Notes on poems and reviews

KOTES ON POEMS AND
REVIEWS.

NOTES ON POEMS AND

— — N

REVIEWS.

BY

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

" Je pense sur ces satires comme fipietete: ' Si I'on dit du mal de toi, et qu'U soit
veritable, corrige-toi ; si ce sont des raensonges, ris-en.' J'ai appris avec I'age a devenir
bon cheval de poste; je fais ma station, et ne m'embarrasse pas des roquets qui aboient
en chemin." — Frederic le Grand.

"Ignorance by herself is an awkward lumpish wench; not yet fallen into vicious
courses, nor to be uncharitably treated : but Ignorance and Insolence, these are, for
certain, an unlovely Mother and Bastard!" — Carlt/le,

LONDON:

JOHN CAMDEN HOTTEN, PICCADILLY.

1866.

LONDON :

8AVILL, EDWAEDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHAND03 STREET,

COVENT GARDEN.

^ ^3 AJUur-

NOTES ON POEMS AND
E E Y I E W S.

It is by no wish of my own tliat I accept tne task now
proposed to me. To vindicate or defend myself from tlie
assault or the charge of men whom^ but for their attacks^ I
might never have heard of, is an office which I, or any writer
who respects his work, cannot without reluctance stoop to
undertake. - As long as the attacks on my book — I have
seen a few, I am told there are many — were confined within
the usual limits of the anonymous press, I let them pass
without the notice to which they appeared to aspire. Sin-
cere or insincere, insolent or respectful, I let my assailants
say out their say unheeded.

I have now undertaken to write a few words on this
affair, not by way of apology or vindication, of answer or
appeal. I have none such to offer. Much of the criticism
I have seen is as usual, in the words of Shakspeare's greatest
follower,

"As if a man should spit against the wind ;
The filth returns in's face."

In recognition of his fair dealing with me in this matter,
I am bound by my own sense of right to accede to the
wish of my present publisher, and to the wishes of friends
whose advice I value, that on his account, if not on mine,
I should make some reply to the charges brought against

M5657S2 V

6

me — as far as I understand them. The work is not fruitful
of pleasure, of honour, or of profit ; but, like other such
tasks, it may be none the less useful and necessary. I am
aware that it cannot be accomplished without some show of
egotism ; and I am perforce prepared to incur the conse-
quent charge of arrogance. The office of commentator of
my own works has been forced upon me by circumstances
connected with the issue and re-issue of my last book. I am
compelled to look sharply into it, and inquire what passage,
what allusion, or what phrase can have drawn down such
sudden thunder from the serene heavens of public virtue. A
mere libeller I have no wish to encounter ; I leave it to
saints to fight with beasts at Ephesus or nearer. " For in
these strifes, and on such persons, it were as wretched
to affect a victory, as it is unhappy to be committed with
them."

Certain poems of mine, it appears, have been impugned by
judges, with or without a name, as indecent or as blasphemous.
To me, as I have intimated, their verdict is a matter of
infinite indifference : it is of equally small moment to me
whether in such eyes as theirs I appear moral or immoral.
Christian or pagan. But, remembering that science must
not scorn to investigate animalcules and infusoria, I am
ready for once to play the anatomist.

With regard to any opinion implied or expressed through-
out my book, I desire that one thing should be remembered :
the book is dramatic, many-faced, multifarious ; and no
utterance of enjoyment or despair, belief or unbelief, can
properly be assumed as the assertion of its author's personal
feeling or faith. Were each poem to be accepted as the
deliberate outcome and result of the writer's conviction, not
mine alone but most other men's verses would leave nothing
behind them but a sense of cloudy chaos and suicidal con-
tradiction. Byron and Shelley, speaking in their own
persons, and with what sublime effect wc know, openly and

insultingly mocked and reviled what the English of their day
held most sacred. I have not done this. I do not say that,
if I chose, I would not do so to the best of my power ; I do
say that hitherto I have seen fit to do nothing of the kind.

