University of Virginia Library

Swinburne's continuing interest in the Theban legend, "with its infinite suggestions and significances,"[1] provided the binding metaphor when in 1880 he gathered a series of his parodies, written over a period of two decades, under the omnibus title, Specimens of Modern Verse: The Heptalogia, or The Seven against Sense: A Cap with Seven Bells. The volume was issued anonymously, and obviously with good cause since six of its subjects were alive and still writing. It was essential, moreover, to Swinburne's design that it be published on the same date as his Studies in Song, which he intended to acknowledge. "How is it," he inquires irritably of Andrew Chatto, "that no copies of the Heptalogia accompanied these Studies? You will remember that it was my particular desire that the two books should appear together on the same day."[2] Though simultaneous

publication would have the effect of associating the two collections, the overtness of the gesture might serve to keep them sufficiently apart as to prevent the matter of authorship from becoming more than a tantalizing likelihood. Two further measures were calculated to cloud the issue. In the "Nephelidia" parody, Swinburne numbered himself among the modern heroes (Tennyson, the Brownings, Patmore, "Owen Meredith," Rossetti) besieging the walls of poetic sense; and then as a sign of friendship with Browning, he borrowed the opening lines of Landor's "To Robert Browning" for the epigraph to his own "Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor," which initiated the Studies volume. Since the two poets responded to the same master and had received in their several ways his acknowledgement, it was as unlikely that Swinburne would parody Browning as that he would parody himself or his old friend Rossetti.

Ambiguity there was, but the truth, as Swinburne doubtless assumed, was not to remain dark for very long. On the book's appearance, Rossetti wrote briefly to Watts-Dunton, asking whether the "whole" was from Swinburne's hand and whether it appeared with his sanction. Though he had yet to see the collection, its contents "as reported seemed very dubious as to friendship."[3] Whatever the mollification Watts-Dunton may have offered, it is not recorded; and indeed the record of allusion to the Heptalogia gradually closes off, much as though an indiscretion (however well-loved) were henceforth to be dead and buried. Perhaps this was a further concession to the cautious new regimen imposed at The Pines, though it is to be recalled that Watts-Dunton proved no obstacle when late in 1881 the poet published his "Disgust: A Dramatic Monologue" in reaction to Tennyson's "Despair: A Dramatic Monologue." In any event, as late as 1896, T. J. Wise and W. R. Nicoll thought it safe to pronounce, as if drawing upon a private confidence, that "it may without hesitation now be stated that Mr. Swinburne has admitted the authorship of The Heptalogia, but has at the same time expressed his determination never to republish the volume."[4]

What enterprise may have already been brewing in Wise's imagination must be left to inference, but he and Nicoll would have done well to hesitate before entering the second claim. For when Swinburne proceeded to order his poetry for the Collected Poems of 1904, the Heptalogia was accorded its proper position among the later miscellanies that compose the fifth volume. At that point, Swinburne not only formally acknowledged his authorship, but, contrary to his usual practice, made substantial alterations

in the contents. Having shown himself a false prophet, Wise simply passed the matter over in his Swinburne Bibliography of 1919, not without noting, however, that all of the revisions the poet was to absorb in his reprint had been recorded in "two copies of the first edition. . . . One of these, which had belonged to Andrew Chatto, was sold . . . on June 29th, 1916, for £69. The other, which belonged to Watts-Dunton, was included in a bequest . . . to one of his executors."[5] Of the two copies Wise mentions, only one — the Chatto — has come to light,[6] and its provenance becomes evident from two letters published for the first time in Cecil Lang's edition of the correspondence. On December 7, 1899, Swinburne writes to Georgiana Burne-Jones, the widow of his long-time friend: The volume was duly received, and two months later, Swinburne presumably having copied from it, it is returned "with many thanks."[7]

The two copies alluded to by Wise were thus unquestionable latecomers, their transcriptions based on the copy Swinburne had presented long before to Burne-Jones. Though this volume has yet to be unearthed, it turns out that another, contemporary with it, does in fact exist; and there is good reason to assume that it is a close approximation, if not a precise version, of the volume that Swinburne used as his source. In its margins are to be found, in Swinburne's hand, virtually all of the revisions he was to incorporate in the reprint. Attached to it, and of significant bibliographical and biographical relevance, are three letters in the hand of its original owner, John Nichol, addressed to his Glasgow bookseller, Hugh Hopkins.

Nichol had first met Swinburne while both were undergraduates at Oxford, and though he was to return to Scotland soon after taking his degree, their friendship remained fast through the 1860's and 1870's. In June of 1880 Nichol passed a gratifying week with Swinburne and Watts-Dunton at their new accommodations; the Heptalogia appeared in December of that year; and in March of the next Nichol published his review of it in the Glasgow Herald.[8] But as happened so often to Swinburne's old friendships, his relations with Nichol gradually lessened and came finally

to seem irrelevant to the needs of his present world.[9] Nichol's resentment, of which Swinburne seems never to have been conscious, provides the biographical burden of the letters that follow.

The first, dated 20 September 1890, establishes the context and tone of the other two:

The second letter, dated 19 October, shows still the firmness of Nichol's resolve, though with a minor concession:

Nichol's allusion to the sale of Atalanta in Calydon, quite possibly Swinburne's presentation copy, suggests the degree of souring of their friendship. His commitment at this point to only a posthumous sale of the Heptalogia gives way in the next letter, dated 23 October. The opening concerns Nichol's accounts, and then he promises to come down on the 31st.

Three lines are then heavily stricken out, so emphatically that only two words — "old days" — are at all intelligible; but they perhaps intimate the drift of the rest. The letter resumes:

The identity of the shadowy gentleman — indeed, whether it was he who made the purchase — remains uncertain. When the volume next appears, it is as part of the Jerome Kern Collection, from which it was bought in 1929 by Owen D. Young, with whose library it passed into the Berg Collection, where it now resides.[10]