The Sun.
London, England, 1866-10-29 00:00:00

LITE R, A T II R, E.

Mr. Algernon Swinburne and His Critics.

Under the title of "Notes on Poems and Re-
views," Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne has just
published, with Mr. Hotter), of Piccadilly, what he
apparently designs to be a crushing reply to the
whole body of his critics, and a triumphant vindi-
cation at the same time of the unsullied purity of
his own poetic reputation. His reviewers, accord-
ing to him, are not only altogether in the wrong—he
himself all the while being as completely in the right—
but he undertakes to prove them (not himself) to be
foul-mouthed and filthy-minded. Certainly this—if
it could only have been effectually accomplished—
would have been carrying the war into the enemy's
camp with a vengeance. Only—very unluckily for Mr.
Swinburne in this his new adventure—every succes-
sive shaft of ridicule he hurls against his assailants
no sooner leaves his handS than it transforms itself
into a boomerang. In effect, the task thus undertaken
with so much audacity, was in itself too flagrantly
outrageous to prove otherwise than an inevitable
fiasco. Reverting to the " Poems " which imme-
diately preceded, and in fact thereby elicited, the
" Reviews"—of both of which (that is, Poems and
Reviews) the " Notes" now under consideration,
are intended to be elucidatory—one cannot but feel
that, here, in these Poems, it is no Virginal Muse who
comes to us. Rather than that, it is some Stripling
Satyr, with his horns scarce budding, and his hooves
just beginning to harden, who creeps towards us
through the arcadian coppice to whisper his foul
imaginings in our ears from a lair of tangled vine
and roses. Taking them for such as they are, these
lyrics and ballads, born of a libidinous imagination, are
not certainly, it must be admitted, of the literature
of Grub-street. They arc, in an artistic sense, of
course, immeasurably above and beyond all that.
But they have the taint as of Ifoly well-street about
them nevertheless, and that, moreover, as it appears
to us, ineradicably. Insomuch so that it becomes
almost a matter of question with us, in the abstract,
with respect to these same libidinous word-pictures,
as they have been pencilled by Mr. Swinburne,
whether he has not by their production rendered
himself amenable to the law, as defined but a very
few years since in what is popularly known as Lord
Campbell's Act—an act expressly designed with a
view to the suppression of impure and demoralising
publications. It has been somewhere wittily re-
marked by Lord Macaulay in reference to the
sometime laureate Robert Southey, that his
(Southey's) lovers are always in extremes, that
either they love like Cattle, or they love like
Seraphim. Mr. Swinburne's lovers invariably come
under the former category—they love like cattle.
As to his religion, his god or goddess, or however
else it may be termed—his chosen idol, in other
words, the recipient of his orisons, we are left to
presume can be no other than the unutterable
object of adoration shamefully held in reverence by
the Ansayrii. That evil race of " the assassins" of
the Lebanon, of whom and of whose abhorred wor-
ship the Hon. Frederick Walpole has given, per-
haps, among all modern travellers, the most popular
and accurate description. Born seemingly of precisely
such a worship as that:indulged in by the Ansayrii,
these hot-breathed poetic utterances of Mr. Alger-
non Swinburne's are definable no otherwise than as
an outrage on our common humanity. They are a
wanton violation of the sanctity and of the purity
of all the domestic affections. So wanton a violation
of them, in truth, that one marvels how this young
writer could himself by possibility have come into
existence—incredulous for the moment that he could
ever have had a mother ! Or, that, having had a
mother, and a sister possibly, as well as other near
and dear relations of the gentler sex, he could so
outrage, by the gloating profanations of his lascivious
fancy, what had been enshrined (meaning the ideal
of that sex) as in a sanctuary of reverential chastity
by the whole genius of Christian Chivalry. His
Muses, however, one and all of them, are Wantons.
His Erato has no sense of decency or of reticense
in her lyrical warblings. His Terpsichore is a
Nautch Girl, but half clad and bedizened with coins,
flushed less with wine-lees than with animal passion,
shameless as the daughter of Herodias, meretricious
of eye, breathless of lip, dishevelled ! And so on
