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

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 the
ocean—those impurities being, as they are,
rendered utterly insignificant and wholly in-
nocuous by the overwhelming flood of the all-mas-
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
debauchce 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. Swill-
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. Swin-
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 wh°
turn aside from this Circean wash are disdaining
a celestial compound of mingled nectar and ambro-
sia tendered to them by a Hebe and Ganyinede
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 Athenaeum, and the Pall-Mall Gazette,], in whose
eyes he is filthy and a blasphemer, have fairly brought,.
down on themselves." In attempted vindication el
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 this
and much more ; butShelleywrote all this and wee'
more. Will no Society for the Suppression of Cotai
mon Sense—no Committee for the Propagation
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. Swill:,
burne's notion of it, the repudiating these referene,e'
to the Holy One's " malignant soul" and " Godlio
malice ?" Reasoning thus, no wonder he comes Lte.d
be mistaken for a Blasphemer! Altogether 01'
most astounding persistence of Mr. Swinburnes 1.3
maintaining to the last what he apparently consi-
ders the inerent dignity and the intrinsic puritin
of his abandoned Muse, appears to us to be aloe;
comparable to that shameless spectacle which w!
presentedto view in Paris towards the close of tile
last century, when the robeless strumpet was ell;
throned upon the desecrated high-altar of N°tre
Dame, and there worshipped as the Goddess eL
Reason in the midst of a saturnalia of Godless
Democrats.