| "Philistines," "one might
| call, for the sake of a shorter a more summary name, the
| Great Moral Heresy": ~~
| "Walhalla," "factories of the Titans,"
| "moral cranks,"
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
| 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
| "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.