HILARY FRASERwork. Here, at all events, he has wasted none; here is no melodious whine of
retrospective and regretful scepticism; here are no cobwebs of plea and
counterplea, no jungles of argument and brakes of analysis. (62)Of his own Atalanta in Calydon (1865) - a magnificent verse-drama styled
after Aeschylus - Swinburne wrote: "I think it is pure Greek" 16 (on the
grounds, presumably, that it is unaccompanied by the aforesaid "melodious
whine"). But Swinburne's own reviewers, although generally enthusiastic
about the poetic drama, begged to differ. Richard Holt Hutton, for
example, observed:
Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between the workmanship of
Mr. Swinburne and the workmanship of his great models. The attempt to
imitate the Greek tragedians in English verse has once before been made in
our time by Mr. Matthew Arnold in Merope. That poem was a great failure
as a poem, for it was unluckily quite devoid of life and interest. Merope
sighed out her melancholy like a languid Oxford gentleman rather than like
Antigone or Electra. There was nothing of the keen and solemn irony of the
Greek sadness in her. Still the drama had its merits, not as a poem, but as a
lesson in the singleness of conception which belongs to the Greek school of
imagination. Mr. Arnold succeeds in imitating the fine thin fibre of thought or
feeling which winds through a Greek tragedy. Merope was dull, but it was in
some respects classical. Mr. Swinburne is curiously unclassical in his work-
manship. His fancies and illustrations throng upon us with the short, quick
panting breath of [Percy Bysshe] Shelley rather than with the single, measured
chaunt of the Greek imagination. 17Hutton makes it clear that historicism in poetry embraces not only the
choice of historical subject matter, language, and form but also the poet's
ability to evoke the "thought or feeling" and period style of an earlier
culture. Even Richard Monckton Milnes, who vigorously sponsored Swin-
burne's early poetic career, condemned the verse-drama's moral tone and its
"bitter, angry anti-theism, which has its place among the aberrations of
human nature, but not in Greek culture." 18 Swinburne was captivated by
the Marquis de Sade's anti-theism as well as by his flagellant enthusiasms,
and both influences find their way into his erotic and decadent invocation
of classical paganism. The Chorus in Atalanta first accuses the gods of
having "circled pain about with pleasure, / And girdled pleasure about with
pain" (ACS IV, 285) before proceeding to denounce "the supreme evil,
God." (IV, 287). Such sentiments certainly strike a different note from
Arnold's poetic renditions of the ancient Greek world. Swinburne explains
their differences in terms of their respective classical allegiances, with
Arnold emerging as "a pupil of Sophocles" while he himself stands as "a
disciple of Aeschylus." 19 But it was not simply a matter of following one or