MR. SWINBURNE'S " MISCELLANIES." •

A VOLUME of comments and criticisms on matters poetical from the most fluent master of verse and the most ardent critic of the day is certain to command attention. Mr. Swinbnrne praises the men whom he loves with a superfluity of zeal which, however extravagant, is invariably sincere ; while his denunciation of the men he despises is in some instances at once forcible and unjust. Dr. Johnson would have loved him for being a good hater, and no doubt the intellectual energy and passionate emotion which force Mr. Swinburne to fight in print, show the writer's vitality, and stimulate, if they do not always gratify, his readers. And it must always be admitted by the critic who ventures to differ from Mr. Swinburne, that for attack or defence he is armed de pied en cap. As a man of letters, his resources are manifold; be has read much and remembered much, and writes at all times from a full mind. Moreover, he has such a copious vocabulary for praise or scorn, words "so nimble and so full of subtle flame," that the modest reviewer, if such a man there be, feels some dread of encountering the fiery torrent. Just as Pope hitched his opponents in a rhyme, so does Mr. Swinburne some- times hitch his in a note, with such cunning art that it matters not for the reader's amusement whether the deed be fairly done or not.

Considering who the author is, the present volume of critical judgments is comparatively calm in tone, and the offensive application of the most solemn words of Scripture to purposes of literary criticism, a fault defacing all Mr. Swinburne's writings, is indulged in less frequently than usual. He observes that he desires "above all things to preserve in all things the golden mean of scrupulous moderation ;" and this desire, though not always accomplished, is one to be grateful for, since hitherto the defects of the poet's prose style have been due, we think, to the lack of this "golden mean."

In a volume so varied in contents, it matters little what subject is taken up first. Mr. Swinburne's earliest essay treats cursorily of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, with one excep- tion the four greatest names in English poetry. It is a characteristic paper, strong in praise of Milton's Republicanism, and defending the foul language with which he belaboured his antagonists in a style somewhat like his own. The following extract is taken from a rather long passage written in the same strain :—

"It is certainly no very dignified amusement, no very profitable expenditure of energy or time, to indulge in the easy diversion of making such curs yelp, and watching them writhe under the chastise- ment which an insulted superior may condescend to inflict, till their foul months foam over in futile and furious response, reeking and rabid with virulent froth and exhalations of raging ribaldry. Yet when, like those that swarmed at the heels of Milton, the vermin venture on all possible extremes of personal insult and imputation to which dullness may give ear or malice may give tongue, a man cannot reasonably be held to derogate from the duty and the dignity of self- respect if he spurns or scourges them out of his way. To give these rascals rope is a needless waste of hemp ; a spider's thread, span from the inner impurity of his own venomous vitals, will suffice for such a creature to hang himself."

In the second paper, "A Century of English Poetry," Mr. Swinburne can hardly be said to have broken fresh ground with regard to Dryden and to Pope. While saying little that is new, he says much that is just ; but it is not correct to hint that the "noisome and unmentionable vermin" held up to execration by the "great and gallant" author of The Dunciad were always the first to offend. Pope often attacked without provocation and without justice ; but it is some extenuation of what one is forced to regard as the poet's malignity that he lived in an age "when every blockhead who might also be a blackguard had free vent for his filthiest insolence." His physical infirmities, too, as every critic of Pope admits, explain, if they do not excuse, much that was mean and treacherous in his conduct. Even Mr. Swin- burne allows that Pope was a liar, while complaining that his "cassocked commentators" defame him; and the faults that

• Miscellanies. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. London : Chatto and Windus.

every admirer of this marvellous satirist deplores are just as repulsive to laymen as to the clergy, who are said to find something in the man "which would seem to provoke an inevitable shaking of clenched surplices in the face of his memory at every resurgence of his name." But surely, because Pope's genius was matchless on his own ground—and we entirely agree with Mr. Swinburne that matched he never has been—there is no reason why his faults should be treated more gently than if they had been committed by a smaller man. Mr. S winburne admits that Pope took an unmanly and unfriendly advantage of his best friend's piteous infirmity ; he admits the charge of indelicate and unchivalrous conduct with regard to women ; he admits the scandalous intrigue with reference to the correspond- ence; he must admit, though he does not mention it, his gross indecency ; and yet he objects to severity of criticism on the part of clergymen, apparently because they are clergymen. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls Pope a liar and a hypocrite, for which he is gently reproved,—Mr. Swinburne, as we have said, agrees that he was a liar; but that clerical critics should be pre- sumptuous enough "to open in full cry upon the trail of this poet" is what he cannot tolerate. On the other hand, how generous and sympathetic is the critic's praise of Pope, which it does one good to read, even though we cannot fully accept the judgment or admire the language in which it is uttered,—

" No man ever saw his life's way more clearly, or accepted the conditions of his life's work with more of rational manfulness, than Pope. He had a most healthy an t liberal interest in other men's lines of life, a most cordial and virile content and satisfaction with

his own Of his personal character, it is nothing to say that he bad the courage of a lion : for a beast's or an athlete's courage must have something of physical force to back it, something of a body to base itself upon ; and the spirit which was in Pope, we might say, was almost as good as bodiless. And what a spirit it was! how fiery, bright, and 55t For Byron we should have charity and sympathy ; but it rouses the blood, it kindles the heart, to remember what an indomitable force of heroics spirit, and sleepless always as fire, was enclosed in the pitiful body of the misshapen weakling whose whole life was spent in fighting the good fight of sense against folly, of light against darkness, of human speech against brute silence, of truth and reason and manhood against all the banded bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all black- guardly blockheads and all blockheaded blackguards, who then as now were misbegotten by malignity or dullness.'

