The Novels of A. C. Swinburne (Farrar, $6.50). Swinburne, who was trapped all his life in his own adolescence, wrote two novels about that time of rapidly expanding sensations and harshly contracting inhibitions. Edmund Wilson, in his introduction to this edition, tries to make these tales major social documents that give us our one authentic glimpse of Victoria’s aristocracy, seen through the clear, cruel eyes of a child, not the clouded, envious eyes of the novel-writing and novel-reading middle class. There is some of this historical interest in the stories; but when Wilson finds, in these suppressed tales, the promise of a great novelist’s thwarted talent, sacrificed to the vaguer, more permissible sensuality of a second-class poet, he is succumbing to the critic’s continuing temptation—”discovering” a neglected masterpiece that does not exist. The novels are, taken one page at a time, brilliant, like everything Swinburne wrote. But no one is alive in them; even the highly praised Lady Midhurst is only a carefully drawn caricature. Swinburne, describing himself as the adolescent hero of the novels, unconsciously gives us the reason for his own failure as a novelist: “for places rather than persons he had a violent and blind affection.” If the novelist had been able to people his own world, so would the poet. As it is, the wonderful technique of Swinburne’s poems can only create a world entirely uninhabited, a place of music but no men.
G. wills
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