| | | | | Weary of triumphs in the realms of poetry, Mr. Swinburne | has stooped to gather fresh laurels on the flats of prose. The | “Critical Essay” on William Blake is, we are bound to won, | a complete success from its own point of view; we can | remember no prose work of our own day so perfectly | Swinburnian in its cynical effrontery. To reach such an end | Mr. Swinburne has been content to reveal to the world, | what otherwise | | the world might never have known, his frivolous incapacity | as a critic either of poetry or of art; his inability to think | consecutively for five minutes together; his powerlessness | to express even his gleams of momentary intelligence in | intelligible speech. Of the long reaches of glittering rant | which supply the place of critical statement, of the bursts of | pretentious bombast which pass for fine writing in this | wonderful essay, we may perhaps be able to give our | readers some faint notion ere we close. What we despair of | conveying to their minds is its inexpressible tediousness. | Whatever grudge Mr. Swinburne may have cherished | against those unfortunate persons whose labours in | expounding his merits to the public he rewards by the novel | and ingenious title of

"Philistines,"

he has | contrived in this work to wreak a subtle revenge. Free as | the rest of the world may be to toss them, after a moment's | perusal, to the butter-shop, Mr. Swinburne must have felt a | secret satisfaction, as he penned these three hundred pages, | in the thought that his reviewers would at least be bound to | read him. That any being should do so from inclination is | simply incredible, and we are forced to won that the | sternest sense of critical duty has failed to save us from | occasional lapses into oblivion as we waded through this | quagmire of words. | | says Charles Baudelaire in | the passage which its author has prefixed to this essay. Was | it from some doubt of his claims to poetic greatness that | Mr. Swinburne has determined to five this critical and | indirect proof of them? The critic, like every other artist, | has his own special qualifications and powers for the work | he undertakes. He starts from some principles, right or | wrong; he has some sort of acquaintance with the various | modes of thought, poetic, artistic, philosophical, which | have prevailed at various times; he has a sufficient | command of literary knowledge to appreciate the relation | of the work before him, or of the man whose work he is | examining, to the men or works of their day; he has a | certain measure of patience and self-distrust, a judicial | temper, a cool and unbiased sense of equity. Mr. | Swinburne's critical qualifications can only be summed up | in the description he has given of his hero. | The words are absolutely | ridiculous as applied to Blake, but they are eminently true | of his biographer. Arrogance, dogmatism, and immodesty | are the three strings of his critical bow. He is absolutely | without any sense of justice, or any coolness of intellectual | temper, or any literary or artistic or philosophical | knowledge, or any consistent principles of critical | appreciation. One principle, indeed, he does lay down ~~ a | principle upon which, in fact, his book is built; and that | principle is a simple abhorrence of what

"one might | call, for the sake of a shorter a more summary name, the | Great Moral Heresy": ~~ | | With any ordinary writer we should, of course, never dream | of weaving together fragments of statements such as these; | but no other course is practicable with Mr. Swinburne. It is | impossible to more than pick what is sufficient to convey | his meaning, such as it is, out of a dozen pages of windy | verbiage about

"Walhalla," "factories of the Titans," | "moral cranks,"

and "divine treadmills."

But we | have extracted the passage merely by way of statement, and | not by way of discussion. The answer to it, of course, lies | in the fact that an artist is primarily a man; that his moral | nature in its excellence or its depravity will, whether he | likes it or not, tell upon his selection of subjects for his art, | upon his appreciation and intelligence of the subjects he | chooses. Were it even possible to dismiss all conscious | moral purpose from art, art from its very origin would have | an unconscious moral drift, so long as the artist is a man. | But no doubt the author of this marvelous principle of | criticism would reply that he could imagine a state of things | where the artist was not so much a man as a Swinburne. At | any rate it is upon this theory that Mr. Swinburne has based | his book, and we must do him the justice to say that his | practice is strictly in accordance with his principle. No | book ever displayed a more sovereign contempt for

| "the great moral heresy"

than this essay on Blake. It is | not merely that its author goes out of his way to record in | print what, in his usually happy style of expression, he calls | in | spite of the deliberate excision of the passage by Blake’s | previous biographers, but that hardly a page is free from | some note of cynical contempt for things counted holy or | pure among ordinary men.

"The gift of song,"

for | instance ~~ a gift confined, he is careful to tell us, in their | day to this Aphra Behn and Francois Villoa | ~~ has, it appears,

"after all, borne | better fruit for us than any gift of moral excellence."

| We are far from asserting that any gift of moral excellence | has borne much fruit for Mr. Swinburne; but he will | probably not be startled to find that passages such as these | will hardly recommend his book for admission into decent | or, as this author would say, Philistine families. Mr. | Swinburne's humour again is wholly free from any morally | heretical taint; like his hero's it | take, for instance, this graceful | description of Wainwright ~~ a name so well known to us | as one of the group around Charles Lamb, but rendered | infamous by the miserable greed which spurred him to | murder of the most cowardly sort. Wainwright was, | | It is something to watch the first application of the | of art, and to be present at | the reception within its sacred pale of the | although | has deprived us of this homicidal Raffaelle. | But if we turn from the assertion of this grand principle to | more practical instances of Mr. Swinburne's critical | powers, we find little save a fog of phrases: ~~ | There is, in fact, little but this delirious excitement even in | matters where we should at once be ready to own Mr. | Swinburne's right to speak with authority. A poet's | judgment of a poet must always carry weight, and, from | Dryden to Wordsworth, poets have been found to vindicate | their rights, and to show by example the value of their | criticism. But the elaborate verbiage of Mr. Swinburne is in | no sense criticism at all. How does it help us to appreciate | the Songs of Innocence to know that | or that, if these | the /songs of | Experience | this is just the sort of vapid twaddle | which has hitherto passed current for criticism in music | alone, where we ask for some explanation of the relation of | Sterndale Bennett to Mendelsshon, and are told that the | first is a fountain and the second is a star. | We may perhaps be pardoned if we spare our readers Mr. | Swinburne's efforts at philosophy. The adherent of | Pantheism, uneasy at the news that his dogma has been | settled in a note, will be relieved by hearing that | this, of course, makes the whole question | singularly intelligible. The fact is that the book, from | beginning to end, is the effort of a very ignorant person to | talk knowingly on a number of difficult subjects; and as far | as Mr. Swinburne is concerned, we can just laugh at him | and fling it by. The wrong done is done to Blake. Strange | as his life was, stranger as was his talk, we are among those | who are ready to bow down before one who was at once a | great artist and a great poet. No life, lovingly and | philosophically written, would speak with a deeper pathos | to the lives of men, or throw a clearer light on that confused | protest of almost frantic belief which, under atheistic and | blasphemous forms, broke with Blake, as with Shelley, out | of the faith that was

"unfaith in all"

of the | eighteenth century. But we refuse, even in this passing | notice, to couple the thought of that life, so grandly pure | and lofty in tone and in daily endeavour, with a book so | utterly worthless as this. It simply fills us with indignation | that one who claims to be a poet should have dug up a poet | out of his grave for the mere pleasure of indulging, under | the covert of his name, in a

"shy"

at

| "Philistia"

and morality.