It remains then to inquire what in that book can be
reasonably offensive to the English reader. In order to
resolve this problem, I will not fish up any of the ephemeral
scurrilities born only to sting if they can, and sink as they
must. I will take the one article that lies before me ; the
work (I admit) of an enemy, but the work (I acknowledge)
of a gentleman. I cannot accept it as accurate; but I
readily and gladly allow that it neither contains nor suggests
anything false or filthy. To him therefore, rather than to
another, I address my reclamation. Two among my poems,
it appears, are in his opinion " especially horrible." Good.
Though the phrase be somewhat " inexpressive," I am con-
tent to meet him on this ground. It is something — nay, it
is much — to find an antagonist who has a suflScient sense of
honesty and honour to mark out the lists in which he, the
challenger, is desirous to encounter the challenged.

The first, it appears, of these especially horrible poems is
Anactoria. I am informed, and have not cared to verify
the assertion, that this poem has excited, among the chaste
and candid critics of the day or hour or minute, a more
vehement reprobation, a more virtuous horror, a more pas-
sionate appeal, than any other of my writing. Proud and
glad as I must be of this distinction, I must yet, however
reluctantly, inquire what merit or demerit has incurred
such unexpected honour. I was not ambitious of it ; I am
not ashamed of it; but I am overcome by it. I have
never lusted after the praise of reviewers ; I have never
feared their abuse ; but I would fain know why the vultures
should gather here of all places ; what congenial carrion
they smell, who can discern such (it is alleged) in any rose-
bed. And after a little reflection I do know, or conjecture.

Virtue^ as she appears incarnate in BritisTi journalism and
voluble through that unsavoury organ, is something of a
compound creature —

" A lump neither alive nor dead,
Dog-headed, bosom-eyed, and bird-footed ;"

nor have any dragon's jaws been known to emit on occasion
stronger and stranger sounds and odours. But having, not
without astonishment and disgust, inhaled these odours,
I find myself at last able to analyse their component parts.
What my poem means, if any reader should want that ex-
plained, I am ready to explain, though perplexed by the hint
that explanation may be required. What certain reviewers
have imagined it to imply, I am incompetent to explain, and
unwilliug to imagine. I am evidently not virtuous enough
to understand them. I thank Heaven that I am not.
Ma corruption rougirait de leur pudeur. I have not studied
in those schools whence that full-fledged phoenix, the
" virtue ^^ of professional pressmen, rises chuckling and
crowing from the dunghill, its birthplace and its deathbed.
But there are birds of alien feather, if not of higher flight ;
and these I would now recall into no hencoop or preserve of
mine, but into the open and general field where all may
find pasture and sunshine and fresh air : into places whither
the prurient prudery and the virulent virtue of pressmen
and prostitutes cannot follow ; into an atmosphere where
calumny cannot speak, and fatuity cannot breathe ; in
a word, where backbiters and imbeciles become impossi-
ble. I neither hope nor wish to change the unchange-
able, to purify the impure. To conciliate them, to vindicate
myself in their eyes, is a, task which I should not
condescend to attempt, even were I sure to accomplish.

In this 25<^cm I have simply expressed, or tried to
express, that violence of affection between one and another
which hardens into rage and deepens into despair.

9

The key-note which I have here touched was struck long
since by Sappho. We in England are taught, are compelled
under penalties to learn, to construe, and to repeat, as
schoolboys, the imperishable and incomparable verses of
that supreme poet; and I at least am grateful for the training.
I have wished, and I have even ventured to hope, that I
might be in time competent to translate into a baser and
later language the divine words which even when a boy I
could not but recognise as divine. That hope, if indeed I
dared ever entertain such a hope, I soon found fallacious.
To translate the two odes and the remaining fragments of
Sappho is the one impossible task ; and as witness of this
I will call up one of the greatest among poets. Catullus
" translated" — or as his countrymen would now say " tra-
duced''— the Ode to Anactoria — E'lg 'Epoj/jiivav : a more
beautiful translation there never was and will never be ; but
compared with the Greek, it is colourless and bloodless,
puffed out by additions and enfeebled by alterations. Let
any one set against each other the two first stanzas, Latin
and Greek, and pronounce. (This would be too much to
ask of all of my critics ; but some among the journalists of
England may be capable of achieving the not exorbitant
task.) Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed ;
I tried instead to reproduce in a diluted and dilated form the
spirit of a poem which could not be reproduced in the body.
Now, the ode Etc 'Eptjfxtmv — the " Ode to Anactoria''
(as it is named by tradition) — the poem which English boys
have to get by heart — the poem (and this is more im-
portant) which has in the whole world of verse no com-
panion and no rival but the Ode to Aphrodite, has been
twice at least translated or '^ traduced." I am not aware
that Mr. Ambrose Phillips, or M. Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux,
was ever impeached before any jury of moralists for his suffi-
ciently grievous offence. By any jury of poets both would
assuredly have been convicted. Now, what they did I have not

