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

THE SUN, LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 29, 1860.

Poetry) we would say, while for a moment con-
trasting his poetic violations of decency with those
of Byron, that whereas it is with the impurities of
" Don Juan" as it is with the impurities of tha
ocean—those impurities being, as they are,
rendered utterly insignificant and wholly in-
nocuous by the overwhelming flood of the all-mee-
tering salt of poetry in the world of which they are
afloat as mere worthless and inappreciable atoms—
with regard to the immeasurably grosser impurities of
this latest and youngest of the Editors of Byron, it is
quite otherwise. They constitute the bulk
of the flood—whatever there may be of
purity intermingled with them, must be re-
garded as the inappreciable atoms by comparison.
And it is in vindication of productions such as these
----productions having about them the inerradicable
taint of decomposition—that this young Poet who
has been singing to us as with the voice of an exhausted
debauchee celebrations of animal passion such as
might have called a blush of shame even into the
face of Colonel Charteris—it is in vindication, for-
sooth, of productions such as these, that Mr. Swin-
burne has just now issued this feeble prose pamphlet
with an air of ineffable pertness, and of almost sublime
self-sufficiency ! So far as we are at all aware, there
have been two only among our contemporaries who
have had the hardihood to press forward conspi-
cuously and avowedly as the vindicators, or, as we
should rather say, the apologists, of Mr. Swill-
burne—those two being the Reader and the Exa-
miner. According to their estimate of him--
salacious revellings in the delineation of sheer ani-
mal voluptuousness are chastening and purifying
celebrations of the diviner essence of, Abstract
Purity and Idealised Chastity. According to the
Critics of the Reader and the Examiner, those who
turn aside from this Circean wash are disdaining
a celestial compound of mingled nectar and ambro-
sia tendered to them by a Hebe and Ganymede
rolled into one in the form of a species of Poetic
Hermaphrodite. Our contemporary, the Examiner, '
we observe, goes so far as to talk of this extra-
ordinary pamphlet thus exultingly—" Mr. Swill-
burne," it says, " here speaks for himself without
personality of any kind, but with much general-
expression of a scorn which the small critics
[amongst them, by the way, the Saturday Review?
the Atheneum, and the Pall-Mall Gazette,], inwhoe°
eyes he is filthy and a blasphemer, have fairlY brought
down on themselves." In attempted vindication of
himself from the charge of being a Blasphemer/
it should be here added that this Bard, of Fornica-
tion only contrives to make bad worse by argil-
ing as follows :—" After many alternate curses
and denials of God, a great poet talks of Christ,
veiling his horrible Godhead,' of his malignant
soul,' his' godlike malice.' Shelley outlived all duo
and much more ; butShelleywrote all this and much
more. Will no Society for the Suppression of Com-
mon Sense—no Committee for 'the Propagation 01
Cant—see to it a little ?" Is it Common Sense, then,
in Mr. Swinburne's view of it, to speak in those
hideous words of Shelley's about our Lord veiling
his Godhead? Is it Cant, according to Mr. Swin-
burne's notion of it, the repudiating these references
to the Holy One's " malignant soul" and " Godli▪ ke
malice ?" Reasoning thus, no wonder he comes t?
be mistaken for a Blasphemer ! Altogether this
most astounding persistence of Mr. Swinburne's 1.0
maintaining to the last what he apparently consi-
ders the inherent dignity and the intrinsic purity• '
of his abandoned Muse, appears to us to be alone
comparable to that shameless spectacle which was
presented to view in -Paris towards the close of the
last century, when the robeless strumpet was en-
throned upon the desecrated high-altar of Notre,
Dame, and there worshipped as the Goddess 01
Reason in the midst of a saturnalia of Godless
Democrats.