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The Medieval Background of Swinburne's The Leper
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Among the contents of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, 1866, few pieces aroused more hostility than The Leper. John Morley and Robert Buchanan, it is true, ignored that poem in their damaging critical notices in The Saturday Review and The Athenæum for August 4, nor did Swinburne mention it in Notes on Poems and Reviews. But The Spectator of September 22, discussing the question of immorality in literature, after citing Swinburne's Faustine as a poem in which artistic treatment justifies the subject, added: “It is entirely otherwise with his Anactoria and Phaedra, and other foul stuff, worst of all, The Leper, which we think no critics can speak worse of than they deserve.” An article in Fraser's Magazine for November, though predominantly favorable to Poems and Ballads, named The Leper among the poems that should be suppressed. The Athenæum for November 3, in a criticism of Notes on Poems and Reviews, remarked: “To our thinking, nothing can be more horribly impure, more utterly loathsome, than the story of the unclean priest [sic] and his leprous mistress [sic].” The Westminster Review for April 1, 1867, mentioned Laus Veneris, The Leper, and Les Noyades as the chief objects of popular clamor.
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References
1 Georges Lafourcade (La Jeunesse de Swinburne, i, 247 f.) erroneously assigns the Athenæum review to Lush. Buchanan himself acknowledged it. Cf. Harriett Jay, Robert Buchanan (London, 1903), p. 161.
2 See also Robert Buchanan, The Fleshly School of Poetry (London, 1872), p. 88.
3 Swinburne (1929), p. 30 note.
4 Op. cit., ii, 457.
5 Printed in T. J. Wise's Catalogue of the Ashley Library, vi, 36, and in Lafourcade, ii, 573. Both A Vigil and The Leper are among Swinburne's earliest poems. See Wise, loc. cit., and Lafourcade, ii, 420.
6 Situations like that of A Vigil may be found in the old romances; cf., for instance, the beginning of Sir Amadace. In this connection Professor G. L. Kittredge refers me to the story of Charlemagne's ring, most familiar in Southey's King Charlemain. In the extract from Pasquier's Recherches de la France, prefixed to Southey's ballad, Charlemagne is said to be so bewitched that “cherissoit-il ce cadaver, l'embrassant, baisant, accolant de la meme façon que devant.” Cf. Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), p. 109 and note.
In Swinburne's prose story Dead Love a heroine named Yolande falls in love with the corpse of her husband's slayer, and cherishes the body until it apparently comes to life, though in reality inhabited by an evil spirit. With this narrative compare the story in Mandeville's Travels (ed. P. Hamelius, EETS, Or. Ser. 153, pp. 16–17); see also Kittredge's A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, 1916), pp. 185–186, and Lafourcade, ii, 81.
7 See H. G. Fiedler's letter to The Times Literary Supplement, August 19, 1920, in which is incorporated a letter from the poet. Cf. William Rossetti's Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (London, 1866), p. 31.
Perhaps one may attribute the introduction of the archaic French to Swinburne's youthful love of mystification and to the delight which he took (and of which he speaks in the letter to Fiedler) in composing pastiche. One wonders, moreover, whether he did not anticipate in some measure the criticism of Laus Veneris and The Leper and so wished to emphasize the fact that he was dealing with medieval stories, a fact overlooked by the reviewers.
8 In “Swinburne's Laus Veneris and the Tannhäuser Legend,” PMLA, xlv, 1202–1213.
9 Poems and Ballads (London, 1866), p. 143.
10 T. J. Wise, Catalogue of the Ashley Library, vi, 57; Lafourcade, ii, 456. Likewise Mr. T. Earle Welby (A Study of Swinburne, p. 44), misinterpreting or reading too hastily one of Swinburne's letters, names the Annales des Gaules as the source of the story.
11 i, leaf cxxvi. The edition Swinburne mentions was inaccessible to me.
12 Cf. i, leaf cxvii. But here the form is Fontainebelland.
13 i, leaf cxxiiii; cf. leaf cxxv. Morris used the name “Yoland” in The Tune of Seven Towers (The Defence of Guenevere, 1858). Cf. also Swinburne's Dead Love (the prose story, not the poem).
14 i, leaf cxxviii.