10

done. To the best (and bad is the best) of their ability,
they have " done into" bad French and bad English the
very words of Sappho. Feeling that although I might do it
better I could not do it well, I abandoned the idea of
translation — eKMv afKovri js Ou/iJ. I tried, then, to write
some paraphrase of the fragment which the Fates and the
Christians have spared us, I have not said, as Boileau and
Phillips have, that the speaker sweats and swoons at sight
of her favourite by the side of a man. 1 have abstained
from touching on such details, for this reason : that I felt
myself incompetent to give adequate expression in English
to the literal and absolute words of Sappho ; and would not
debase and degrade them into a viler form. No one can
feel more deeply than I do the inadequacy of my work.
" That is not Sappho," a friend said once to me. I could
only reply, " It is as near as I can come ; and no man can
come close to her." Her remaining verses are the supreme
success, the final achievement, of the poetic art.

But this, it may be, is not to the point. I will try to
draw thither ; though the descent is immeasurable frojn
Sappho^s verse to mine, or to any man's. I have striven i
to cast my spirit into the mould of hers, to express and ',
represent not the poem but the poet. I did not think it J
requisite to disfigure the page with a foot-note wherever~TL
had fallen back upon the original text. Here and there, I
need not say, I have rendered into English the very words
of Sappho. I have tried also to work into words of my own
some expression of their cff'ect: to bear witness how, more than
any other's, her verses strike and sting the memory in lonely
places, or at sea, among all loftier sights and sounds — how
they seem akin to fire and air, being themselves "all air and
fire ;" other element there is none in them. As to the
angry appeal against the supreme mystery of oppressive
heaven, which I have ventured to put into her mouth at
that point only where pleasure culminates in pain, affection

11

in anger, and desire in despair — as to the " blasphemies"''^
against God or Gods of which here and elsewhere 1 stand ac-
cused,— they are to be taken as the first outcome or outburst
of foiled and fruitless passion recoiling on itself. After this,
the spirit finds time to breathe and repose above all vexed
senses of the weary body, all bitter labours of the revolted
soul ; the poet^s pride of place is resumed, the lofty con-
science of invincible immortality in the memories and the
mouths of men.

What is there now of horrible in this ? the expressions
of fierce fondness, the ardours of passionate despair ? Are
these so unnatural as to afii'ight or disgust ? Where is there
an unclean detail ? where an obscene allusion ? A writer as
impure as my critics might of course have written, on this
or on any subject, an impure poem ; I have not. And if
to translate or paraphrase Sappho be an offence, indict
the heavier offenders who have handled and rehandled
this matter in their wretched versions of the ode. Is
my poem more passionate in detail, more unmistakable
in subject ? I affirm that it is less ; and what I affirm I
have proved.

Next on the list of accusation stands the poem of Dolores.
The gist and bearing of this I should have thought evident
enough, viewed by the light of others which precede and

* As I shall not return to this charge of " blasphemy," I will here cite a notable
instance of what does seem permissible in that line to the English reader. (I
need not say that I do not question the right, which hypocrisy and servility
would deny, of author and publisher to express and produce what they please.
I do not deprecate, but demand for all men freedom to speaii and freedom to
hear. It is the line of demarcation which admits, if offence there be, the greater
offender and rejects the less— it is this that I do not understand.) After many
alternate curses and denials of God, a great poet talks of Christ "veiling his
horrible Godhead," of his " malignant soul," his " godlike malice." Slielley
outlived all this and much more ; but Shelley wrote all this and much more.
Will no Society for the Suppression of Common Sense — no Committee for the
Propagation of Cant— see to it a little 1 or have they not already tried their
hands at it and broken down ? For the poem which contains the words above
quoted continues at this day to bring credit and profit to its publishers — Messrs.
Moxon and Co.

