ESSAYS AND STUDIES.*

THERE are few readers who have a fitting regard for the noblest of all arts who will not already have read in the form in which they first appeared Mr. Swinbtune's eloquent criticisms, and there are, we imagine, still fewer who, having read them, will not eagerly follow the poet and critic once more through the ample domain of poetry covered by these Essays. The author writes in prose as he writes in poetry, with an affluence of language, a felicity of illustration Ind imagery, a bounding strength, and a wealth of genius which for the time carry us away captive. So mighty is the rush of words, so im- petuous the energy with which he expresses his poetical belief, so vigorous—we had almost said overbearing—the force of his asser- tions, that the reader, after making now and then perhaps a feeble protest, a spasmodic and puny effort to stem the torrent, will be prone to submit to the imperial strength of this great master of English, a captive to his gorgeous eloquence, if not to the soundness of his argument. And even the well-seasoned critic- who reads what Mr. Swinburne has to say respecting poets and poetry will feel some diffidence in questioning the statements of a writer whose literary resources are so manifold, and who has given proofs that are beyond question of extraordinary power, both as a poet and a critic. On the other hand, it is impossible to be blind to the palpable faults of the writer, to the grotesque vehemence of his invective, to his often unmeasured praise, which he endeavours to make more intense by crowding adjective upon adjective, until even the eye becomes offended by the singular aspect of the page. Mr. Swinburne has yet to learn the strength that lies in moderation, and the weakness that accompanies every kind of literary extravagance.

The author, we imagine, regards the ordinary English critic as a malevolent, narrow-minded, blear-eyed mortal, who has not taste enough to appreciate culture, or logic enough to understand argument, or faith enough to believe in the vitality of genius. He may be honest, but then he is stupid ; be may have some ability, but then he will probably be unjust ; and he lacks the natural sense and self-respect which preserve from mere contempt even the Philistines of French literature. All this, indeed, is rather implied than definitely expressed, but here and there the writer scarcely deigns to veil his contempt. For some of the sins of his youth and riper manhood—literary sins, we mean—English society, represented by English critics, has more than once pronounced on Mr. Swinburne a very severe judgment. It has been said, and said justly, that the way in which he has dealt with names and subjects which the generality of his countrymen regard as sacred is reprehensible on the score of good taste and feeling, to say nothing of morality. Certain it is that readers not slow to recognise genius, and by no means narrow in their sympathies, do, nevertheless, turn from much of Mr. Swinburne's poetry with something like repulsion ; and we need not wonder that the poet, sensitive as a poet needs must be, should show irritation at a feeling which he will regard as illiberal, or perhaps as hypocritical Mr. Swinburne does not understand, or if he does understand he despises, the standing- point of his countrymen. With them the supreme law of life is one to which even the artist himself owns allegiance. They can- not be brought to believe, despite the brilliant arguments of critics, that the sphere of art is wholly distinct from that of religion and. morality, deeming, not without reason, that the faculties which form the artist are but a part of the nature which constitutes the entire man, and by no means the highest part. On the other hand, the one duty of which Mr. Swinburne is conscious is that which he owes to art, the only faith to which he is a devotee it faith in genius. "Art," he writes, "is dependent on herself alone, and on nothing above her or beneath ; by her own law she must stand or fall, and to that alone she is responsible ; by no other law can any work of art be condemned, by no other plea can it be saved ;" and he observes, what in a certain sense is true, that the worth of a poem has properly nothing to do with its moral meaning or design. Of course it is readily granted that * Essays and &tidies. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. London: Outgo awl Windom. 1874.

the aim of the artist is not that of the didactic teacher, nor can we estimate a work of art by the moral purpose of the artist. If we did, we might prefer Cowper's "Truth" to Shelley's "Sky- lark," or Mr. Tupper's "Philosophy" to Mr. Arnold's "Scholar Gipsy." We do not ask for poetical theologians, or for novelists who make fiction the vehicle for moral platitudes and pious dis- cussions. But to allow that the artist need not invade the sphere of the moralist or dogmatist is one thing, and to argue that art is independent of morality is another. It is this latter belief which has infected modern literature with the bald obscenities of Walt Whitman, with the obtrusive immoralities of certain lady novelists, and with certain nauseous lyrical effusions from Mr. Swinburne's own pen.

