MR. SWINBURNE AS CRITIC.

IN a recent article, in many respects of no common merit, on Mr.- Swinburne's poetry, and one, like almost all those which have hitherto appeared in our contemporary the Chronicle, marked by an intellectual care, thoroughness, and precision of thought which make its pages far more instructive than those of almost any weekly journal of the day, the reviewer asserts that Mr. Swin- burne's poetry, with all its "wealth of lyrical sweetness," is marked by "barren poverty of thought." There is truth in this ; there is no intellectual thread in any single poem of his that we can remember; and in his last, on Italy, where there was most need of intellectual study, the trace of an intellect vanished altogether. But though Mr. Swinburne has never shown the least intellectual sympathy even with the most characteristic currents of thought in his own favourite Greece, he has the natural delight Of true poetic genius in the greater poets of every age, and whatever intellectual discrimination he has, has been exercised in studying the individual characteristics of his favourite singers. In the.' new number of the Fortnightly Review he measures himself with. great boldness against the most accomplished critic of the day, Mr. Matthew Arnold, and scatters over a review of that fine poet many brilliant remarks on English and French poets which show that he has studied them deeply, and that he has often caught accu- rately, and when he has caught accurately can delineate with un- equalled power, their finest individual traits. But in spite of a much greater wealth of critical perception than we might have expected from him, in spite of many fine and some splendid sayings, in spite of an obviously great effort at the tranquillity and calm of his model for the time being,—Mr. Arnold,—we doubt if Mr.- Swinburne ever placed himself to greater disadvantage than in the position of critic to that thoughtful and equal-minded poet. It is not that he makes very many false criticisms on his special sub- ject,—most of them are true, and many brilliantly expressed,—but that while his critical eye is often true, he never for a moment falls into the mood of true criticism, the mood in which you feel that the critic is surrendering himself, so far as he can without unfaithfulness to his own inner judgment, to the overruling con- trol of another's imagination or thought. There is barely a single sentence written in this mood through the entire article. When Mr. Swinburne praises, which he often does with great force, you feel that he is trying to cap the quality he is praising by the brilliance of the language in which he describes it. Never for a complete sentence, seldom for half a sentence, do you lose the excitable personality of the critic. Like a humming-bird, he dashes about among the blossoms of the author whom he pane- gyrizes, vying with them in. colour, and restlessly displaying his own wonderful activity as well. There is, too, an odious strut in his style which will seldom let you forget the vanity of his bril- liant sayings in their truth and aptness. If he rises into elo- quence, as he often does, he is not content till he rises out of it again into that harsh, shrill, peculiar note,—like the peacock's dissonant cry,—which drowns the note proper to his subject, and racks the ear with its discord. The essay abounds in happy sayings, spoiled by this dissonant and impatient treble, in which

you seem to hear Mr. Swinburne's feverish desire to surpass the excellences he criticizes. This, at the best, is not criticism, for you are never for a moment left with your "eye simply on the object." Directly the critic's eye rests for an instant on his object, he sets to work to bring such a battery of fire- works to play on the point in question, that he and every- body else thinks a great deal more of the iridescent lights than of the thing illuminated. If he cannot succeed, as he often can, in getting up a much more exciting display on the outside of the show by his description, than those who go in to look at it themselves will find, he goes out of the way to say something irrelevant in a .note, the only function of which is to startle or challenge. A more successful intellectual irritant than Mr. Swin- burne's criticisms we do not ever remember to have met with. When we agree with him most entirely, and admire his unwonted power of expression most deeply, we are perhaps even more chafed by his shrill falsetto climax than we are when he taunt- ingly drags us aside into the private audience of a note, only in order to stick a pin into us. Nothing could be finer or truer, for instance, than this on Wordsworth

His concentration, his majesty, his pathos have no parallel ; some have gone higher, many lower, none have touched precisely the same point as he ; some poets have had more of all these qualities, and bet- ter ; none have had exactly his gift. 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 per- sistent as the agony of a lonely and a common soul which endures through life a suffering which runs always in one groove, without relief or shift. Because he is dull, and dry, and hard, when set by the side of a groat lyrist or dramatist; because of these faults and defects, he is so intense and irresistible when his iron hand has hold of some chord which it knows how to play upon. How utterly unlike his is the pathos of Homer or /Eschylus, Chaucer or Dante, Shakespeare or Hugo ; all these greater poets feel the moisture and flame of the fever and the tears they paint ; their pathoa when sharpest is full of sensitive life, of subtle tenderness, of playing pulses and melting colours ; his has but the downright and trenchant weight of swinging steel ; he strikes like the German headsman, one stroke of a loaded sword.

