A „satyr” at Queen Victoria’s court: Algernon Charles Swinburne
The present study deals with the intricate relationships between Algernon Charles Swinburne’s public „persona” and his Victorian contemporaries. For the nineteenth century literary careers it is taken into consideration the broad social context referring to the rise and establishment of burgeois values and life style, then the particulary interplay of discreet ideologic targets and public biographic disclosures with sheer cultural action. While still fighing with the contradictory tendencies and ideas of his age, Swinburne likes to dwell inside the paradox. Consequently, at the dawn of the twentiest century, he came to be paradoxically considered as the main mouthpiece of middle class shallowness and vanity. All in all, a Victorian booby trap.
Keywords: burgeoisie, biography, Romanticism, Decadence, Victorianism, myth of literature, public/ prive life
1.[1] Lytton Strachey, Preface în Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon, http://bartleby.com.
2.[1] Peter Gay, The Burgeois Experience. Victoria to Freud. Education of the Senses, vol. I, New York, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 19.
3.[1] Thorstein Veblen, „The Leisure Classes”, în A Veblen Treasury, apud Caius Dobrescu, Revoluţia radială. O critică a conceptului de postmodernism dinspre înţelegerea plurală şi deschisă a societăţii burgheze, Braşov, Editura Universităţii din Braşov, 2008, p. 189.
4.[1] Peter Gay, op. cit., p. 28.
5.[1] Caius Dobrescu, op.cit., p. 185.
6.[1] ibidem., p. 295.
7.[1] David Weir, Decadence and The Making of Modernism, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
8.[1] Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought, London, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971, p. X.
9.[1] Ulrich Meier, citat de Caius Dobrescu, op. cit., p. 304.
10.[1] César Graña, Bohemian versus Burgeois. French Society and the French Man of Lettres in the Nineteenth Century, apud Caius Dobrescu, op. cit., p. 308.
11.[1] William E. Buckler, The Victorian Imagination: Essays in Aesthetic Exploration, New York, New York University Press, 1980, p. 1-14.
12.[1] M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism. Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, New York, W.W. Norton Comp.&Inc., 1971, p. 80.
13.[1] Caius Dobrescu, op. cit., p. 308.
14.[1] ibidem, p. 234.
15.[1] În lucrarea sa, Caius Dobrescu rezolvă ecuaţia conflictului dintre artist şi societate printr-o foarte subtilă analiză a ideii de „glorie”. Cele trei strategii în urma cărora producătorul de sens ajunge la prestigiul şi recunoaşterea râvnite ar fi „ordalia” (conflictul legitim care instaurează o ordine mai dreaptă), „potlatchul” (conflictul cu sens iniţiatic presupunând depăşirea extatică de sine) şi „mandarinatul” (formă conflictuală pasivă, afectând impersonalitatea, detaşarea şi completitudinea personalităţii).
16.[1] ibidem, p. 231.
17.[1] William Morton Payne, Algernon Charles Swinburne în Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century, http://openlibrary.org.
18.[1] J. W. Mackail, Swinburne: A Lecture Delivered Before the University on April 30, 1909, www.archive.org , p. 3-7.
19.[1] Samuel C. Chew, Swinburne, Hamden, Conneticut, Archon Books, 1929, p. 270-271.
20.[1] Edward Thomas, Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Critical Study, London, Martin Secker, 1912, p. 114, www.archive.org.
21.[1] Coulson Kernahan, In Good Company. Some Personal Recollections of Swinburne, Lord Roberts, Watts-Dunton, Oscar Wilde, Edward Whymper, S. J. Stone, Stephen Phillips, London, John Lane, 1917, p. 14, www.archive.org.
22.[1] Rossetti numea poezia swinburniană „fundamental brain work” (v. Samuel C. Chew, op. cit., p. 88).
23.[1] Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on Poems and Reviews, London, John Camden Hotten, 1866, p. 14, www.archive.org.
24.[1] Ibidem, p. 7.
25.[1] Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dedicatory Epistle în The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, vol. I, London, Chatto&Windus, 1904, www.archive.org.: „For its author the most amusing and satisfying result of the clatter aroused by it was the deep diversion of collating and comparing the variously inaccurate verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors who insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted or achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursions of absolute fancy. There are photographs from life in the book ; and there are sketches from imagination. Some which keen-sighted criticism has dismissed with a smile as ideal or imaginary were as real and actual as they well could be: others which have been taken for obvious transcripts from memory were utterly fantastic or dramatic. If the two kinds cannot be distinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to an artist whose medium or material has more in common with a musician’s than with a sculptor’s (…) The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard’s distinction between books and life (…) Marlowe and Shakespeare, Aeschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusy shelves of libraries”.
26.[1] Samuel C. Chew, op. cit., p. 229.