12

follow it. I have striven here to express that transient state of
spirit through which a man may he supposed to pasSj foiled in
love and weary of loving, but not yet in sight of rest;
seeking refuge in those " violent delights" which " have
violent ends/' in fierce and frank sensualities which at
least profess to be no more than they are. This poem,
like Faustine, is so distinctly symbolic and fanciful that it
cannot justly be amenable to judgment as a study in the
school of realism. The spirit, bowed and discoloured by
suflPering and by passion (which are indeed the same thing
and the same word), plays for awhile with its pleasures and
its pains, mixes and distorts them with a sense half-humorous
and half-mournful, exults in bitter and doubtful emotions —

" Moods of fantastic sadness, nothing worth."

It sports with sorrow, and jests against itself; cries out for
freedom and confesses the chain ; decorates with the name
of goddess, crowns anew as the mystical Cotytto, some
woman, real or ideal, in whom the pride of life with its
companion lusts is incarnate. In her lover's half-shut eyes,
her fierce unchaste beauty is transfigured, her cruel sensual
eyes have a meaning and a message ; there are memories and
secrets in the kisses of her lips. She is the darker Venus,
fed with burnt-off'ering and blood-sacrifice ; the veiled image
of that pleasure which men impelled by satiety and perverted
by power have sought through ways as strange as Nero's
before and since his time ; the daughter of lust and death,
and holding of both her parents ; Our Lady of Pain, anta-
gonist alike of trivial sins and virtues : no Virgin, and
unblessed of men ; no mother of the Gods or God ; no Cybele,
served by sexless priests or monks, adored of Origen or of
Atys ; no likeness of her in Dindymus or Loreto.

The next act in this lyrical monodrame of passion repre-
sents a new stage and scene. The worship of desire has
ceased ; the mad commotion of sense has stormed itself out ;

13

the spirit, clear of the old regret that drove it upon such
violent ways for a respite, healed of the fever that wasted
it in the search for relief among fierce fancies and tem-
pestuous pleasures, dreams now of truth discovered and re-
pose attained. Not the martyr's ardour of selfless love, an
unprofitable flame that burnt out and did no service— not
the rapid rage of pleasure that seemed for a little to make
the flesh divine, to clothe the naked senses with the fiery
raiment of faith ; but a stingless love, an innocuous desire.
" Hesperia," the tenderest type of woman or of dream, born
in the westward " islands of the blest," where the shadows
of all happy and holy things live beyond the sunset a sacred
and a sleepless life, dawns upon his eyes a western dawn,
risen as the fiery day of passion goes down, and risen where
it sank. Here, between moonrise and sunset, lives the love
that is gentle and faithful, neither giving too much nor
asking — a bride rather than a mistress, a sister rather than
a bride. But not at once, or not for ever, can the past be
killed and buried; hither also the huntress follows her
flying prey, wounded and weakened, still fresh from the
fangs of passion ; the cruel hands, the amorous eyes, still
glitter and allure. Qui a bu boira : the feet are drawn
back towards the ancient ways. Only by lifelong flight, side
by side with the goddess that redeems, shall her slave of old
escape from the goddess that consumes : if even thus one
may be saved, even thus distance the bloodhounds.

This is the myth or fable of my poem ; and it is not
without design that I have slipped in, between the first and
the second part, the verses called The Garden of Proserpine,
expressive, as I meant they should be, of that brief total pause
of passion and of thought, when the spirit, without fear or
hope of good things or evil, hungers and thirsts only after
the perfect sleep. Now, what there is in all this unfit to be
written — what there is here indecent in manner or repulsive
in matter — I at least do not yet see ; and before I can see

14

it, my eyes must be purged with the euphrasy and rue which
keep clear the purer eyes of professional virtue. The insight
luto evil of chaste and critical pressmen, their sharp scent for
possible or impossible impurities, their delicate ear for a sound
or a whisper of wrong — all this knowledge " is too wonderful
and excellent for me ; I cannot attain unto it/^ In one thing,
indeed, it seems I have erred : I have forgotten to prefix to
my work the timely warning of a great poet and humorist : —

" J'en prdviens les mferes des families,
Ce que j'^cris n'est pas pour les petites filles
Dont on coupe le pain en tartines ; mes vers
Sont des vers de jeune homme."