We must pass over Mr. Swinburne's eulogistic comments on Prior, Congreve, and Collins with the remark that the brief essay on the only lyric poet of the period who can compete with Gray has already appeared in Mr. Ward's English Poets, and contains much matter for poetical and other controversy, since it asserts the incomparable superiority of Collins to Gray as a lyric poet, and "the godlike duty of tyrannicide."

The essay on "Wordsworth and Byron" is the longest and the most significant in the volume. It is an attack on Mr. Matthew Arnold as a critic, and on Byron as a poet. Of the former, Mr. Swinburne observes,—" I cannot but feel that in his recent utterances or expositions regarding Wordsworth and Byron, he has now and then spread a wider sail before a stronger wind of sheer paradox than ever has any critic of anything like equal or comparable reputation ;" and, of course, in the writer's opinion, one of the strongest proofs of this is the astounding expression of belief that Shelley's essays and letters will resist the wear and tear of time better, and finally come to stand higher, than his poetry. Without accepting this dictum of Mr. Arnold with regard to one of the most wonderful of English singers, it is possible to believe in the immeasurable superiority of Wordsworth, not, indeed, for his voice of song, but for his almost matchless poetic insight, and for the inspiring force of his genius. The two primary and essential qualities of poetry, according to Mr. Swinburne, are imagination and harmony, and he adds that "where these qualities are perceptible in the highest degree, there, even though they should be unaccompanied and unsupported by any other great quality whatever is the best and highest poetry." In a sense, no student of poetry, we suppose, will disagree with this definition. But imagination is a wide term ; there is a harmony which gladdens a man's whole nature, as well as his ear ; and neither in Coleridge's "transcendent song," nor in the enchanting music of Shelley, do we find these high qualities in such abundance as in Words- worth when he wrote, which he sometimes forgot to do, with his singing robes upon him. For word-music not even Shelley has surpassed Coleridge ; but the loveliest music into which lan- guage can be cast, and the rare 'imagination that flowered in The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, do not in themselves supply all we demand from the poets whose function it is to ive us "nobler lows and nobler cares." Among English poets, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, in our judgment, do this in largest measure ; and so, in lesser degree perhaps, does the "sage and serious poet, Spenser." Mr. Swinburne will not agree with us in this estimate; but it is time we should Inar what he has to say of Byron.

Byron, said Mr. Cary, the translator of Dante, must be read for the novelty and, vigour of his sentiments alone, and in order to enjoy him, the lover of poetry must forget the harmonies of Spenser and Milton and Dryden. Mr. Swinburne writes in a similar strain of Byron's "wretchedly bad metre," and he is so severe upon this poet's faults, that one wonders he should ever have taken the trouble to form a selection from his poetry. He writes of his "monstrous stupidities," of his "rant, and cant, and glare, and splash, and splutter," of his "jolter-headed jargon," of his "blundering, floundering, lumbering, and stumbling stanzas," of his "villainously bad tragedies," of his "debauched excesses of bad taste run mad and foaming at the mouth" (these excesses, we may observe, being purely literary), of the "utterly unutterable rubbish" of a passage selected by Mr. Arnold ; and he declares that "in all the composition of Byron's highly composite nature, there was neither a note of real music nor a gleam of real imagination." According to this verdict, Byron was no poet, for sincerity and strength, which Mr. Swinburne does claim for him, are not specially poetical virtues. But if not a poet, what was he ? And can it be that the passionate interest felt for him half a century and more ago was due simply to his personality, and to the wit and fire and versatility which Mr. Swinburne allows that he possessed ?

It must be admitted that Byron was one of the most faulty and slovenly of distinguished writers ; that be had no ear for the diviner harmonies of verse; that his imagery is frequently false, and his grammar defective ; that his heroes are stage-puppets, and his pathos too often a sham ; indeed, we think, malgre Mr. S arinburne, that insincerity is a marked feature of his character as a poet, and are ready, also, to allow that his imagination is rarely of a high order. Yet, notwithstanding these defects, to which may be added the want of dramatic power, it is impossible ot to recognise in Byron that ardour which Wordsworth regarded as the one poetical quality of Dryden, and a love of Nature and power of representing her of which Dryden felt and knew nothing. There are lines in Byron that take lasting hold of the memory, and mark him for a poet; and if there is much of his verse which, although praised at the time, grows in worthlessness the more carefully it is read, there is also a portion of it, though, perhaps, not a large portion, which has on it the mark of poetical immortality. Mr. Swinburne, however, places Byron on a poetical equality with the man whom, as a poet, he despised the most. While observing that Southey writes incomparably better English than Byron, he declares that "the gift of poetic or creative imagination has been withheld by Nature from either competitor with a perfectly absolute impartiality. There is just as much of it in Chilcle Harold as in Thalaba, and there is just as little of it in Roderick as in The Corsair." And comparing Byron with Crabbe, he writes :—