The volume before us consists of eleven essays, chiefly reprinted from the Fortnightly Review. Two of these essays are devoted to Victor Hugo, "our supreme poet ;" one to Mr. Rossetti ; one to Mr. Morris's Le and Death of Jason; one is on "Matthew Arnold's New Poems;" in another, entitled "Notes on the Terf of Shelley," Mr. W. M. Rossetti receives a severe and by no means unmerited castigation ; Byron and Coleridge each obtain an essay ; there is also an admirable paper on John Ford, a dramatist who, as -the writer justly observes, "stands apart among his fellows, with- out master or follower ;" an essay on the "Old Masters at Florence ;" and finally, a paper entitled, "Notes on Some Pictures of 1868." A word or two about this last. Mr. Swinburne's apology, if such it may be called, for writing upon an art in -which he is not a labourer is excellently expressed :— " It is certain that a man's judgment may be shaped and coloured by -the lines of his own life and the laws of his own labour; that a poet, for example, may be as bad a judge of painting as a painter may be of poetry-, each man looking vainly in his neighbour's work for the qualities proper to his own; but it does not follow that either must of necessity lie fool enough to mispraise or to dispraise a poem or a picture for the presence or the absence of qualities foreign to its aim. I would ask for either artist no more than is conceded as an unquestionable right to critics who are clear from any charge of good or bad work done in any but the critical line of labour."

This claim cannot be disputed, and it must be added that a poet's estimate of a painter's work has a peculiar interest. Read- ing over these notes of the pictures exhibited by the Academy seven years ago, we find remarks that apply equally well to the exhibition of 1875. For instance, this passage with regard to the dearth of landscape hits a prominent defect in the present exhibi- tion :—" The show of this year is noticeably barren in landscape.

Nothing is here of Inchbold, nothing of Anthony. The time -which can bring forth but two such men should have also brought forth men capable to judge them and to enjoy,"—a

capacity which, if we may judge from reports, has not been found in the hangers of the present season. Of Mr. Albert Moore, Mr. Swinburne writes with the most sensitive appreciation, and his exquisite comment on Mason's "Evening Hymn" reminds us that one of the most poetical and idyllic of modern painters is no longer accessible to our praise. But it is on matters poetical that Mr. Swinburne writes with the greatest freedom, and if sometimes his passionate admiration of a poet carries him further than we care to follow, the vivacity of his style forces us to listen eagerly to criticisms we are unable to accept. Our admi- ration of Mr. Dante G. Rossetti's poetry is far more measured than Mr. Swinburne's, but it is nevertheless interesting to witness the extraordinary homage he pays to his contemporary. After marking the traits which distinguish the work of the best poets, he continues :—

"In all these points the style of Mr. Rossetti excels that of any English poet of our day. It has the fullest fervour and fluency of im- pulse, and the impulse is always towards harmony and perfection. It luta the inimitable note of instinct, and the instinct is always high and right. It carries weight enough to overbear the style of a weaker man, but no weight of thought can break it, no subtlety of emotion attenuate, no ardour of passion deface. It can breathe unvexed in the finest air, and pass unsinged through the keenest flue; it has all the grace of perfect force and all the force of perfect grace. It is sinuous as water, or as light, flexible, and penetrative, delicate and rapid ; it works on its way without halt, or jar, or collapse. And in plain strength and weight of sense and sound these faultless verses exceed those of faultier work- men, who earn their effects by their defects, who attain at times and by Ste to some memorable impression of thought upon speech and speech open memory, at the cost, generally, of inharmonious and insufficient

work."

And again, he writes :—

"In the work of Mr. Rossetti, besides that particular colour and flavour which distinguishes each master's work from that of all other masters, and by want of which you may tell merely good work from -wholly great work, the general qualities of all great poetry are separately

visible aud ; strength, sweetness, affluence, simpliuity, depth, light, harmony, variety, bodily grace, and range of mind and force of soul, and ease of flight, the scope and sweep of wing to impel the might and weight of thought through the air and light of speech with emotion

as of mere musical impulse; • and not less the live bloom of perfect words, warm as breath and fine as flower-dust, which lies light as air upon the parting of lyric leaves that open into song ; the rare and ineffable mark of a supreme singing power, an element too subtle for solution in any crucible of analysis, though its presence or absence be patent at a first trial to all who have a sense of taste. All these this poet has, and the mastery over all these which melts and fuses all into form and use ; the cunning to turn his own gifts to service which is the last great appanage of great workmen. Colour and sound are servants of his thought, and his thought is servant of his will ; in him the will and the instinct are not two forces, but one strength ; are not two leaders, but one guide ; there is no shortcoming, no pain or compulsion in the homage of hand to soul."