I have overlooked the evidence which every day makes
clearer, that our time has room only for such as are content
to write for children and girls. But this oversight is the
sum of my ofience.

It would seem indeed as though to publish a book were
equivalent to thrusting it with violence into the hands of
every mother and nurse in the kingdom as fit and necessary
food for female infancy. Happily there is no fear that the
sujDply of milk for babes will fall short of the demand for
some time yet. There are moral milkmen enough, in all
conscience, crying their ware about the streets and by-ways ;
fresh or stale, sour or sweet, the requisite fluid runs from a
sufficiently copious issue. In due time, perhaps, the critical
doctors may prescribe a stronger diet for their hypochondriac
patient, the reading world ; or the gigantic malade hnagi-
naire called the public may rebel against the weekly draught
or the daily drug of MM. Purgon and Diafoirus. We, mean-
while, who profess to deal neither in poison nor in pap, may
not unwillingly stand aside. Let those read who will, and
let those who will abstain from reading. Caveat emptor.
No one wishes to force mcu^s food down the throats of babes
and sucklings. The verses last analysed were assuredly
written with no moral or immoral design ; but the upsliot
seems to me moral rather than immoral, if it must needs be

15

one or the other, and if (which I cannot be sure of) I
construe aright those somewhat misty and changeable
terms.

These poems thus disposed of are (I am tokl) those which
have given most offence and scandal to the venal virtue of
journalism. As I have not to review my reviewers, I need
not be at pains to refute at length every wilful error or un-
conscious lie which a workman that way inclined might drag
into light. To me, as to all others who may read what I
write, the whole matter must continue to seem too pitiable
and trivial to waste a word or thought on it which we can
help wasting. But having begun this task, I will add yet a
word or two of annotation. I have heard that even the little
poem of Faustine has been to some readers a thing to make
the scalp creep and the blood freeze. It was issued with no
such intent. Nor do I remember that any man's voice or
heel was lifted against it when it first appeared, a new-born
and virgin poem, in the Spectator newspaper for 1862.
Virtue, it would seem, has shot up surprisingly in the space
of four years or less — a rank and rapid growth, barren of
blossom and rotten at root. Faustine is the reverie of a'
man gazing on the bitter and vicious loveliness of a face as
common and as cheap as the morality of reviewers, and dream-
ing of past lives in which this fair face may have held a nobler
or fitter station ; the imperial profile may have been Faus-
tina's, the thirsty lips a Msenad's, when first she learnt to
drink blood or wine, to waste the loves and ruin the lives of
men ; through Greece and again through Rome she may have
passed with the same face which now comes before us dis-
honoured and discrowned. Whatever of merit or demerit there
may be in the verses, the idea that gives them such life as
they have is simple enough ; the transmigration of a single
soul, doomed as though by accident from the first to all evil
and no good, through many ages and forms, but clad always
in the same type of fleshly beauty. The chance which sug-

16

gested to me this poem was one whicli may happen any day
to any man — the sudden sight of a living face which re-
called the well-known likeness of another dead for centuries :
in this instance, the noble and faultless type of the elder
Faustina, as seen in coin and bust. Out of that casual glimpse
and sudden recollection these verses sprang and grew.

Of the poem in which I have attempted once more to em-
body the legend of Venus and her knight, I need say only
that my first aim was to rehandle the old story in a new
fashion. To me it seemed that the tragedy began with the
knight's return to Venus — began at the point where hitherto
it had seemed to leave off. The immortal agony of a man
lost after all repentance — cast down from fearful hope into
fearless despair — believing in Christ and bound to Venus —
desirous of penitential pain, and damned to joyless pleasure
— this, in my eyes, was the kernel and nucleus of a myth
comparable only to that of the foolish virgins and bearing
the same burden. The tragic touch of the story is this :
that the knight who has renounced Christ believes in him;
the lover who has embraced Venus disbelieves in her.
Vainly and in despair would he make the best of that which
is the worst — vainly remonstrate with God, and argue on
the side he would fain desert. Once accept or admit the
least admixture of pagan worship, or of modern thought, and
the whole story collapses into froth and smoke. It was not
till my poem was completed that I received from the hands
of its author the admirable pamphlet of Charles Baudelaire
on Wagner^s Tannhauser. If any one desires to see, expressed
in better words than I can command, the conception of the
mediaeval Venus which it was my aim to put into verse, let
him turn to the magnificent passage in which M. Baude-
laire describes the fallen goddess, grown diabolic among ages
that would not accept her as divine. In another point, as I
then found, I concur with the great musician and his great
panegyrist. I have made Venus the one love of her knight's