"All his serious poetry put together is hardly worth—or, to say the very least, it can show nothing to be set beside—that incomparable passage in Crabbe's Borough, which (according to Macaulay) has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child ;' and, indeed, though I am not myself so rough and cynical as ever to have experienced that particular effect from its perusal, it does seem to me impossible for any man at all capable of being touched through poetry by the emotions of terror and pity to read the record of that dream in the condemned cell, with its exquisite realistic touches of seaside nature and tender innocent gladness, and not feel himself under the spell of a master tenfold more potent than Byron."

Comparisons, by the way, between men of genius are rarely satisfactory ; but Mr. Swinburne is fond of them. He compares Landor with Byron, and Keats with Wordsworth and Gautier, and Coleridge with Shelley, and Byron with Coleridge, and Tennyson with lifasset, and delights throughout the volume in marking the salient points of contrast between the writers whose merits he discusses. It must be admitted that this habit gives piquancy to Mr. Swinburne's pages, if it does not add greatly to their critical value. It is an infinite pity that Byron's finest work as a poet and a wit should be the most detestable from a moral standing-point. More than one English poet is tainted with gross indecency ; but we.do not know of one holding a prominent position, unless it be Dryden in his dramas, who has confounded virtue and vice so as to convey the impression that there is no difference between them. Yet this is what Byron has done in Don Juan. He is a great wit and a great satirist, but in every department of his work there are flaws due quite as much to moral deficiencies as to limitations of genius.

There is so much in the discursive and able essay headed "Wordsworth and Byron" from which we are forced to dissent, that it is delightful to come upon a noble passage in praise of Scott, from which we will make a short extract, premising that the eulogy of Scott is in a measure lessened by an irrelevant comparison with "the far higher name of Shelley." Far higher, doubtless, he stands as a lyric poet, while infinitely lower, in our judgment, not only in the moral and intellectual qualities that give dignity to manhood, but in his range as an imaginative writer. After observing that as surely as Lord Tennyson had, almost at his starting, defeated Byron as a painter of feminine passion, so had Scott defeated him long before as a painter of masculine action, Mr. Swinburne adds :—

"And for this among other reasons, Scott, with all his short- comings in execution, with all his gaps and flaws, and deficiencies and defects, must surely always retain the privilege assigned by Thackeray to Goldsmith—high as are doubtless Goldsmith's claims to that privi- lege—of being the most beloved of English writers.' Two names far higher than his will be more beloved, as well as more honoured, by those who find their deepest delight in the greatest achievements of dramatic and lyric poetry : bat the lovers of this last will always be fewer, if more ardent, than the lovers of other and humbler, less absolute and essential, forms of art : and though dramatic poetry, even at its highest pitch of imagination, appeals to a far wider and more complex audience, yet even Shakespeare, though less than Shelley, demands of the student who would know and love him, some- thing more than is common to all simple and healthy natures. But Sir Walter demands nothing of his reader beyond a fair average allowance of kindliness and manhood : the man must be a very Carlyle who does not love and honour him. His popularity may fluctuate now and then with elder readers,—so much the worse for them : it is sure always to right itself again in a little time : hut when it wanes among English boys and girls, a doomsday will be dawning of which as yet there are most assuredly no signs or presages perceptible. Love of Scott, if a child has not the ill-fortune to miss by some mis- chance the benefit of his generous influence, is certain to outlast all changes of interest and inclination, from the age when he divides a heart of six or seven with the owner's first pony, to the age when affectionate gratitude has rooted in the adult heart a hundred names and associations of his engrafting, only less deep and dear than those implanted there by Shakespeare's very self."

With these just words we must close our notice of a volume that abounds with suggestive topics and points of controversy. The splendid generosity of Mr. Swinburne's praise is only to be surpassed by the vehemence with which he denounces what he deems unjust pretensions and false critical judgments. If he often lacks sobriety, he is never wanting in fertility. If it were possible for him to moderate without weakening his language, and to forget, for a time at least, his two idols, Shelley and Hugo, the satisfaction of his readers would be increased ; Int this, perhaps, is too much to expect. Mr. Swin- borne is a poet, and being a man of genius, is not likely to alter his method, or to forswear the gods of his idolatry, at the advice of either reader or reviewer. Throughout his prose writings the language of excessive praise or blame grows a little weari- some; but there is less of both, as we have said already, in this volume than in its predecessors, and there are comments in these pages—a notable one, for example, on Wordsworth's patriotism, and another on Charles Lamb—which are alike moderate in expression and models of just criticism.