Even then there might be a monotony of mere suffering that would render the subject essentially unfit for dramatic purposes. But however this may be, it is certain that a monotony of mere sensual indulgence has no dramatic element, that weak natures enamoured of mere externals supply no materials of higher tragic interest. It is for ever impossible to construct a tragedy out of the mere paddling of hot palms and brutal interchange of lascivious bites and bruises.

The same principle of art applies to Mr. Swinburne's lyrics. The more celebrated of these, and especially the longer ones in Poems and Ballads,' are occupied with the same subjects as the tragedies, and come, in a still more sweeping manner, under the same critical condemnation. The keynote of the whole is struck in the first poem of the volume, where Lust is represented as saying, 'I am Love.' The general character of these pieces is, however, so well known, and they have been visited with such just and unanimous critical censure, that it is happily needless to illustrate this point in extended detail. It is enough to say that throughout these poems virtue is represented as contemptible, while vice is raised to the highest pinnacle of honour. Sensual enjoyment is depicted as the crown of life, the only worthy object of hope, ambition, and desire, of strenuous effort and continuous pursuit. Often, too, the enjoyment thus glorified is not only sensual but of a momentary and grossly animal kind. The whole universe is ideally impoverished to aggrandise the value of such enjoyment. All its highest symbols of grace and favour, worth and dignity, power and achievement, permanence, grandeur, and renown, are accumulated only to be rejected with triumphant scorn, for the sake of a temporary sensual indulgence. Reason, conscience, and religion, justice and temperance, purity and truth, the most sacred relationships, the very bonds of society, name and fame, life and death, time and eternity, heaven and hell, are as the dust of the balance in comparison with burning tresses, blinding eyes, curled eyelids, bruising intertwisted lips, insatiate mouth, hard sweet kisses, fleece-white shoulders, flower-soft fingers, fierce lithe hands, winding arms, bright bosoms strained and bare, straight soft flanks, slender feet, quivering blood, fierce midnights, and famishing to-morrows. These subjects represent in Mr. Swinburne's pages the very carnival of criminal riot and delirious confusion. Faithful to the compact with his evil genius, he seems to have read backwards the first principles of noble and honourable living, the highest truths of enlightened experience, the profoundest maxims of the wise and good in every age, as well as the supreme

moral precepts of Holy Writ. What shall it profit a man,' he virtually says, if he gain the whole world and lose a momentary sensual enjoyment; or what shall a man give in exchange for such an enjoyment?' The answer to this question in Mr. Swinburne's poems is explicit enough. Thus in one of the earliest poems of the volume, a Christian knight who had broken his vows and renounced his faith through the allurements of a wanton, goes to Rome in a fit of penitence for absolution, but on his return having again relapsed, he says:

'And I forgot fear and all weary things,
All ended prayers and perished thanksgivings,
Feeling her face with all her eager hair
Cleave to me, clinging as a fire that clings
To the body and to the raiment, burning them;
As after death I know that such-like flame

Shall cleave to me for ever; yea, what care,
Albeit I burn then, having felt the same?
'Ah, love! there is no better life than this;
To have known love, how bitter a thing it is,

And afterward be cast out of God's sight! In the same way, Chastelard, in the immediate prospect of death, gives utterance to a like sentiment:—

'Now, if God would,

Doubtless He might take pity on my soul

To give me three clear hours, and then red hell
Snare me for ever: this were merciful:

If I were God now I should do thus much.

I must die next, and this were not so hard
For Him to let me eat sweet fruit, and die
With my lips sweet from it.'

Rosamond, in a passage already quoted, gives utterance to the same sentiment, and it reappears again and again in the • Poems and Ballads.' Perhaps, however, the most extreme illustration the volume affords of this deliberate bartering of Heaven for a momentary pleasure of a horrible kind is to be found in the intensely revolting piece entitled Les Noyades.' The story well exemplifies Mr. Swinburne's instinct for a morally repulsive subject. It is derived from the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated during the early years of the French Revolution by the infamous Carrier when he acted as agent for the Convention in the provinces. Before this wretch sitting in mockery on the tribunal of justice

The boor had long indulged a hopeless passion for the lady who regarded him with disgust and horror. They were condemned to be stripped, bound together and thrown into the sea. On this judgment being pronounced, we have from the lips of the ruffian half a dozen verses of blasphemy, thanksgiving, and prayer, of which the following may serve as a specimen :

เ

"Lord, if I loved thee-Lord, if I served—

If these who darkened thy fair Son's face

I fought with, sparing not one, nor swerved
A hand's breadth, Lord, in the perilous place-
pray thee, say to this man, O Lord,

Sit thou for him at my feet on a throne.

I will face thy wrath, though it bite as a sword,
And my soul shall burn for his soul, and atone.

"For Lord, thou knowest, O God most wise!

How gracious on earth were his deeds toward me;
Shall this be a small thing in thine eyes,

That is greater in mine than the whole great sea ? " ' He then turns to the lady, and after describing what is to happen, concludes with this verse :—

6.46 But you would have felt my soul in a kiss,
And known that once if I loved you well;
And I would have given my soul for this,
To burn for ever in burning hell.”'

