across when he had to give up. On the 24th–25th of August 1875, he swam across the English Channel, diving from the Admiralty Pier, Dover, and touching Calais sands, France, after swimming for 21 hours 45 m. It is the greatest swim ever recorded, and at the time of the accomplishment created a great sensation in England. Since this great achievement, numerous unsuccessful attempts have been made, the best being those of Montague Holbein, Jabez Wolff and T. W. Burgess, and their efforts created an interest in long-distance swimming in all parts of the world, which has resulted in the accomplishment of trials and tests once thought impossible.
Bibliography.—The literature of the subject of swimming is considerable; the most useful work of general reference is Swimming, by Ralph Thomas (London, 1904), with bibliography. Other chief works on the technic of swimming that may be mentioned are: Thevenot, The Art of Swimming (London, 1789); Steedman, Manual of Swimming (Melbourne, 1867); W. Wilson, The Swimming Instructor (London, 1883); A. Sinclair and W. Henry, Swimming (Badminton Library, London, 1893); C. M. Daniels, How to Swim and Save Life (Spalding’s Library, London, 1907). (W. Hy.)
SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES (1837–1900), English poet and critic, was born in London on the 5th of April 1837. He was the son of Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne (of an old Northumbrian family) and of Lady Jane Henrietta, a daughter of George, 3rd earl of Ashburnham. It may almost be said to have been by accident that Swinburne owned London for his birthplace, since he was removed from it immediately, and always
felt a cordial dislike for the surroundings and influences of life in the heart of a great city. His own childhood was spent in a very different environment. His grandfather, Sir John Edward Swinburne, bart., owned an estate in Northumberland, and his father, the admiral, bought a beautiful spot between Ventnor and Niton in the Isle of Wight, called East Dene, together with a strip of undercliff known as the Landslip. The two homes were in a sense amalgamated. Sir Edward used to spend half the year in the Isle of Wight, and the admiral’s family shared his northern home for the other half; so that the poet’s earliest recollections took the form of strangely contrasted emotions,
inspired on the one hand by the bleak north, and on the other by the luxuriant and tepid south. Of the two, the influences of the island are, perhaps naturally, the stronger in his poetry; and many of his most beautiful pieces were actually written at the Orchard, an exquisite spot by Niton Bay, which belonged to relatives of the poet, and at which he was a constant visitor.
After some years of private tuition, Swinburne was sent to Eton, where he remained for five years, proceeding to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1857. He was three years at the University, but left without taking a degree. Clearly he must have cultivated while there his passionate and altogether unacademic love for the literature of Greece; but his undergraduate career was unattended by university successes, beyond the Taylorian prize for French and Italian, which he gained in 1858. He contributed to the “Undergraduate Papers,” published during his first year, under the editorship of John Nichol, and he wrote a good deal of poetry from time to time, but his name was probably regarded without much favour by the college authorities. He took a second class in classical moderations in 1858, but his name does not occur in any of the “Final” honour schools. He left Oxford in 1860, and in the same year published those remarkable dramas, The Queen Mother and Rosamond, which, despite a certain rigidity of style, must be considered a wonderful performance for so young a poet, being fuller of dramatic energy than most of his later plays, and rich in really magnificent blank verse. The volume was scarcely noticed at the time, but it attracted the attention of one or two literary judges, and was by them regarded as a first appearance of uncommon promise.
It is a mistake to say, as most biographers do, that Swinburne, after leaving Oxford, spent some time in Italy with Walter Savage Landor. The facts are quite otherwise: The Swinburne family went for a few weeks to Italy, where the poet’s mother, Lady Jane, had been educated, and among other places they visited Fiesole, where Landor was then living in the house that had been arranged for him by the kindness of the Brownings. Swinburne was a great admirer of Landor, and, knowing that he was likely to be in the same town with him, had provided himself with an introduction from his friend, Richard Monckton Milnes. Landor and Swinburne met and conversed, with great interest and mutual esteem; but the meetings were not for more than an hour at a time, nor did they exceed four or five in number. Swinburne never lived in Italy for any length of time. In 1865 appeared the lyrical tragedy of Atalanta in Calydon, followed in the next year by the famous Poems and Ballads, and with them the poet took the public gaze, and began to enjoy at once a vogue that may almost be likened to the vogue of Byron. His sudden and imperative attraction did not, it is true, extend, like Byron's, to the unliterary; but among lovers of poetry it was sweeping, permeating and sincere. The Poems and Ballads were vehemently attacked, but Dolores and Faustine were on everyone’s lips: as a poet of the time has said, “We all went about chanting to one another these new, astonishing melodies.” Chastelard, which appeared between Atalanta and Poems and Ballads, enjoyed perhaps less unstinted attention; but it is not too much to say that by the close of his thirtieth year, in spite of hostility and detraction, Swinburne had not only placed himself in the highest rank of contemporary poets, but had even established himself as leader of a choir of singers to whom he was at once master and prophet.
Meanwhile, his private life was disturbed by troublous influences. A favourite sister died at East Dene, and was buried in the little shady churchyard of Bonchurch. Her loss overwhelmed the poet’s father with grief, and he could no longer tolerate the house that was so full of tender memories. So the family moved to Holmwood, in the Thames Valley, near Reading, and the poet, being now within sound of the London literary world, grew anxious to mix in the company of the small body of men who shared his sympathies and tastes. Rooms were found for him in North Crescent, off Oxford Street, and he was drawn into the vortex of London life. The Pre-Raphaelite movement was in full swing, and for the next few years he was involved in a rush of fresh emotions and rapidly changing loyalties. It is indeed necessary to any appreciation of Swinburne’s genius that one should understand that his inspiration was almost invariably derivative. His first book is deliberately Shakespearian in design and expression; the Atalanta, of course, is equally deliberate in its pursuit of the Hellenic spirit. Then, with a wider swing of the pendulum, he recedes, in Poems and Ballads, to the example of Baudelaire and of the Pre-Raphaelites themselves; with the Song of Italy (1867) he is drawing towards the revolt of Mazzini; by the time Songs before Sunrise are completed (in 1871) he is altogether under the influence of Victor Hugo, while Rome has become to him “first name of the world’s names.” But, if Swinburne’s inspiration was derivative, his manner was in no sense imitative ; he brought to poetry a spirit entirely his own, and a method even more individual than his spirit. In summing up his work we shall seek to indicate wherein his originality and his service to poetry has lain; meanwhile, it is well to distinguish clearly between the influences which touched him and the original, personal fashion in which he assumed those influences, and made them his own. The spirit of Swinburne’s muse was always a spirit of revolution. In Poems and Ballads the revolt is against moral conventions and restraints; in Songs before Sunrise the arena of the contest is no longer the sensual sphere, but the political and the ecclesiastical. The detestation of kings and priests, which marked so much of the work of his maturity, is now in full swing, and Swinburne's language is sometimes tinged with extravagance and an almost virulent animosity. With Bothwell (1874) he returned to drama and the story of Mary Stuart. The play has fine scenes and is burning with poetry, but its length not only precludes patient enjoyment, but transcends all possibilities of harmonious unity. Erechtheus (1876) was a return to the Greek inspiration of Atalanta; and then in the second series of Poems and Ballads (1878) the French influence is seen to be at work, and Victor Hugo begins to hold alone the place possessed, at different times, by Baudelaire and Mazzini. At
