Another is the ordinary device of contrast and antithesis only run to the extreme of mere prettiness and affectation, as— Those eyes the greenest of things blue, 'Exceeding pleasure out of extreme pain.' And barren water and many-childed earth.' But in the mere matter of rhymes in which, with a little care, no practised writer of verse ought to go wrong, and is inexcusable if he does, Mr. Swinburne is slovenly beyond example, at least among recent poets. The following poor tinkles, assonances, and false rhymes are all taken from a single poem in the Poems and Ballads,' the third, entitled 'Laus Veneris:' deem, dream-death, eat-feet, it-thereof, clove-blows, bows-them, flame-black, back-thereof, love -sweet, it-enough, love-sea, she-mouth, doth-fruit, foot. If the volume as a whole were taken, these examples might of course be multiplied tenfold. Even the versification, which is Mr. Swinburne's strong point, is, from sheer carelessness, not unfrequently culpably harsh, and sometimes defective as well. These constant failures in minor points, over which Mr. Swinburne has proved his mastery, seem to show that the neglect of the higher requirements of his art injuriously affects his power of execution even in the lower and more mechanical details of verbal accuracy and metrical finish. And however this may be, they illustrate afresh the writer's radically defective sense of what constitutes high poetic excellence, and his utter want of the ethical firmness and artistic selfcontrol essential to its attainment. The analysis we have given of Mr. Swinburne's work enables us to fix with some precision his place amongst contemporary writers. He is the poet of what is known as the sensational school of literature. This school has long had its novelists and playwrights, its critics and journalists, and it now has its poet. All the points we have noticed as distinctive in Mr. Swinburne's writings identify him with the principles and peculiarities of the school. He agrees with the sensationalist in the fundamental point which gives the school its name-in appealing not to the intellect and the moral reason, not to the imagination and the affections, but to the senses and the appetites. The sensational writer, whether novelist or poet, deals with bodily instead of mental pleasures and pains, and hence the appropriateness of the title; sensations as distinguished from thoughts and emotions representing that class of our experiences which depend on physical rather than on moral or intellectual causes. Of these experiences the painful are the more memorable and impressive. And as the object of the sensational writer is to produce the strongest effect, he naturally tends not only towards the physical, but towards what is extreme, revolting, and even horrible in our physical experience. Hence the accumulation of violent outrages and unnatural crimes that crowd the pages of the more characteristic novels of this class, and hence, too, the marked prominence which sensual pains as well as pleasures have in Mr. Swinburne's poetry. In this feature of their work Mr. Swinburne and his friends are, however, opposed to the higher conceptions as well as to all the best schools of art. Hellenic art, for example, reflecting the genius of a highly cultivated people, shrunk, in the main, with instinctive aversion from the detailed exhibition of mere bodily suffering. The Greek artist felt intuitively that mere physical anguish is in itself revolting and ignoble, and that it can therefore be only sparingly employed in art as a condition for the development of higher qualities. Bodily pain accordingly holds a very subordinate place in the best Greek art, whether plastic or poetical, and is exhibited not so much in itself as in its moral results on those who suffer, and on those who behold the spectacle of suffering. It brings out, on the one hand, the virtues of fortitude and self-sacrifice -of heroic endurance and absorbing devotion to some noble object of friendship, piety, or patriotism; and on the other, the humanising and elevating qualities of admiration, sympathy, and love. Hence the dictum of the great critic, that tragedy, which is the concentrated and ideal delineation of human suffering, purifies the soul by touching its deeper springs of love and sympathy, of pity and terror. Even in the Laocoön, which, as Lessing points out, is perhaps the extremest representation of physical suffering to be found in Greek plastic art, the victim's greatness of soul visibly triumphs over the supreme anguish of the hour. Modern art, in all its greatest periods, has not only faithfully observed the same vital law, but carried it still further. It is indeed mainly distinguished from Greek art by its more varied and absolute use of bodily suffering as an instrument for the development of moral and spiritual quali ties. It is true that in all periods of art, both ancient and modern, there have been some who, in violation of its higher requirements, have given an extreme and exaggerated prominence to the physical details of human suffering. But it was reserved for the modern sensational school to reverse the great and pervading law which holds alike in nature and in art-to make, that is, bodily suffering an end to itself, instead of employing it as a means for the attainment of higher and nobler ends. The writers of this school appear to delight in extreme physical experiences-ecstasies and horrors-for their own sake, or rather for the sake of the morbid appetite they create and help for the moment to gratify. One of the worst but most inevitable results of this sensational literature is, indeed, to be found in the diseased appetite for artificial mental stimulants it produces, and which takes away the relish for wholesome and nourishing literary food. All coarse and violent stimulants deaden the finer sensibilities on which they act, and thus not only destroy the natural capacity for enjoyment of a more refined and satisfying kind, but produce a restless and intensely selfish craving for the coarser stimulant. Hence the for sensational novels and sensational literature, and hence too, we fear, the appearance of a sensational poet. rage In all the main features of his poetry Mr. Swinburne is faithful to the school. As a natural result of his poetical temperament, he may be said, indeed, to represent its special characteristics in a more intense and concentrated form than even the most eminent of its prose writers. In many of his more audacious pieces, indeed, Mr. Swinburne fairly outHerods Herod. Much of his poetry is sensationalism run mad, foaming at the mouth, snapping rabidly at