Poetry in the late nineteenth centurySwinburne contentiously describes "royalties rust-eaten" as "fanged mer-
idian vermin" and "Blind flesh-flies" (ACS II, 154-55).
The year 1871, the year when Songs Before Sunrise appeared, was the
year of the Paris Commune and its vicious suppression. It was also the year
when Gerard Manley Hopkins sent Robert Bridges his famous "red" letter,
in which he told Bridges that his awareness of the plight of so many people,
and of their inevitably violent response to material inequality, had made
him a Communist. 30 It may well have been in that same year that another
Oxford undergraduate, W.H. Mallock, encountered Swinburne. In his
Memoirs of Life and Literature, Mallock recalls the impact that Poems and
Ballads made on him and his contemporaries in 1866. Mallock was then
still a pupil at a private school. Four years later he began life as a student at
Oxford and soon afterward met Swinburne in Benjamin Jowett's rooms at
Balliol College. Jowett, whom Mallock never really liked, was at that time
probably the most famous of Oxford's dons: a classical scholar, a leading
light in the Broad Church, and an inveterate university schemer. But he
tolerated Swinburne. And here, therefore, Mallock first met "the veritable
genius who had made the English language a new instrument of passion."
An increasingly drunk Swinburne, so Mallock recalls, recited among much
else some lines by Sydney Dobell, about a girl bathing: "She with her body
bright sprinkles the waters white, / Which flee from her fair form and flee in
vain." Swinburne, says Mallock, was "almost shouting these words when
another sound became audible - that of an opening door, followed by
Jowett's voice, which said in high-pitched syllables: "You'd both better go
to bed now." 31
A few days later Mallock met Swinburne again, this time at a luncheon
party hosted by a group of the poet's undergraduate admirers:
[Swinburne,] as I presently gathered, was about to begin an account of a
historical drama by himself, which existed in his memory only - a sort of
parody of what Victor Hugo might have written had he dramatized English
events at the opening of the reign of Queen Victoria. The first act, he said,
showed England on the verge of a revolution, which was due to the frightful
orgies of the Queen at "Buckingham's Palace." The Queen, with unblushing
effrontery, had taken to herself a lover, in the person of Lord John Russell,
who had for his rival "Sir Peel" ... In a later act it appeared that the Queen
and Lord John Russell had between them given the world a daughter, who,
having been left to her own devices, or, in other words, to the streets,
reappears as "Miss Kitty," and is accorded some respectable rank. Under
these conditions she becomes the object of much princely devotion; but the
moral hypocrisy of England has branded her as a public scandal. With regard
to her so-called depravities nobody entertains a doubt, but one princely
admirer, of broader mind than the rest, declares that in spite of these she is
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