Yet while we admire, we chafe at the various turns in the sen-

tence, which show you how little the critic is thinking of Words- worth as he writes, how much of his own fine scales for weighing Wordsworth. "The downright and trenchant weight of swing- ing steel," the "German headsman's one stroke of a loaded sword," are ornamental sentences as far as possible from the tone of Wordsworth ,—mere efforts to bring the critic forward again after his true and fine previous description of Wordsworth's pathos. When he had said of "The Affliction of Margaret" that it is "hard and fiery, dry and persistent, as the agony of a lonely and a com- mon soul, which endures, through life, a suffering which runs always in one groove, without relief or shift,"—he had described

with unequalled power the drift of such lines as,— My apprehensions come in crowds,

I dread the rustling of the grass ; The very shadows of the clouds

Have power to shake me as they pass,

—but he cannot rest there. His critical mood is feverish and

restless till he has eclipsed the object of his vision by some of his own feats of language, and so he gets into his "swinging steel" and "one stroke of a loaded sword," which are about as inexpressive of that strange possession by the genius of common but ineffaceable and undiminishable misery, which enabled Wordsworth to write as

he did, as any form of words that could be invented. The "stroke of swinging steel" expresses force and momentum of will, not that truthfulness which comes from the singleness of a haunted and overridden imagination. This figure is a rhetorical flourish of Mr. Swinburne's sword, not of Wordsworth's, and, instead of clinching the thought, cleaves it in two, and makes you stare up at the brandishing hand which you had barely for a moment forgotten.

Or, take his very fine and delicate criticism on Mr. Arnold's style, spoiled, as usual, by the self-conscious and rhetorical magniloquence of the closing sentence, where Mr. Swinburne feels that there has been too much of Mr. Arnold, and that the grander presence of

the younger poet must be asserted before the period can be complete:— The supreme charm of Mr. Arnold's work is a sense of right resulting in a spontaneous temperance which bears no mark of curb or snaffle, but obeys the hand with imperceptible submission and gracious reserve. Other and older poets are to the full as vivid, as incisive and impressive ; others have a more pungent colour, a more trenchant outline ; others as deep knowledge and as fervid enjoyment of natural things. But no one has in like measure that tender and final quality of touch which tempers the excessive light and suffuses the refluent shade ; which as it were washes with soft air the sides of the earth, steeps with dew of quiet and dyes with colours of repose the ambient ardour of noon, the fiery affluence of evening.

Down to " refluent shade" we are simply delighted with so artistic a delineation of Mr. Arnold's style, but then we get to a rush of ad- jectives which have the effect of entirely drowning Mr. Arnold, and making us hold our breath at the lavish wealth of language of his gorgeous critic. "Ambient ardour of noon" and "fiery affluence of evening" seem expressly intended to extinguish the remem- brance of Mr. Arnold's delicate and temperate touch. Mr. Swin- burne cannot bear to rest in the cool shower of Mr. Arnold's placid truthfulness ; he feels that he must blaze out upon it like the sun, and light up in it the many-coloured bow of his own more splendid genius.

The utter incapacity of Mr. Swinburne, with all his fine apercus, for the mood of criticism,—a mood which must be self- forgetting, or at least self-remembering only where it is jarred by a fault of judgment and art in its object,—is shown in nothing more remarkably than his pert digressions from his subject simply to strike a blow or interpolate an irrelevant sneer. Thus, in writing on Mr. Arnold's " Empedocles " and his grand pagan " self-sufficience," as he prefers to call it (on the ground that self- sufficiency is already stamped with an accent. of reproach), he says :- I take leave to forge this word, because "self-sufflcingness " is a compound of too barbaric sound, and " self-sufflciency " has fallen into a form of reproach. Archbishop Trench has pointed out bow and why a word which to the ancient Greek si,gnified a noble virtue came to signify to the modern Christian the base vice of presumption. I do not stOthat human language has gained by this change of meaning, or that the later mood of mind which dictated this debasement of the word is at all in advance of the older, or indicative of any spiritual im- provement; rather the alteration seems to me a loss and discredit, and the tone of thought which made the quality venerable more sound and wise than that which declares it vile.