17

whole life, as Mary Stuart of Cliastelard^s ; I have sent him,
poet and soldier, fresh to her fierce embrace. Thus only
both legend and symbol appear to me noble and significant.
Light loves and harmless errors must not touch the elect of
heaven or of hell. The queen of evil, the lady of lust, will
endure no rival but God ; and when the vicar of God rejects
him, to her only can he return to abide the day of his judg-
ment in weariness and sorrow and fear.

These poems do not seem to me condemnable, unless it be
on the ground of bad verse ; and to any charge of that kind
I should of course be as unable as reluctant to reply. But
I certainly was even less prepared to hear the batteries of
virtue open fire in another quarter. Sculpture I knew was
a dead art ; buried centuries deep out of sight, with no angel
keeping watch over the sepulchre; its very grave-clothes
divided by wrangling and impotent sectaries, and no chance
anywhere visible of a resurrection. I knew that belief in the
body was the secret of sculpture, and that a past age of
ascetics could no more attempt or attain it than the pre-
sent age of hypocrites ; I knew that modern moralities
and recent religions were, if possible, more averse and alien
to this purely physical and pagan art than to the others ;
but how far averse I did not know. There is nothing lovelier,
as there is nothing more famous, in later Hellenic art, than
the statue of Hermapliroditus. No one would compare it
with the greatest works of Greek sculpture. No one would
lift Keats on a level with Shakspeare. But the Fates have
allowed us to possess at once Othello and Hyperion, Theseus
and Hermapliroditus. At Paris, at Florence, at Naples, the
delicate divinity of this work has always drawn towards it
the eyes of artists and poets.* A creature at once foul and

* Witness Shelley's version : —

" A sexless thing it was, and in its growth
It seeuied to liave developed no defect
Of eitiier sex, yet all the grace of both ;
In genlleness and streni;th its limbs were decked

18

(lull enono;!! to extract from a sight so lovely^ from a tting
so noble^ the faintest, the most fleeting idea of impurity,
must be, and must remain, below comprehension and below
remark. It is incredible that the meanest of men should
derive from it any other than the sense of high and grateful
pleasure. Odour and colour and music are not more tender
or more pure. How favourite and frequent a vision among
the Greeks was this of the union of sexes in one body of
perfect beauty, none need be told. In Plato the legend has
fallen into a form coarse, hard, and absurd. The theory of
God splitting in two the double archetype of man and
woman, the original hermaphrodite which had to get itself
bisected into female and male, is repulsive and ridiculous
enough. But the idea thus incarnate, literal or symbolic, is
merely beautiful. I am not the first who has translated into
written verse this sculptured poem : another before me, as
he says, has more than once " caressed it with a sculptor's
love.'' It is, indeed, among statues as a lyric among tragedies;
it stands below the Niobe as Simonides below JEschylus, as
Correggio beneath Titian, The sad and subtle moral of this
myth, which I have desired to indicate in verse, is that
perfection once attained on all sides is a thing thenceforward
barren of use or fruit; whereas the divided beauty of separate
woman and man — a thing inferior and imperfect — can serve
all turns of life. Ideal beauty, like ideal genius, dwells
apart, as though by compulsion ; supremacy is solitude.

The bosom lightly swelled with its full youth,
The countenance was such as might select
Some artist, that his skill should never die,
Imaging forth sucli perfect purity."

Witch of Atlas, st. xxxvi.

