which deeply concern him.

He knows that the war will lay heavy burdens upon him, and he feels instinctively that it implies a suspension of those social and political activities about which he really cares.

At the outset of the present conflict this attitude was overborne by the idealism of the conflict itself-the conception of a war to end war, a fight for the rights of small nations, a struggle of freedom against autocracy. If it must be said that that early enthusiasm has waned, the statement must not be misunderstood. It does not mean that there is any strong stop-the-war' party with a clearly defined programme. It is true that there is such a party, whose influence may as easily be under-rated as over-rated; but the attitude of the majority may best be described in the slang term, ' fed up.' War weariness does not necessarily imply the lack of determination to see the thing through, and is particularly excusable in the case of men who have long been subjected to an excessively severe strain, coupled with restrictions on their personal habits, their freedom of movement, their tastes and sports. But its result is the frame of mind in which the worker is apt to ask himself what it is all about, and whether the sacrifices he is making are made for any object in which he is interested.

In this frame of mind the Russian formulas, with their lofty if vague idealism, appeal to him strongly; and his knowledge of foreign affairs is insufficient to enable him to see the pitfalls which beset their interpretation. In his impatience, he feels that the principles for which his support was asked have been allowed to fall into the background, and he suspects that the whole dreary business of slaughter and waste is being allowed to go on for the sake of some obscure boundary question or to serve some private ends of the capitalists and bureaucrats.

In this state of doubt, largely inarticulate and unformulated, as to the direction of the national policy, the specific grievances complained of by the worker are felt more keenly; and he begins to ask whether the war is to end by establishing in this country the Prussian system against which we are fighting. If the present unrest is not to become an embarrassment in the war and an obstacle to reconstruction after the war, these suspicions must be removed. For this, two things are

required. The war aims of the Allies must be set forth in terms which the working man can understand, with a force which will carry conviction, and in such a way that he can see their relation to the principles of democracy, freedom and justice in which he profoundly believes. At the same time, the whole policy of the Government and the nation with regard to the control of industry during the war and the reorganisation of our industrial system after the war must be taken in hand in constant and intimate cooperation with Labour itself. The economic and political villeinage of the workers has been abolished; they have become citizens. But the tone adopted towards them, and the conception of industrial relations shared by employers and employed, have tended to make them citizens of a State within the State. We shall not get rid of Labour unrest until we have made it possible for the workers to feel themselves members of an undivided community, united by the double bonds of common interests and reciprocal obligations.

C. ERNEST FAYLE.

Art. 12.-SWINBURNE.

1. The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne. By Edmund Gosse, C.B. Macmillan, 1917.

2. The Boyhood of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Personal Recollections by his Cousin, Mrs Disney Leith. Chatto and Windus, 1917.

3. Portraits and Sketches. By Edmund Gosse, C.B. Heinemann, 1913.

4. The Posthumous Poems of Algernon C. Swinburne. Edited by Edmund Gosse, C.B., and T. J. Wise, with an Introduction by Edmund Gosse. Heinemann, 1917. SWINBURNE only died in 1909, but to many people he almost seems to have been dead for twenty years. Indeed for the thirty years which he spent at Putney under the protection of Watts Dunton, and especially for the second half of them, he had lived so regularly, silently and obscurely, that except for an occasional publication which made a little noise, or an occasional quarrel which made a good deal, he was almost forgotten even in the world of letters. Outside it he had never been known, except as Don Juan is known to Mrs Grundy or the fairies to the Governor of the Bank of England. His life is, in fact, divided into two halves of almost exactly equal length and extraordinarily unequal importance. He went to Eton in 1849; from that day forward for thirty years he lived a life of ever-increasing intellectual activity, of promise, performance, fame, authority, of no little noise and scandal, of private friendships and private feuds, of public abuse and public homage. In 1879 Watts Dunton took him to Putney; and the thirty years which followed were years of always diminishing activity, of friendships lost by disuse as well as by death, of a life which more and more forgot and was itself forgotten. The most potent of the stars that guided the first half were the stormy brilliance of Rossetti and the circle of genius which surrounded him. The sole star of the latter half was that of an industrious solicitor who had a remarkable talent for introducing method and order into the study of poetry and into the life of a poet. The resulting contrast could not have been more complete. Chelsea was Sturm und Drang, Poems and Ballads,' and

