Swinburne's tragic paganism and the difference between sorrow and added sorrow
The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself a pessimist.
“Atalanta” is Swinburne's verse tragedy Atalanta in Calydon, first published in 1865. It dramatizes the Calydonian boar hunt and the death of Meleager: his mother burns the brand on whose survival his life depends. Chesterton has substantial textual grounds for finding its world dark. In the chorus beginning “Before the beginning of years” (lines 314–361), human creation incorporates grief, perishable pleasure and foreknowledge of death. A later chorus, beginning “Who hath given man speech?”, represents the gods as pitiless dispensers of suffering. These are speeches within a Victorian imaginative reconstruction of pagan tragedy, however, rather than testimony establishing how happy historical pagans were. The text inspected here is the Swinburne Project's transcription of the 1904 Chatto & Windus collected edition; Toronto's independently identified 1924 collected-text witness supplies the line numbers. Atalanta, choruses; Toronto text and numbering.
The apparent contradiction becomes less decisive when the previous paragraph's “pale Galilaean” line is read in its original setting. Hymn to Proserpine, first published in Poems and Ballads (1866), gives a pagan speaker a world already subject to pain, change and death. His objection is that Christianity adds deprivation by taking away earthly beauty and pleasure. Existing sorrow and additional sorrow are logically compatible: the speaker need not believe pagan life wholly happy to resent the new religion. This is explicit in the question immediately preceding the famous line: why bring further grief into years already burdened by tears? The inspected witness is again the Project's 1904 collected-edition text. Hymn to Proserpine, passage beginning “And grief is a grievous thing”.
Chesterton's sharper move is therefore evaluative: he asks whether the critic's own distribution of despair and pleasure supplies a trustworthy standard of happiness. That is a challenge to Swinburne's judgment, not a demonstrated contradiction in the poems, and a dramatic speaker's utterance cannot by itself establish the poet's personal unhappiness.
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