But Shelley had not studied purity in the school of reviewers. It is well for
us that we have teachers able to enlighten our darkness, or Heaven knows into
what error such as he, or such as I, might not fall. We might even, in time,
come to think it possible to enjoy the naked beauty of a statue or a picture
without any virtuous vision behind it of a filthy fancy ; which would be im-
moraL

19

But leaving this symbolic side of the matter, I cannot see
why this statue should not be the text for yet another poem.
Treated in the grave and chaste manner as a serious " thing
of beauty/' to be for ever applauded and enjoyed, it can
give no offence but to the purblind and the prurient. For
neither of these classes have I ever written or will I ever
write. " Loathsome and abominable''-' and full of " un-
speakable foulnesses" must be that man's mind who could
here discern evil; unclean and inhuman the animal which
could suck from this mystical rose of ancient loveliness
the foul and rancid juices of an obscene fancy. It were
a scavenger's office to descend with torch or spade into
such depths of mental sewerage, to plunge or peer into sub-
terranean sloughs of mind impossible alike to enlighten or
to cleanse.

I have now gone over the poems which, as I hear, have
incurred most blame ; whether deservedly or not, I have
showji. For the terms in which certain critics have clothed
their sentiments I bear them no ill-will : they are welcome
for me to write unmolested, as long as they keep to simple
ribaldry. I hope it gives them amusement ; I presume it
brings them profit ; I know it does not affect me. Absolute
falsehood may, if it be worth while, draw down contradic-
tion and disproof; but the mere calling of bad names is a
child's trick, for which the small fry of the press should
have a child's correction at the hands of able editors ; stand-
ing as these gentlemen ought to do in a parental or peda-
gogic relation to their tender charges. They have, by all
I see and hear, been sufficiently scurrilous — one or two in
particular.

" However, from one crime they are exempt;
They do not strike a brother, striking me."

I will only throw them one crumb of advice in return ;
I fear the alms will be of no avail, but it shall not be
withheld : —

20

Why grudge them lotus-leaf and laurel,

0 toothless mouth or swinish maw,
Who never grudged you bells and coral.

Who never grudged you troughs and sti'aw 1

Lie still in kennel, sleek in stable,

Good creatures of the stall or sty ;
Shove snouts for crumbs below the table ;

Lie still ; and rise not up to lie.

To all this^ however; there is a grave side. The question
at issue is wider than any between a single writer and his
critics^ or it might well be allowed to drop. It is this :
whether or not the first and last requisite of art is to give
no offence ; whether or not all that cannot be lisped in the
nursery or fingered in the schoolroom is therefore to be
cast out of the library ; whether or not the domestic circle
is to be for all men aud writers the outer limit and extreme
horizon of their world of work. For to this we have come ;
and all students of art must face the matter as it stands.
Who has not heard it asked, in a final and triumphant tone,
whether this book or that can be read aloud by her mother
to a young girl ? whether such aud such a picture can pro-
perly be exposed to the eyes of young persons ? If you
reply that this is nothing to the point, you fall at once into
the ranks of the immoral. Never till now, and nowhere
but in England, could so monstrous an absurdity rear for
one moment its deformed aud eyeless head. In no past
century were artists ever bidden to work on these terms ;
nor are they now, except among us. The disease, of course,
afflicts the meanest members of the body with most viru-
lence. Nowhere is cant at once so foul-mouthed and so
tight-laced as in the penny, twopenny, threepenny, or six-
penny press. Nothing is so favourable to the undergrowth
of real indecency as this overshadowing foliage of fictions,
this artificial network of proprieties. L'Aiioste rit au soleil,
VAreiin ricane a I'ombre. The whiter the sepulchre without,
the ranker the rottenness within. Every touch of plaster

21

is a sign of advancing decay. The virtue of onr critical
journals is a dowager of somewhat dubious antecedents :
every day that thins and shrivels her cheek thickens and
hardens the paint on it ; she consumes more chalk and
ceruse than would serve a whole courtful of crones. " It is
to be presumed/' certainly, that in her case " all is not
sweet, all is not sound.^' The taint on her fly-blown repu-
tation is hard to overcome by patches and perfumery. Litera-
turCj to be worthy of men, must be large, liberal, sincere;
and cannot be chaste if it be prudish. Purity and prudery
cannot keep house together. Where free speech and fair
play are interdicted, foul hints and evil suggestions are
hatched into fetid life. And if literature indeed is not to
deal with the full life of man and the whole nature of
things, let it be cast aside with the rods and rattles of child-
hood. Whether it affect to teach or to amuse, it is equally
trivial and contemptible to us ; only less so than the charge
of immorality. Against how few really great names has not
this small and dirt-encrusted pebble been thrown ! A repu-
tation seems imperfect without this tribute also : one jewel
is wanting to the crown. It is good to be praised by those
whom all men should praise ; it is better to be reviled by
those whom all men should scorn.