Songs before Sunrise'; it was creation, excitement, and violent energy of life alternating with catastrophic seizures of illness. Putney, on the other hand, was a life monastic in regularity, almost monastic in quietness; filled full of air and sleep and exercise and sobriety; with less and less creative energy and no illness, till the delicate author of 'Poems and Ballads' became a sturdy little old man without an ache or a pain,' who 'ate like a caterpillar and slept like a dormouse'; till that Nemesis arrived which, alas, in all fields lies in wait for too much order, and, in Mr Gosse's words, it came about that 'nothing could be more motionless than the existence of "the little old genius and his little old acolyte, in their dull little villa."'

The contrast between these two halves of Swinburne's life suggests the key to his character and work. Genius is mind on fire. In some cases, as for instance in Goethe, there was so much mind that a fire, which did not always burn very vigorously, could not always keep it more

than respectably warm. The same thing may be seen,

on a smaller scale, in our own Arnold. In others, as sometimes even in Shelley, and often in many of the Elizabethans, the fire is apt to burn too long and too fiercely for the material supplied to it. There is no doubt that Swinburne belonged to the latter of these two classes. It is a complete mistake to say, as is sometimes said, that he was nothing but a reed through which every breath of wind passed into music. Neither the marvellous music of his verse nor the accumulated and cumbrous violence of his prose ought to conceal from the reader so often as they are allowed to do that there is a mind of real power working behind both. But still there is no doubt that the dominant feature is rather the passions and emotions which never fail, than the thoughts which, though far from absent, are in no equal abundance. This was always the case with the man as well as with the poet, and resulted in a youth of violence followed by a middle and old age of exhaustion and routine.

This is the story which Mr Gosse has told in what will rank as one of the pleasantest of our literary biographies, especially if read in conjunction with the curious and amusing sketch of Swinburne already given by the same

writer in his 'Portraits and Sketches.' No life was ever more entirely that of a man of letters than Swinburne's. He never had any other profession or occupation. Outside his own family he had no friendships but those which were rooted in literature or art. Whether he was loving Burne Jones and Morris, or worshipping Hugo and Landor, or consigning Furnivall to the depths of Hell, it was always the artist or writer (I was almost making him call Furnivall an artist!) as well as the man that he kept in view. Such a life, even when lived by so original and excitable a personality as Swinburne, cannot provide a great deal of incident for a biographer. And it is not the least of Mr Gosse's merits that he has kept his story within one volume. But all that it does provide asks for exactly those gifts which Mr Gosse brings. It asks for a combination which can only rarely be achieved. We often get biographies by friends or relations who knew and loved their hero indeed, but, knowing little else, cannot really deal with his work. Or we get them of another sort, written by those who have full knowledge of the subject of the man's work but never knew the man himself. The latter kind almost necessarily lacks charm and the former authority. Mr Gosse's book abounds in both. It is the book of one who has given all his leisure, which has fortunately meant much of his life, to letters, and one who was Swinburne's intimate friend. It is at once amusing enough to entertain those who are curious about an eccentric individual, and serious enough to interest those who want to know more of a great poet. Its only defects are the two rarest of all in these days-an excess of brevity and of caution.

Mr Gosse must know a thousand good stories about Swinburne; indeed he has told a good many in his earlier sketch. But here he has hardly given us a dozen. Even the exciting episode of his narrow escape from drowning at Étretat, which fills half a dozen of the best pages in 'Portraits and Sketches' and is called 'the most important adventure' he ever had, is here very briefly related. It seems, too, that, with his tongue if not with his pen, Swinburne was often extremely humorous; and here again Mr Gosse's caution has shown us hardly anything of a feature certainly wanted to complete his portrait. And, golden as brevity shines in an age of verbosity,