JOHN LUCASreally the embodiment of everything that is divine in woman. "She may," he
says, "have done everything which might have made a Messalina blush, but
whenever she looked at the sky, she murmured "God," and whenever she
looked at a flower she murmured "mother." (74-76)
Not long after these meetings, Mallock produced his first published
work, Everyman His Own Poet, or The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book, in
which would-be poets are told how to concoct poems in the manner of
contemporary masters. The recipe for making an epic poem by Tennyson
recommends taking "one blameless prig": "Set him upright in the middle of
a round table, and place beside him a beautiful wife, who cannot abide
prigs. Add to these, one marred goodly man; and tie the three together in a
bundle with a link or two of Destiny." 32 Here Mallock would have
expected his readers to recognize a parodic account of the main theme of
Tennyson's Arthurian Idylls of the King (1859-85). Swinburne comes
under the recipe for patriotic poems, though not patriotic fervor for
England. Among the ingredients for Swinburne are a love of France and a
detestation of the British monarchy.
Mallock's comments elucidate why Arnold, when delivering his lecture
on Shelley, would have been well aware that the "beautiful and ineffectual
angel" as he called him, 33 had in fact been effective (or so it could be held)
in recruiting later poets to his multiple causes of atheism, Republicanism,
and sexual liberation. The line from Shelley to Swinburne looked to run
both clear and strong, and for that reason alone it is not at all surprising
that orthodox opinion should have ruled Swinburne out from consideration
for the Laureateship.
But there may be more to it than that. By the beginning of the 1890s the
so-called "fleshly" school of aestheticism was modulating into "the Deca-
dence," a still greater threat to all that was "strenuous and virile." By then
Swinburne was himself hors de combat. As Ian Fletcher puts it: "In 1879,
by arrangement with his parents, he was taken into care by the critic and
poet Theodore Watts-Dunton and the quality of his poetry declined
gradually over the next thirty years of staid domesticity." 34 Yet Swinburne's
earlier life, notably his frequent drunkenness and regular visits to flagella-
tion brothels, was hardly a secret. Although it would be absurd to suggest
that admirers thought the young Swinburne's behavior was necessary to the
creation of poetry, it is not absurd to claim that during the 1890s the poet
was widely perceived to be a special type of human being.
One version of this type can be found Yeats's famous definition of the
"tragic generation" of poets who sacrificed their lives to and for their art.
Included in this grouping is Ernest Dowson, whose life of "dissipation and
drink" was likely to see him spend the night "upon a sixpenny bed in a doss
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