'As our kisses relax and redouble

From the lips and the foam and the fangs,
Shall no new sin be born for men's trouble,
No dream of impossible pangs?'

'By the ravenous teeth that have smitten
Through the kisses that blossom and bud,
By the lips intertwisted and bitten

Till the foam has a savour of blood.'

'All thine the new wine of desire,

The fruit of four lips as they clung
Till the hair and the eyelids took fire,
The foam of a serpentine tongue,
The froth of the serpents of pleasure,

More salt than the foam of the sea,
Now felt as a flame, now at leisure
As wine shed for me.'

These verses all occur in the first eighteen stanzas of a lyric that consists of fifty-four; and this is a fair specimen of the harsh, repulsive, and unimaginative repetitions of which the whole volume is largely made up. The same phrases, the same images, the same allusions, occur, as we have said, over and over again in the same poem-not unfrequently in the same page. We confidently ask whether anyone with the least knowledge of poetry, or the least feeling for art, will venture to say that execution of this sort is artistic, is worthy of a great poet, or in fact of any poet great or small? In the first place, were the details ever so good and appropriate in themselves, the mere multiplication and repetition of them is a fatal flaw in point of art. We have already said that the great law with regard to execution is carefully to observe the mingled pregnancy and reserve of expression, and of course of expressive details also, on which unity of effect depends. This prescribes that the details selected should be significant but few, and rendered in the simplest and most vivid manner. Multiplication of needless details tends directly to defeat the poet's main purpose, which must be to convey a distinct impression to the reader's mind either of a scene, an action, or a feeling, or possibly of all together. Now the crowding of illdiscriminated, if not incompatible details prevents the realisation of this result. On the one hand, we do not see the object the writer attempts to depict by an accumulation of descriptive bits, the exaggerated prominence and intrusive repetition of the parts being fatal to a clear perception of the whole. When we attempt to realise it in imagination the picture is a blur of confused limbs and features, instead of a distinct object. On

the other hand, the accumulation and repetition of such descriptive details is equally fatal to anything like unity of moral or emotional effect. The time taken up in going over fragmentary descriptions, not controlled by any central conception, distracts the reader's attention and dissipates his interest, even when the piece as a whole may be animated by a common sentiment, which is rarely the case. If the aim is to convey the writer's own feeling, or the feeling he wishes dramatically to express, it equally fails, for the repetition of what he regards as stimulating features and images soon becomes as wearisome as an inventory or a catalogue. This helps to explain how it is that these longer poems, though possessing striking passages and melodious lines, are still so utterly uninteresting and even unintelligible. This characteristic of his writing has, we believe, been complained of by some of Mr. Swinburne's greatest admirers, and he has himself so far recognised the truth of the complaint as to have furnished a prose key to three or four of the longer pieces. The explanation, it is true, reads very like an after-thought, and even with its help it is impossible to find the meaning assigned to them in the poems themselves. But the fact that the author has felt the necessity of explaining his most important lyrical poems is an instructive commentary on the confusion and obscurity of his conceptions, as well as on the careless and slovenly character of his work as an artist.

But, in the second place, the descriptive details in these pieces, so far from being in themselves appropriate or poetical, are of the coarsest, most inartistic, and unimaginative kind. With regard to the particulars to be employed in elaborating a work of art, the law of reserve applies, and this law is determined by the nature and end of poetry. It prescribes that the details selected and employed by the poet should be of a nature to interest and stimulate the imagination and the higher emotions, from which the art springs and to which it appeals. The more violent bodily pains and pleasures that terminate in the senses, and exhaust themselves, as it were, in the act, are thus least of all fitted for poetical or artistic use. A shriek or a swoon is so purely physical as to exclude for the moment the ideal element altogether; and the extremes of bodily suffering and bodily delight which confound themselves and in their triumph die,' are therefore to be used in art with the utmost reserve. much of Mr. Swinburne's poetry is all shrieks and swoons together. It is, as we have seen, largely made up of fierce physical extremes, raptures and languors, sobs and shouts, convulsive laughter and hysterical tears. His pages are full of stinging nerves, burning veins, and thundering pulses; of

