SWINBURNE has fallen upon evil days. When his poems

were banned from all polite libraries and ardent youths looked upon him as the liberator of the human race, the greatest of all free spirits, redeeming poetry from the dreary conven- tions of the Laureate, redeeming thought from the rigidity of Christian morals, redeeming the world from an infinity of black and Borgia-like tyrants—who could have expected the shouting to die down and Swinburne, of all things, to be considered dull ? This is the inversion that Mr. Nicolson records : " Swinburne, who to his contemporaries was ' the most exciting thing that ever happened ' appears to our later generations as almost unutterably dull." Once the gentle and charitable Mr. Punch had been outraged into referring to him as " Mr. Swineborn." On the other hand Ruskin, although frightened of the " Demoniac youth," was htimble and self-effacing before his genius.

" He is infinitely above me in all knowledge 'and power, and I should no more think of advising him or criticizing him thaw of venturing to do it to Turner if he were alive again. He is simply one of the mightiest scholars of the age in Europe ; in power of imagination and understandinehe simply sweeps me away before

him as a torrent over a pebble. righter than he is—so are the lambs and the swallows, but they're not his match."

Yet it is very notable in our own time that the most intelligent of our literary critics have little to say of Swinburne-.

He hardly enters into their canon. Some survivors of those bright days relive their early enthusiasm and fail to -observe their singularity. And, of course, Swinburne is down in the Corpus Poetarum . and leaves behind him the superstition of a name. But when he .is mentioned by critics other than the last Great Victorians, for the most part it is with-low-toned, apology or faint contempt. • The fact is that from almost all Swinburne's work the content has dropped out. This is odd and significant ; for revolu-

tionary sentiment and the denunciation of -restrictions never- in themselves become. old-fashioned. Obviously there must have been a lack of power and depth in Swinburne's advocacy..

Meredith hit off this lack very neatly when he asserted that

Swinburne was devoid. of " an internal centre." - brought. nothing but a prodigality of enthusiasm and grand words to- the ideas which he repeated. An easy melody, which many readers found intoxicating, was continuous .in all his poems:- Swinburne himself thought that he possessed the acutest • " car " of all our English poets ; but his verdict needs huge

qualifications.

There are two main streams of prosody in our poets ; there are poets whose music consists in fluency and smoothness of sound—Crashaw, Spenser, and Swinburne are paramount ;. Shelley can be placed among them, especially for his lyrics.. There are others whose music is continually in discord and

the resolutions of discord, strife of consonants, dissonance, and an occasional opening out, in a line here and there, to simplicity and melody. The first class tries, on the whole, to weaken the consonantal effects by the employment.. of liquids"-end _seg.-vowels and by avoiding words which arc heavily " instressed." The second class finds an infinitely sturdier and richer harmony in sharply contrasted sounds, in comparatively varied and broken rhythms. On the whole their words are more muscular, vivid and sensuous ; they are poets of detailed- ecstasy of thought or of quick observation. Donne is almost too wholly a " dissonant " poet to be typical ; Shakespeare is, perhaps, the best example. And to a poet of this kind Swinburne would no doubt seem to have possessed

the worst ear in the history of poetry ; his sense of music would seem unforgivably vulgar.

Mr. Nicolson has. made a most tactful attempt to reinstate Swinburne in critical estimation. He has taken the wisest course of all—to acknowledge Swinburne's faults, even expatiate on them, and advise his readers to observe what remains when all criticism has been allowed. To any reader with a real distaste for Swinburne thiS will be difficult ; for

at least Swinburne was consistent enough 'alwaYS to display

the same faults,'aral it is useless d search for a poem in a non-Swinburnian manner. Perhaps Atalanta in Calydon is the least :verbose . M Swinburne's -pdeins ; but it is precisely this poem that Browning dismissed as a " fuzz of words." Even Swinbufne's parodies are very reeognizably

Swinburne. Another prejudice, hard to overcome, is not so definitely to be laid to Swinburne's own account) It happens that Swinburne is easy to imitate ; a host of peculiarly bad poets have written in his manner, with even more febrility and emptiness ; and it is a laborious process to forget those echoes when. Swinburne himself is being read.

Admit, then, that .Swinburne had no intellectual stamina) no ability to bear emotional tension and speak quietly of it, no consciousness of distinctions and hard lights in nature and ijklife ; admit that his rebellions are vague and theoretical.; that his moods are self-intoxications, that his technique is narrow and facile ; admit that his experience is thin and that he was_ incapable of co-ordination—is anything left to him at all ? There is still. something in Swinburne of magnitude, and something which is miserably to seek in our own time, He had a passionate desire for largeness of breath and greatness of conception. Some sincerity, and even a struggle to attain gigantic sincerity, can be heard in his poems. If it were possible to have a great man without substance, then Swinburne might be he.

It is strange that a critic will often catch an infection of style from the author he is discussing. Mi. Nicolson generally writes in an orderly and sober prose ; but here and there in his new book he catches a fit of Swinburnianism and talks of white bright light or some such banality. More amusing than this, he will break unconsciously into highly-mannered blank verse, comparing, for example, a passage from Anactoria to

" the salt, sad savour of-a tideless sea.".

But this is no great defect ; and" Mr. Nicolson proceeds with such care in judgment and such lucidity in expression that we cannot -be anything but grateful to him: His book perhaps, the first extended study of . Swinburne that earl claim to be critical.