Various chances and causes must have combined to pro-
duce a state of faith or feeling which would turn all art and
literature " into the line of children.^' One among others
may be this : where the heaven of invention holds many
stars at once, there is no fear that the highest and largest
will either efface or draw aside into its orbit all lesser lights.
Each of these takes its own way and sheds its proper lustre.
But where one alone is dominant in heaven, it is encircled
by a pale procession of satellite moons, filled with shallow
and stolen radiance. Thus, with English versifiers now, the
idyllic form is alone in fashion. The one great and pros-
perous poet of the time has given out the tune, and the

22

hoarser choir takes it up. His highest lyrical work remains
unimitated, being in the main inimitable. But the trick of
tone which suits an idyl is easier to assume ; and the note
has been struck so often that the shrillest songsters can
affect to catch it up. We have idyls good and bad^ ugly and
pretty ; idyls of the farm and the mill ; idyls of the dining-
room and the deanery ; idyls of the gutter and the gibbet.
If the Muse of the minute will not feast with " gig-men'*
and their wives, she must mourn with costermongers and
their trulls. I fear the more ancient Muses are guests at
neither house of mourning nor house of feasting.

For myself, I begrudge no man his taste or his success; I
can enjoy and applaud all good work, and would always,
when possible, have the workman paid in full. There is
much excellent and some admirable verse among the poems
of the day : to none has it given more pleasure than to me,
and from none, had I been a man of letters to whom
the ways were open, would it have won heartier applause. I
have never been able to see what should attract men to the
profession of criticism but the noble pleasure of praising.
But I have no right to claim a place in the silver flock of
idyllic swans." I have never worked for praise or pay, but
simply by impulse, and to please myself j- I must therefore,
it is to be feared, remain where I am, shut out from the
communion of these. At all events, I shall not be hounded
into emulation of other men's work by the baying of un-
leashed beagles. There are those with whom I do not wish
to share the praise of their praisers. I am content to abide
a far different judgment : —

" I write as others wrote
On Sunium's height."

I need not be over-careful to justify my ways in other
men's eyes ; it is enough for me that they also work after
their kind, and earn the suffrage, as they labour after the

23

law, of their own people. The idyllic form is best for do-
mestic and pastoral poetry. It is naturally on a lower level
than that of tragic or lyric verse. Its gentle and maidenly
lips are somewhat narrow for the stream and somewhat cold
for the fire of song. It is very fit for the sole diet of girls ;
not very fit for the sole sustenance of men.

When England has again such a school of poetry, so headed
and so followed, as she has had at least twice before, or as
Erance has now ; when all higher forms of the various art
are included within the larger limits of a stronger race ; then,
if such a day should ever rise or return upon us, it will be
once more remembered that the office of adult art is neither
puerile nor feminine, but virile ; that its purity is not that
of the cloister or the harem ; that all things are good in its
sight, out of which good work may be produced. Then
the press will be as impotent as the pulpit to dictate the laws
and remove the landmarks of art ; and those will be laughed
at who demand from one thing the qualities of another —
who seek for sermons in sonnets and morality in music.
Then all accepted work will be noble and chaste in the wider
masculine sense, not truncated and curtailed, but outspoken
and full-grown ; art will be pure by instinct and fruitful by
nature, no clipped and forced growth of unhealthy heat and
unnatural air ; all baseness and all triviality will fall ofiF from
it, and be forgotten ; and no one will then need to assert, in
defence of work done for tlie work's sake, the simple laws of
his art which no one will then be permitted to impugn.

A. C. SWINBURNE.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
BERKELEY

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