through the whole sisterhood. With regard to the
running loose, hitherand thither, whithersoever they
list, of his erratic erotic fancies, we are sometimes
fain to wonder if ever, in his affected disdain for
modern languages and in his pining by preference for
some memorable utterance in a classic tongue, he
could hearken for once—and lay well to heart on
hearing them thus echoed in the recesses of his con-
science—to words articulated eighteen hundred years
ago by holier lips than those of Catullus, by an elo-
quence more inspired than that of Sappho-7ropvcia
U. Kai racra aKaOapo-ia µrlSe ovoilaCia-Oco ev viuv—or
according to the Vulgate of St. Jerome, " Formcatio
autem et omnis inznzunditia nee nominetur in vobis
Instead of which holy abstinence from anything like
a deliberate consideration of them—here, in Mr.
Swinburne, is one who not merely selects those very
themes to gloat over them and to expatiate upon
them in the abandon of a voluptuous imagination,
but one who, while thus gloating over them and ex-
patiating upon them, strives to render them more
than ever insidiously alluring by tricking them out
with all the depraving resources of his rhetoric.
Love and Poetry, with Mr. Swinburne, are as the
masses are to Mr. Gladstone—flesh and blood. And,
when singing of the loves of his fellow mortals in his
melodious verse, this young poet sings of them with an
eye to them solely as flesh and blood. The art prefer-
redby him is that usually concealed by curtains in the
inner salon of your epicurean voluptuary or fashion-
able sybarite—only, here, the curtains are torn
asunder, and the painting revealed to view in the
broadest light imaginable. According to one of our
time-honoured proverbs, no doubt—" To the pure
all things are pure"—except, par exenzple, the reve-
lations of a brothel ! Hardly such as those, at any
rate, we may presume. And these poems of Mr.
Swinburne are nothing more nor less than the out-
pourings of the hitherto unuttered fancies engen-
dered by the upboilings of sheer animal puberty.
They are the carefully defined and minutely elabo-
rated celebrations of the bitings and rumblings and
slobberings of a precocious pruriency, or even, we
would say, of a wholly supposititious lasciviousness.
It is related of some eccentric old lady, whose name,
happily for her, has been forgotten, that shortly
after the first appearance from the press of Dr.
Johnson's Dictionary, she offered her congratula-
tions to that great lexicographer and moralist, for
inasmuch as his stupendous and all but exhaustive
catalogue of words made no mention whatever of
some of the filthiest and foulest in the language.
" So, madam," said the Doctor, "You have been
looking after them, I find !" Now, precisely what
the Old Lady attempted to do in regard to Dr.
Johnson's Dictionary, Mr. Swinburne has done,
with unhappily the fullest success, in his re-
searches among the stores of classic litera-
ture. He has sedulously hunted up whatever
there was in it of impurity and salaciousness.
His readings have been almost exclusively confined
to those astoundingly inconsequent supplementary
pages or appendices of the Expurgated Editions of
the Greek and Latin authors, in which have been
carefully set apart together—for readier reference at
the hands of those who may chance to prefer them—
all the loathlier passages previously and very care-
fully eliminated from the writer's text, as calculated
to profane its beauty, yet afterwards, as carefully
collected together in these astounding Supplements
or Appendices as propitiary offerings to Cloacina—
offerings of which the offence, like the arch-crime of
the King in Hamlet," is rank and smells to heaven !"
Among the accumulation of such later portions
of those strangely Expurgated Editions of the
classics, Mr. Swinburne has evidently wallowed with
a sort of grovelling exultation, as of a seal sporting in
its native element. If he has taken up Juvenal, he
has turned, as by an instinct—we may be sure of
that—to an examination of one abhorred book
in particular—in preference to any of the others.
Coming down again to our own times, how-
ever, from that far-off table - land of Anti-
quity, we are constrained (by himself) to believe
that if he knows as yet anything at all about the world,
it is with the demi-monde alone he is acquainted. To
borrow a happy illustration of his own, from one of
the few things he has written worthily (his prose in.
troduction to the Selections from Lord Byron's