But
assuredly Tennyson dead laid no such strain on our fancy as Swinburne
living.
It is true that Swinburne did, from time to time, take public notice
of current affairs; but what notice he took did but seem to mark his
remoteness from them, from us. The Boers, I remember, were the theme
of a sonnet which embarrassed even their angriest enemies in our
midst. He likened them, if I remember rightly, to `hell-hounds foaming
at the jaws.' This was by some people taken as a sign that he had
fallen away from that high generosity of spirit which had once been
his. To me it meant merely that he thought of poor little England
writhing under the heel of an alien despotism, just as, in the days
when he really was interested in such matters, poor little Italy had
writhen. I suspect, too, that the first impulse to write about the
Boers came not from the Muse within, but from Theodore Watts-Dunton
without.... `Now, Algernon, we're at war, you know--at war with the
Boers. I don't want to bother you at all, but I do think, my dear old
friend, you oughtn't to let slip this opportunity of,' etc., etc.
Some such hortation is easily imaginable by any one who saw the two
old friends together. The first time I had this honour, this sight for
lasting and affectionate memory, must have been in the Spring of '99.
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