But

physical influences and sensuous agitations that dazzle and blind, deafen and stun, torture and stupefy. No mistake could possibly be greater in point of art. Poetry must be poetical in substance as well as in form, and the crowding of these extreme physical effects into metrical lines has about the same relation to true poetry that the puffs and screams of a railway whistle have to music, or the spurts and splotches of crimson and purple on a mutilated mendicant's scroll to painting. In such a procedure the primary conditions of effective and expressive art are altogether violated, and the result is not, properly speaking, a work of fine art at all. It has no perspective or proportion, no gradations of light and shadow, no softer tints or reserved tones of colour, no background, no relief, no repose. It is a uniform glare of blinding light and dazzling colours. The main end of art is equally defeated by such crude and untempered work. The appeal is really made not primarily to the imagination at all, but to the senses, the result being not the production of ideal pleasures or of any purely mental effect, but a physical commotion in the frame-a flutter of the blood'results which the railway scream and the mendicant's daub are equally fitted and intended to produce. The three forms of art employ, indeed, the same means and produce, so far as they succeed, the same effects. The choice of such means and ends, on the part of a poet, indicates, however, not only native poverty of thought and engrained coarseness of feeling, but radically false and perverted views of art. Poetry is degraded into the mere slave and drudge of our lowest sensual appetites and desires, instead of occupying its true position as the minister and interpreter of the higher powers, activities, and capabilities of our nature. This interpretation when faithful always has an invigorating, elevating, purifying effect. Genuine passion of a noble kind is necessarily expansive and illuminating. It enlarges the intellectual vision and quickens the powers of insight, while at the same time it enrichens, deepens, and refines the current of our mental being. Great works of art, and especially great poetical delineations that awaken and stimulate such emotions, have the same effect. The poetical delineation of any great passion has indeed, as Aristotle points out, a purifying effect by rousing, through the imagination, the unselfish emotions. But of this higher influence of genuine passion and true poetry hardly a trace is to be found in Mr. Swin burne's writings. Love, for example, the great transformer, whose purifying fires purge away the dross from the mind, and kindle it by the contemplation of loftier ideals to the steadfast admiration and pursuit of the noblest ends in thought and life,

is represented, throughout Mr. Swinburne's poetry, as some

thing that blights, poisons, and destroys. In his pages it

bites and foams and stings, blinds and maddens and satiates, stifles and strangles, crushes and chars; but it never raises or refines, redeems or saves. In the same way the influence of beauty, or the perfect in nature, is uniformly confounded with blind and passionate desire. It is described as fierce, bitter, fervent, intolerable, insatiable, unassuaged, as sharp, hot, salt, brackish, hungry, wasting, destroying.

Not satisfied, however, with selecting the materials of his poetry amongst what is lowest, most perverted, and extreme in nature, Mr. Swinburne resorts to the pigments, cosmetics, and stimulants of art, in order to heighten its meretricious effect. He says, indeed, in the prose apology we have already quoted, that poetry should be no forced growth of unhealthy heat and unnatural air. But no heat could be more unhealthy, no air more unnatural, than that which pervades his own. poems. We have in them, instead of the freshness and grace of natural feeling, the jaded spasms of outworn desire and artificially stimulated appetite. Instead of the breezy purity, of the open air and sky, of the wind and the meadow and the wave, we have a curtained atmosphere heavy with oppressive scents, and thick with drowsy or stimulating fumes, steaming incense, fragrant oils, bruised seeds and gums, smelling of all 'the sunburnt south:'

'Strange spice and flower, strange savour of crushed fruit,
And perfume the swart kings tread underfoot,

For pleasure when their minds wax amorous,

Charred frankincense and grated sandal-root.'

It is the atmosphere not of nature or of health, not of natural and healthful activity and enjoyment at all, but of luxurious abandonment and corrupted passion. These external appliances may no doubt help to stimulate the languid pulse, soothe the throbbing nerve, or rouse afresh the partially paralysed sense, and Mr. Swinburne seizes with instinctive avidity on all devices for heightening the momentary effect and prolonging the intensity of the sensual gratification he depicts. But such pandering is at best fit only for the waste pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhym'ing parasite.' It is no office for the children of Apollo, and the poet who stoops to it ought first of all to rend his singingrobes asunder, and cast his garland in the dust.

The same central characteristic, the indiscriminate use of the least-refined expedients for producing a strong but essentially

temporary impression, is found even in Mr. Swinburne's style and versification. His style is full of verbal tricks, surprises, mannerisms, and conceits. Alliteration is the commonest, and perhaps to a cultivated taste the least tolerable, of these tricks, but Mr. Swinburne seems incurably addicted to it. The vice is indeed so flagrant and abounding in his work that his longer odes and lyrics may be described as thickets or jungles of alliteration, in which it is almost impossible to advance a step without being arrested and disturbed by their intrusion. But Mr. Swinburne has other mannerisms and tricks of style so numerous as almost to require a paper to themselves. A very few illustrations must however suffice. One common trick is that of employing contradictory terms and epithets, as in the following examples:

'Me satiated with things insatiable.'

'Deathless shall be the death, the name be nameless.'
'Pitiless pity of days degenerate.'

'The fruitless fruitage of despair.'

'Time in its timeless tide.'

'Deathless though death overtake her;

Faithful though faith should forsake her.'

Another, still more common perhaps, is that of counterplacing nouns and verbs in the same line or couplet. The following examples illustrate this, and at the same time the writer's fondness for playing with, and repeating, favourite phrases:

'A strong desire begot on great despair;

A great despair cast out by strong desire.'
'O sole desire of my delight;

O sole delight of my desire.'

'The delight that consumes the desire;

The desire that outruns the delight.'

'Labouring he dreams, and labours in the dream.'
'By short sweet kisses, and by sweet long loves.'
'The face is full of prayers and pains,

To which they bring their pains and prayers.'

Another trick is that of exchanging the objects and activities of the senses, as in the following:

'The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine.'

'Visible sound, light audible'