everything in its way, especially at the sanctities and sanities of life, avoiding all natural food, and seizing with morbid avidity on what is loathsome and repulsive, mere orts and offal. But there is still a method in the madness, with all its apparent blindness and fury. Sensationalism, at least in its extremest developments, rests on a speculative basis. It has a philosophy of its own. It springs from the assumption that the senses and their impulses are our highest sources of light and guidance, that reason and conscience are of no authority, that the moral and rational principles they supply-the highest regulative elements of our nature-may not only be disregarded with impunity, but are to be denounced as delusions, and rejected as mere hindrances to the life of nature. On such a theory reason is, of course, subordinated to sense, will to desire, while appetite and impulse are enthroned as lords of all. In this point of view, as an exposition of what may be called the theory or creed of the extreme sensationalist school, Mr. Swinburne's last volume, Songs before Sunrise,' is of special interest. Here the writer evidently attempts to meet the objection urged against his poetry even by his best friends, that it embodies no great vital conceptions, has no animating and fructifying spirit, no inspiring impulse of faith, or hope, or effort, that in its moral aspects it is utterly dark, cold, and repulsive, with a background of cheerless impenetrable gloom; in a word, that it recognises no moral element in life or action, no real or ultimate ground for any belief in duty, liberty, or virtue. It will be clear from what we have already said that this complaint is perfectly just, but that it should be made at all, only shows how imperfectly Mr. Swinburne's admirers comprehend the real drift of his poetry, and the kind of philosophy it embodies. Mr. Swinburne's latest volume is, however, in part a kind of reply to this complaint; and it offers an exposition of what may be called the speculative groundwork, or creed of his poetry. This creed, when carefully examined, is found to consist of two points or articles, the first being the ultimate authority of appetite and impulse, and the second the deification of humanity. But these two points may obviously be resolved into one, the deification of appetite and impulse. The practical recognition of this doctrine is called by Mr. Swinburne liberty, freedom, and he expresses his admiration of it, after his fashion, in a dazzling coruscation of verbal and metrical effects. After all, the conception thus glorified is a negative not a positive one, and ought to be called license, lawlessness, not liberty. Such as it is, however, he lauds and magnifies it in shrill-toned hymns and hallelujahs of the most surprising kind. The poetical utterance of his creed contained in the volume may indeed be described, as Mr. Disraeli once described a speech delivered by Mr. Bernal Osborne when newly emancipated from the trammels of office, as 'a wild shriek of freedom.' In the same way Mr. Swinburne, having cut himself adrift from all moorings, driven off the pilots with strong language, and thrown the helm and compass and chart overboard, pipes his shrillest to the storm gathering on the horizon, and abandons himself with intoxicated delight to the fury of the coming tempest. At last he is free, clear of all established havens and moorings, emancipated from the degrading thraldom of rudder and chart, lodestar and needle, his frail barque left to welter as a waif, in obedience to the natural laws of wave and storm, on the seething hissing bosom of the angry sea. That exactly represents Mr. Swinburne's idea of freedom and independence. Rejecting all the means which intelligence and foresight provide for controlling the elements or escaping their fury, he blindly abandons himself to their power, or as in such circumstances we justly say, 'to 'his fate.' That is precisely the case. Extremes meet, and Mr. Swinburne's so-called freedom is absolute fate. His conception of freedom is, as we have said, wholly negative, and as such it is necessarily delusive and false. True liberty has its root in law, in the higher principles of our nature, is indeed the moral reflex of the responsibility thence arising. If we had no higher light, no authoritative moral perceptions superior to sense, we should have no claim to freedom, and could make no use of it. The right to the enjoyment of liberty is founded on the duty of every man to improve his powers to the utmost, to attain the highest possible degree of moral and spiritual perfection. The true conception of freedom is thus that of means to an end, the end being progress in virtue and knowledge, truth and goodness. Mr. Swinburne, however, cuts away the living root, and utterly destroys the rational basis of freedom. With him it simply means the abolition of all existing restraints, in the last resort the overthrow of all law and order, of all existing moral rules and established government. It is thus a purely anarchical and destructive. principle, which would soon make wild work of human life and human society. Enlightened reason and conscience are the highest human sources of guidance for the individual. The principles we reach under the guidance of these powers are often, it is true, narrow and mistaken. But the gradual correction of these defects constitutes, with good and wise men, the very discipline of life. They strive to enlarge and purify their knowledge, and make their principles of judgment and action more enlightened, liberal, and true. But because they do not at once illuminate everything, Mr. Swinburne would extinguish these supreme guiding lights in the pathway of life. The impulses of appetite and desire, if blind are at least definite, and with the heat and impatience of a weak and passionate nature, he virtually says, 'Let us follow 'these impulses as supreme.' Again, positive institutions, political and religious, are the reflex in society of reason and conscience in the individual. These institutions partake no doubt of human imperfection, and are often grievously defective. But the great aim of enlightened patriotism and true statesmanship is to improve them, and make them more and more fitted to secure their great end, the welfare of society. But Mr. Swinburne and his friends seek to destroy them altogether, and substitute in their place the aggregate of ungoverned impulse and passion known as the Red Republic. Not the nobly organised Commonwealth, the vision of which kindled Milton's disciplined imagination, and roused all the VOL. CXXXIV. NO. CCLXXIII. II |