This is rather like a schoolboy's irreverent taste for making im- pertinent signs at the authorities of his home or school. It has nothing to do with the drift of the criticism, and as Mr. Swin- burne has never shown the slightest sign of spiritual insight into either Christian ideas, or Christian ethics, or Christian sentiment, as there is no vestige of his ever having passed through even a phase of temporary sympathy with the highest literature of the last eighteen centuries, this .childish little gesture of irrelevant pertness can derive not the slightest force from his unques- tionable genius. The whole article is marred and spotted by this restless vanity, which is always driving Mr. Swinburne into little digressions of moral grimace. What, for example, should have induced him, by way of illustrating Mr. Arnold's happy executive skill as a poet, to go off into the following digression on the theory of dumb poets' and handless painters,' unless it be the pleasure of the sneer at an exquisite poet who died in his youth, with which it is illustrated ? It is as foreign to the subject of the article as a fly to the amber in which it is preserved, and a very nasty fly in amber it seems to us :-

There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate. It is the mere impudence of weakness to arrogate the name of poet or painter with no other claim than a susceptible and impressible sense of outward or inward beauty, producing an impotent desire to paint or sing. The poets that are made by nature are not many; and whatever " vision " an aspirant may possess, he has not the "divine faculty" if he cannot use his vision to any poetic purpose. There is no cant more pernicious to such as these, more wearisome to all other men, than that which asserts the reverse. It is a drug which weakens the feeble and intoxi- cates the drunken ; which makes those swagger who have not learnt to walk, and teach who have not been taught to learn. Such talk as this of Wordsworth's is the poison of poor 130110.13 like David Gray. Men listen, and depart with the belief that they have this faculty or this vision which alone, they are told, makes the poet; and once imbued with that belief, soon pass or slide from the inarticulate to the articu- late stage of debility and disease. Inspiration foiled and impotent is a piteous thing enough, but friends and teachers of this sort make it ridiculous as well. A man can no more win a place among poets by dreaming of it or lusting after it than he can win by dream or desire a woman's beauty or a king's command ; and those encourage him to fill his belly with the east wind who feign to accept the will for the deed, and treat inarticulate or inadequate pretenders as actual associates in art. The Muses can bear children and Apollo can give crowns to those only who are able to win the crown and beget the child; but in the school of theoretic sentiment it is apparently believed that this can be done by wishing.

We are inclined to accept (with some wonder, and a good deal of allowance for the spirit of opposition which breathes in Mr. Swin- burne's panegyrics on poets of no name) our critie'spositive insights, —though he does overdo his ecstasies, as, for instance, concerning Miss Christina Rossetti, who, it appears, could, with any one verse

or word, "absorb and consume" Eugenie de Guerin, "as a sun- beam of the fiery heaven, a dew drop of the dawning earth." We are disposed to think sincerely that the fault must be in ourselves, U we have read with faint interest and no admiration poems in which Mr. Swinburne can feel so much delight as he certainly does in a hymn of Miss Roasetti's. But we do not feel the slightest respect for his incidental sneers, like that at David Gray. There are several of David Gray's sonnets which, with all our reverence for Mr. Arnold, seem to us far above any of Mr. Arnold's sonnets, except the one great sonnet on Sophocles. Many of David Gray's, —for example, the one ending, I weigh the loaded hours till life is bare,

0 God! for one clear day, a snow drop, and sweet air !

will live as long as English literature. In fact, so far from being a dumb poet, David Gray's powers of sweet, clear, low music of language have rarely been equalled. Nothing shows us how Mr. Swinburne's fine critical apercus are prevented from developing into anything like a fair, tranquil, critical insight, more than these horrid blotches, needlessly and disastrously spotted over his essay, apparently for mere caprice or pique.

There is another sort of digression with which Mr. Swinburne laboriously spoils what has in it the materials of a very fine essay, and that is the digression in search of indecency. To that we are so accustomed in him, that we shall only point out that his elaborate pleasantries on the French Academy, as a Delilah on whose bosom Mr. Arnold is to be betrayed and shorn of his strength, will seem to most of his readers, perhaps the most unpleasant and inartistic blotch contained in -this curious mixture of delicate insights, and gaudy, flaunting, impure taste. Nothing shows more completely how little his mind is filled with his subject—Mr. Arnold—than this squeal of vulgar merriment over his own cleverness in drawing Mr. Arnold as the lover of a French literary file de joie.

The truth is, that Mr. Swinburne, with the rarest faculty for special critical insights, can never succeed as a critic while he -continues to let the image of himself be continually flitting between his eye and the object on which it is cast. This dancing image is constantly irritating hire into affected eloquence, false digressions, meaningless impertinence, and eager indecency. There is no more irritating task than reading such an article as this. One must read it,—for its occasional touches of wonderful genius,—but it is like applying a sort of literary cantharides to one's mind, to read these patched and blotched and disfigured criticisms on one whose own critical nature is so perfectly tempered and refined, by a man .capable of discerning this temperance and refinement, but wholly incapable of emulating them.