At Worcester College Library there is a small collection of Swinburne manuscript material which deserves to be more widely known; and to this end I have compiled a brief description of the contents. The most significant item is probably the early draft of part of "The Armada," published in Poems and Ballads, Third Series (1889), on the usual blue paper, written at all angles and with such density that a transcription would be a minor Herculean labour. There is also a complete draft of "The Union," printed in Astrophel (1894) and written sometime around March 1893. A copy of Poems and Ballads has pasted into its front a letter in Swinburne's hand addressed to the Athenaeum, March 10th, 1877. The text is printed in Lang, The Swinburne Letters (Vol. 3, 296), a spirited public scotching of the idea that the 1866 book was ever reprinted with some of its original contents suppressed.

    The bulk of the collection at Worcester is represented by a large boxful of more than forty sheets of "The Flogging Block" material, flagellation writings Swinburne wrote and compiled over a number of years. The sheets include completed poems and dialogues which describe with obsessive repetitiveness the beating of schoolboys. Present is a draft (dedicated "To M.") of "Eton. An Ode," a burlesque of Swinburne's own "Eton. An Ode" published in Astrophel. As other critics have pointed out, in one sense these writings are innocuous, in that they have nothing overtly sexual or obscene in them whatsoever. Yet merely to glance over these manuscripts, with their sketches and plans for an uncompleted major work and their repulsive school-noticeboard lists of names with the number of "cuts" received, is to be forcibly reminded of how bizarre was a part of Swinburne's personality. These manuscripts must be of interest to any serious biographer. The boxed material is supplemented by a number of other flagellation manuscripts kept separately: "Redgie's Luck," "Redgie's Return" and "The Swimmer's Tragedy." All these were bequeathed to the Library by the late Librarian of the College, C.H. Wilkinson, in 1960.

    Finally, there is a volume of undergraduate essays by Swinburne, from his years at Balliol, written in black ink in a black notebook. The six essays are "On Political and Speculative Liberty," "The Mystical Philosophy of Greece," "On the Character of Socrates," "On the Dialectic of Plato," "On the Province of Logic," and on the question "How far does any metaphysical science exist, corresponding to the dialectic theory of Plato?". Most are initialled by Robert Scott, Master of Balliol; the "Dialectic of Plato" essay by Edward Woolcombe (ECW). Balliol records reveal that Swinburne was studying logic in Lent term and Michaelmas 1857, so one can conjecture that "On the Province of Logic" may belong to that year. He studied the first three books of the Republic in Michaelmas 1858 and Lent 1859, but it seems more likely the essays were written at roughly the same period.

    The longest essay by far is "On Political and Speculative Liberty," running to fifteen sides, and the text is transcribed below for the first time, by kind permission of the Librarian, the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, and William Heinemann Ltd. It was evidently written with a greater personal involvement than most undergraduate essays, showing that even as a commoner, Swinburne exhibited that passion for Liberty which later inspired so many poems, especially Songs before Sunrise, though one can appreciate the frustration of his tutors having to follow it.

    It is a common saying, if not a common belief, that all men in whom habit and teaching have not supplanted nature, desire the possession and the active exercise of reasonable freedom. No common assertion contains a graver error than this. Men, as a rule, do not love liberty: they love their own opinions, their own customs, the systems of their time, the morals and manners of their country. Such residue of regard as they keep for liberty lies mainly in words and vague impotent tradition; it is scarcely a conscious, much less a practical regard of that kind which actually influences the conduct through the convictions. Those men who have a positive belief in freedom as the one thing absolutely right and entirely necessary to make all the relations of life sound or even tolerable, are the rebellious and heretical minorities. Most of us accept with passive patience, as a fact ordained by habit, a certain insecure amount of liberty, we know not well how or why; we give again still less than we receive, and would give yet less if we could. Nevertheless it is very certain that without liberty there can be no good thing for ever whatever. This truth we have let rot into a truism, and ceased to believe it. Obedience is what men now talk of reverence to rule, order, security, worship of this and the other thing. But at the root of all this talk, excellent so far, lies the one clear fact, that but for liberty we can have none of these things, whether as notions or realities. What reverence is there in a slave? what security? what worship? Obedience to just rule is good; but we must have freedom to know the just by when we see it; we must be free to obey. Force and obedience, if the latter word does not mean the same thing for man and brute, cannot live together. All acts of reverence imply as a foregone conclusion that we have seen and chosen what to revere. All advances that were ever made in the world, from religious thought to mechanical device, began in freedom; that is, in rebellious protest by speech and act against a standing custom, called either precedent or authority. Actual faith in conformities would make us live by trust only; we could have neither courage nor belief, head nor heart to work with. Pure, whole and entire liberty is the one want of man; a liberal necessity, like bread or water. We can live on that, but not without it; not on any wood or stone painted or carved. To get that, men have had much work and will have more: for they must have it, if they sell all they have to buy it. This process of sale is the great difficulty. There is so much to give up that no man, or hardly perhaps one in a nation of men, can be ready to give up at once and heartily. So may chances of good to do and good to get--so much (as they think) of common duty, of their religion and morality to clear away. Take one case only, which is a real difficulty at this day: the question of proselytes to be made and kept with more or less employ of force: sometimes, if nothing else will do, with moral compulsion as cruel and narrow as the method of physical torture or temptation. So much harm saved by what one calls beneficent force; so much good gained by prevention of this and the other curse in belief, sin in practice. Take again the matter of marriage and divorce: one half the question is this, whether we must not or may not prevent by force worked up into a law such and such offences against this or that code of morals. In this case indeed the adherents of the party of rule and despotic order may be met on their own ground, and taxed with the far grosser offences they [resubstantiate?] and preserve from punishment--the tyrannies, treacheries, immoralities they keep under shelter rather than displace a theory; but the old objection is more valid yet, that such a code is inconsistent with due and rational freedom. Once admit that we can do without liberty and one sees not where a line can be reasonably drawn; yet no one admits in argument what it would seem they must believe, that men are like beasts or even young children, in whom the rational is overpowered and misguided by the irrational. Of all the ideals the most degraded is that of a human creature to be governed for his ultimate good on a system of blows and force. The very beggars of Naples would reject it, if drawn out in so many words; and a certain school of reasoners propounds it as the ultimate theory of human action and rational well-being. Under the latter circumstances it is called government by Providence, redemption of society, practical worship, and other names of the same or a like purport. 