15 Swinburne's title may have been suggested by Les Grandes Chroniques de France (Paris, 1836), which he could have consulted in preparing his The Chronicle of Queen Fredegond, based on Gregory of Tours and (as M. Lafourcade has pointed out) Nicole Gilles. Les Grandes Chroniques de France tells of King Philip's condemnation of the lepers (v, 249–250), but mesiaux is the word used. “La comtesse Yoland” is mentioned in the introduction (i, xvii).
16 In “The Best Hundred Books” (Pall Mall Gazette “Extra,” No. 24), Swinburne's list of favorites ends with “early English metrical romances, from the collections of Weber, Ritson, and Wright.” J. W. Mackail in The Life of William Morris (London, 1899), II, 283, refers to an unpublished poem by Morris called Amis and Amillion. The Friendship of Amis and Amile was included in Old French Romances (1896), having been printed two years before at the Kelmscott Press. Mackail mentions a letter in which Swinburne recalls “their delight in reading the French ‘in the days when we first foregathered at Oxford’ nearly forty years before.”
17 Henry Weber, Metrical Romances (Edinburgh, 1810), ii, 421.
18 Cf. Charles A. Mercier, Leper Houses and Medieval Hospitals (London, 1915), p. 7: “It seems probable that in very early times the seclusion of lepers from association with the healthy arose, not from any belief in the contagiousness of the disease, but in the conviction that it was a punishment inflicted by the Deity for some signal wickedness, and from a desire to escape from participation in the punishment by repudiating those on whom it had fallen.” Cf. also the Biblical story of Miriam, Numbers, xii, 10, 15.
19 iii, 366.
20 A requiem mass was sometimes said over the body of the leper, who was then carried to an open grave. Cf. Mercier, op. cit., pp. 13–14. For the elaborate regulations governing the leper's intercourse with men see Léon Le Grand's Statuts d'Hotels-Dieu et de Léproseries (Paris, 1901). Mercier (p. 16) mentions the case of two lepers who were burnt alive in 1321 for escaping from confinement.
21 Weber, ii, 436.
22 Weber, ii, 441.
23 Idem, ii, 472.
24 Cf. also “Bread failed; we got but well-water.”
25 Legrand D'Aussy, Fabliaux ou Contes, v, 103. Weber refers to an earlier edition, which obviously contains the same information.
26 Weber, ii, 459.
27 For a droll anecdote of Swinburne's reading the two poems in a mixed company see Gosse's Life (New York, 1917), p. 96.
28 Charles Swan, Gesta Romanorum (London, 1905), pp. 166–167.
29 Tale cli of the Gesta Romanorum (Swan's edition, pp. 256–258) deals with an emperor's son who falls in love with a woman and is infected with leprosy. He lives in seclusion seven years, attended by her; at the end of this time he inadvertently swallows a serpent and then vomits forth both snake and disease.
In a Breton ballad entitled The Leper a leprous clerk makes love to a sweetheart who spurns him. See the Barzaz-Breiz Chants Populaires de la Bretagne, French translation by Th. Hersart de la Villemarqué (Paris, 1846), ii, 551 ff., “Le Lépreux”; or Tom Taylor's Ballads and Songs of Brittany (London and Cambridge, 1865), pp. 187–191, “The Leper.”
Hynd Hasting, a ballad in Peter Buchan's Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1828), ii, 262–265, is the gruesome tale of a woman who leaves her lover and goes among the lepers. Professor Kittredge calls my attention to the widespread class of stories in which a woman loves, or is said to love, a cripple, a leper, etc. For references see Kittredge's “Arthur and Gorlagon,” Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, viii, 188 note and 251 note.
30 His paraphrase, Henry the Leper, probably belongs to 1846, according to William Rossetti (Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family-Letters with a Memoir, i, 104–105). Whether Swinburne could have known the poem in manuscript is immaterial, since it has nothing in common with The Leper save “God's anger.”
31 Cambridge edition of Tennyson, pp. 543–546.
32 “We see Harlequin Virtue make love to the goddess Grundy, and watch if we can without yawning the raddled old columbine Cant perform her usual pirouettes in the ballet of morality” (Under the Microscope, 1872, p. 6). In an article in Temple Bar for July, 1869 (xxvi, 462), Alfred Austin wrote anonymously: “We distinctly remember lending the volume containing this poem [Tennyson's Fatima] to a young lady, and having it returned to us by her mamma, with the remark—we are indulging in no hackneyed joke, but narrating a simple fact—that she strongly objected to a volume containing such abomination as the foregoing, and preferred that her daughter should restrict her poetical reading to Mr. Tupper.”