A glowing torrent of praise like this,—and we have given but a brief specimen of the high-flown and rather exhausting eloquence that fills several pages--is characteristic of much of the criticism that fills the volume. Yet Mr. Swinburne's praise, although often too lavish, and injured by the extravagant enthusiasm of the writer, is not without the subtle discrimination, the per- fection and delicacy of touch which distinguish the criticism of genius from that which is simply the fruit of culture. Ile sees at a glance the right thing to say, and it is so obvious when he has said it, that we wonder it never occurred to us before ; he seizes, as it were, by intuition what the ordinary critic may arrive at (or miss) after assiduous. toil. We might take exception to some of his notes upon Wordsworth, whose orthodoxy is, of course, a matter of wonderment to Mr. Swinburne, but how just are the following remarks !—

" The incommunicable, the nnmitigable might of Wordsworth when the god has indeed fallen upon him cannot but be felt by all, and can but be felt by any ; none can partake or catch it up. There are many men greater than he ; there are men much greater ; but what he has of greatest is his only. His concentration, his majesty, his pathos, have

no parallel His pathos, for instance, cannot be matched against any other man's; it is trenchant, and not tender; it is an iron pathos. Take, for example, the most passionate of his poems, the 'Affliction of Margaret ;' it is hard and fiery, dry and persistent as the agony of a lonely and a common soul which endures through life, a suf- fering which runs always in one groove without relief or shift His metre, too, is sublime ; choice or chance of language, casual or chosen, has miraculous effects in it, when he feels his foot firm on ground fit for him; otherwise, his verse is often hard as wood, and dry as dust, and weak as water."

Of Wordsworth's sonnets he remarks that the few highest "remain out of reach of emulation, not out of sight of worship." Mr. Swinburne is pleased to sneer at Coleridge as a preacher of ghostly dialectics and marsh-light theosophy, and observes that his poems of the religious sort are offensive and grievous to the human sense on that score ; but of Coleridge generally as a poet no critic that we know of has given a finer estimate. Truly does he say that his place is high among the highest of all time, and that for height and perfection of imaginative quality he is the greatest of lyric poets. Indeed, the essay on Coleridge is as splendid a tribute as one great lyric poet could pay to the genius of another. Careful and precise, too, is his estimate of Byron, though there is in it perhaps less eloquence than we might have expected on such a theme. It is but natural that Mr. Swinburne, with his special gift of song, should esteem Shelley far more highly than Byron. Indeed, he protests against Mr. Arnold's bracketing of the two names together. " With all reserve of reverence," he writes, "for the noble genius and memory of Byron, I can no more ac- cept him as a poet equal or even akin to Shelley on any side but one, than I could imagine Shelley endowed with the various, fearless, keen - eyed, and triumphant energy which make the greatest of Byron's works so great. With all his glory of ardour, and -vigour, and humour, Byron was a singer who could not sing ; Shelley outsang all poets on record but some two or three throughout all time,—his depths and heights of inner and outer music are as divine as nature's, and not sooner inexhausti- ble." Mr. Swinburne, in his ardent admiration and unqualified praise of Shelley, who is said to hold the same rank in lyric as Shakespeare in dramatic poetry, supreme and without a second of his race, and to have a "soul as great as the world," bursts into.a strain of panegyric which is likely rather to injure Shelley than otherwise in the eyes of more moderate worshippers. Shelley was an exquisite singer, but much that delights us in his song resembles, to quote his own lovely words,— * The softest notes of falling rills,

The melodies of birds and bees, The murmuring of summer seas, And pattering rain and breathing dew And airs of evening."

We listen to his poetry as we listen to the song of the nightingale, or to any sweet natural sound, and are soothed by the "rain of melody," but it rarely lays hold of the intellect and the heart, which the highest poetry dominates as readily as the ear ; and we entirely disagree with Mr. Swinburne's assertion, though we are by no means surprised to read it, that Shelley's "mark is burnt in more deeply and more durably upon men's minds than that of any of the great poets of his day ;" and on the other hand, that Words- worth (with whom he couples Byron) has failed to impress upon all time any such abiding sign of his power "as Dante or Milton, Goethe or Shelley, each in his special fashion." Readers who feel, as the present writer feels, more indebted to Wordsworth than to any poet of this century for ennobling thoughts, for insight into the world of nature, for the calmness and strength of

--421t-'' divine philosophy, for the help he has afforded in lightening the burden of life, and in adding to existence a new and untold store of wealth, will not accept Mr. Swinburne's statement, although they will readily grant the superiority of Shelley in one branch of the poetic art.

It will be seen from what we have said that there is plenty in these Essays to arouse interest and to elicit comment. The book is full of vitality, and cannot fail to keep the reader alive. There is not a dull page in the volume, and to say this is to award no small praise to a book which is devoted wholly to criticism.