance to ideas of high originality and value. This side of his genius, exemplified by such poems as 'Hertha' and 'Tiresias,' was that which showed most evidence of development, yet his masterpieces in this kind also were mainly written before he was thirty-five. No complete collection of Swinburne's works has appeared, but his poems were published in six volumes in 1904, and his tragedies in five in 1905-6. The authentic portraits of Swinburne are not very numerous. D. G. Rossetti made a pencil drawing in 1860, and in 1862 a water-colour painting, an excellent portrait, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the bust in oils, by G. F. Watts, May 1867, is now in the National Portrait Gallery; as a likeness this is very unsatisfactory. A water-colour drawing (circa 1863) by Simeon Solomon has disappeared. Miss E. M. Sewell made a small drawing in 1868, lately in the possession of Mrs, F. G. Waugh; a water-colour, by W. B. Scott (circa 1860), is now in the possession of Mr. T. W. Jackson; a large pastel, taken in old age (Jan. 1900), by R. Ponsonby Staples, is in the possession of Mr. Edmund Gosse. A full-length portrait in water-colour was painted by A. Pellegrini ('Ape') for reproduction in 'Vanity Fair’ in the summer of 1874; this drawing, which belonged to Lord Redesdale, was given by him to Mr. Gosse. Although avowedly a caricature, this is in many ways the best surviving record of Swinburne's general aspect and attitude. [Personal recollections, extending in the case of the present writer over more than forty years; information about childhood kindly supplied by Miss Isabel Swinburne; the memories of 'contemporaries at school and college, particularly those kindly contributed by Sir George Young, by the poet's cousin Lord Redesdale, and by Lord Sheffield; the bibliographical investigations of Mr. Thomas J. Wise, principally embodied in A Contribution to the Bibliography of Swinburne (published in Robertson Nicoll & Wise's Lit. Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, 1896, ii. 291-364, and more fully in his privately printed Bibliography of Swinburne, 1897); and the examination of a very large unpublished correspondence are the chief sources of information. To these must be added the valuable notes on The Boyhood of Algernon Swinburne, published in the Contemporary Review for April 1910 by another cousin, JMrs. Disney Leith. The Life of Jowett has some notes, unfortunately very slight, of the Master of Balhol's lifelong salutary influence over the poet, who had been and never ceased to be his pupil, and something is guardedly reported in the Life of Lord Houghton. Mr. Lionel Tollemache contributed to the Spectator and to the Guardian in 1909 some pleasant recollections. The Life of Edmund Clarence Stedman, by his granddaughter (New York, 1911), contains some very important autobiographical letters, and there are mentions in the Autobiography of William Bell Scott, and the privately printed Diary of Henry Adams (quoted above). The name of Swinburne, with an occasional anecdote, occurs in many recent biographies, such as The Autobiography of Elizabeth M. Sewell, the Recollections of Mr. A. G. C. Liddell, the lives of D. G. Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Richard Burton, Whistler, John Churton Collins, and Ruskin. R. H. Shepherd's Bibliography of Swinburne (1887) possesses little value. Swinburne left behind him a considerable number of short MSS., principally in verse. The prose tales have been recorded above, and