Here we have one nominally fighting for Christianity, willing to barter his soul for momentary contact of a forced and penal kind with the person of a lady that abhors him, and exulting in the prospect. This is the kind of nameless abomination which Mr. Swinburne delights to glorify, and the glorification of which some of his admirers have, we believe, eulogised as a triumph of pure taste and refined feeling. All we have to say on the matter is that this and many other lyrics and ballads in the volume are smitten through and through with a deadly moral leprosy that would justly make any poetry, however beautiful in form, an object of loathing and disgust.

The next point to be specially considered is Mr. Swinburne's method of dealing with the subjects he selects as those best fitted for the higher purposes of his art. This has been already incidentally touched upon in noticing the tragedies, their slight texture and thin substance making it almost impossible to separate the matter from the manner. But it is necessary to dwell a little on Mr. Swinburne's mode of treatment in order to bring out more fully his radically false conception of

art, as well as to explain his complete failure in the higher walks of poetry he has attempted. There is, however, it need scarcely be said, an intimate connexion between matter and manner. The subjects chosen by Mr. Swinburne being essentially unpoetical, amorphous, indeed, do not admit of much in the way of definite outline or firm handling, of consistent development or constructive unity. With such subjects laxity of arti culation, looseness of execution, are almost inevitable results. From a necessity of nature the poems must, in fact, be æsthetically as well as morally dissolute. We find accordingly that his poetical method is as impure as the subjects chosen are coarse and ideally chaotic. If such a thing were possible, his style of treatment is still more illegitimate on artistic than on ethical grounds. We have already illustrated this in relation to the tragedies. But the lyric has also laws and principles of its own, which must be observed if the work is to be good of its kind. It must have, for example, an internal unity if not of thought, or action, or scene, at least of spirit and feeling, and this vital unity must be reflected in an answering perfection of form. But Mr. Swinburne's longer and more important lyrics have no vital centre, no internal unity, and as a natural result no articulation at all. They are, as we have said, molluscous, spongy, sprawling, sucking in with tentacular convulsions whatever chance throws in their way, and expanding in mere bulk of shapeless structure by the process. The true and perfect lyric springs from an internal principle of life into the exquisite proportions and completeness of a finely organised and beautiful whole. But in most of Mr. Swinburne's longer lyrics such as The Triumph of Life,' Dolores,' and 'Félice,' the verses seem to follow each other by a kind of mechanical multiplication of similar parts, the result being a heap or aggregation rather than a growth or structure. Almost the only form they possess is that imposed externally by the metrical conditions of the verse, each stanza being thus indifferently either a whole or a part. When the aggregate is examined it is found to consist in the endless multiplication of the same features, the repetition of the same images and allusions, the recurrence of the same monotonous effects. And the elements thus repeated are precisely of the kind that soonest pall upon the taste, and become not only wearisome but offensive. These lyrics are in fact a perpetual harping on one or two strings of the coarsest fibre, a mill-horse round of violent pains and pleasures, sensual ecstasies and exhaustions, with the favourite terms of blood and foam and fire, of tooth and fang and claw, in which they are expressed. It is impossible to

open the book and read many lines without meeting with harsh and exaggerated descriptions of some of the physical 'points' over which a polluted imagination gloats, or of the carnal delights in which it revels. But the first shock of surprise at such details is soon exchanged for disgust at the coarseness of feeling and sterility of imagination shown in the endless iteration of the same forced but feeble phrases, strained metaphors, and trivial fancies. The writer has pet descriptions and pet similes for almost every feature and motion of the frame-the hair, the eyes, the eyelids, the mouth, the lips, the throat, the breastand these are repeated over and over again, in most of the longer poems. The hair burns, is shed out like flame, or clings with serpentine curl; the eyelids are bruised and folded leaves or deep double shells; the eyes fervent, fierce, insatiable, blinding flames; the mouth and lips a cup or chalice filled with fire and wine, honey and poison; the breasts buds, blossoms, flowers, bruised and stained with the purple of a kiss. But the most numerous allusions and images, applied at times to all the features, to all parts of the body indeed, are those of fire and foam, serpents and flowers. We will give from a single lyric an illustration of these as applied to a single feature-the mouth and lips. The writer has hit on the not very happy resemblance of curling lips to snakes, and snakes naturally suggest fangs and foam and poison, and having got hold of this really poor and hateful fancy, he is of course incontinent in the use of it. The following verses will illustrate this, and they are all taken as we have said, not only from a single lyric but from its earliest stanzas:-

'Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel,

Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;
The heavy white limbs, and the cruel
Red mouth like a venomous flower.'

'O lips full of lust and of laughter,

Curled snakes that are fed from my breast,

Bite hard, lest remembrance come after

And press with new lips where you pressed.'

'Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?
Men touch them and change in a trice

The lilies and languors of virtue

For the raptures and roses of vice.'

'Ah, beautiful passionate body

That never had ached with a heart!

On thy mouth though the kisses are bloody,
Though they sting till it shudder and smart.'