    It ought to be clear then, if there be any shade of truth in what has been brought forward, that there is not that inborn love and reverence of liberty in the mass of men, which would give us any ground of reasonable hope for its complete prevalence under any form of government; hope, that is, to find it thoroughly worked out, as to leave no inlet for any doctrine or habit at variance with freedom. We certainly do not find this among the realized ideals of the world. In the established governments of force and tradition no man could look for it; but when we come among nations who claim to be ruled by reason and constitutions founded on reason, we might begin to hope, one thinks. But here too we are met and foiled by the inherent weakness of large masses of men in a social condition. At no price will they accept freedom; if they, or others for them, have got clear of active, external tyranny, such as is never ashamed of its name, they must take up with some inconvenient substitute. Here, as Mr. Mill points out, public opinion has the power and the will to injure and impair liberty. Society has a sting for all who revolt against it--a penal code with moral hulks and gallows to scare offenders, as the actual wooden hulks and gibbet are supposed by their admirers to scare convicts of another stamp. A man who disobeys that code might as well be shorn and clad in grey at once. The brand upon him is as deep as the iron [? word] of the galleys, and many persons of repute would as soon receive the one transgression as the other on equal terms.

    This state of things is not simply a great anomaly and inconvenience--it is perilous on very different grounds. By degrees too subtle to grasp or conceive, such a system wears down and refines off all those qualities which are requisite to complete a man, and therefore to make him fit for political freedom. This has been so thoroughly proved and reasoned out by the great writer above quoted, that one cannot hope to do more than touch on the heads of his argument. We may take the question in either form: as to what the social system of opinion is, and what it leads to. In itself it is no light evil, and its reasonable result is a return to consistent and literal despotism. It abrogates the law of reason; it re-introduces the element of tradition; it changes by implication the whole theory of reformed government. More than this; it paves the way for a fresh instalment of tyranny, by slowly killing, as with some corrosive agency, that part of human character and intellect which drives men to resist external oppression, and worship other gods than force at other altars than success. Take men by individuals, and they would probably prefer, with some show of reason and argument, the old idols whose cruelty was at least tangible. Such creeds, religious and otherwise, usually profess at least to have some compensation in store for the practical inconveniences on which their doctrines are based. But public opinion--what will that do for me, a man may reasonably lament. It will simply abstain from rendering his life ridiculous and intolerable to him and to the rest of the world. And for so wholly negative a good, questionable too when you count the cost, what a price has one to pay!--Not that an admirer of despotism would seriously be justified in advancing the claims of his theory to respect on such grounds. Far from that; the interference here spoken of is a grave evil, and to be removed by any procurable remedy; but despotism is none; any more than suicide is a remedy, in any rational sense, against slight fever or cold. It is certain you will have no more pain, when there is no body left you to suffer it. Only in very loose speech can we call it an escape from the evils of opinion to catch at the knife or halter of tyranny. As with man, so with nations: about the worst use you can well make of your capacity to act and think, is willfully to destroy it. Few sins, in politics at least, come near to that one. France--at least such part of France as had then got the upper hand by fraud--resolved in 1851 to consummate such an act. The suicide once well done--the life once fairly taken--day by day and year by year has seen and has speeded the process of decay and corruption. All power and all intellect, all things right and fair, wise and desirable, have dropped from her piecemeal, as the graveclothes might from some corpse that was buried months ago. Nothing good can endure where freedom wholly ceases, without a sun there can be no candles. So much liberty of one kind or another as there is in a nation, so much of noble intellect and capacity for good will the nation keep safe. Without liberty to think, to speak and to act, a man has nothing left but the lower part of his nature; if treated as such only, he does actually become no better than a clever sort of animal with singular propensities and habits. A dog or bird is happier, and worth as much. This, one may trust, can hardly be; the most wretched and the stupidest serf that labours on this earth must keep some poor corner, soiled as it is and narrow, for liberty of thought in his miserable mind. If not, there can certainly be no reason why his master should treat him otherwise than as the beast of burden he is.

    Men were not meant for this, one would think; the lowest of men was not meant for this. It would have been cheaper to make him merely with four legs and a tail. As long as he has the "as sublime" and erected eyes of his manhood, he will want more, and try for it. It is curious to notice, how, when one might begin to tire of hope and faith, some new reason to believe comes up on the sudden. The two great nations which have been always the first leaders of Continental freedom in Europe are held down by the worst conceivable governments; and now, in Russia even, the old labour has to begin again. And the work is taken up by the head of a traditional despotism, which has been forced out of the hands of a free government. It is too early to despair as yet; it is not too late to hope. For of all perilous matters the most perilous to undertake is to destroy the work of the time; nothing is so hard to make as that is to undo. The man was never born, the government will never be, that has power to correct fate and revise Providence; to set a mark where the world shall stop; to erase from the intellect all memory, from the heart all conscience; to establish wrong and confute right; to alter the conditions of human existence, and terms which give us a reason and a claim to enjoy a place in the scale of things preferable to that of creatures who can only sleep, feed, and obey; who live under bit and bridle, and are content with a passive reception of caresses and blows, and the provision of sufficient fodder and commodious litter.