metres that Swinburne's beautiful music seems to me most worthy, most controlled, and most lovely. There is his best dignity, and therefore his best beauty. For even beauty is not to be thrust upon us; she is not to solicit us or offer herself thus to the first comer; and in the most admired of those flying lyrics she is thus immoderately lavish of herself. "He lays himself out," wrote Francis Thompson in an anonymous criticism of which I am glad to make known the authorship. "to delight and seduce. The great poets entice by a glorious accident

but allurement, in Mr. Swinburne's poetry, is the alpha and omega." This is true of all that he has written, but it is true, in a more fatal sense, of these famous tunes of his "music." Nay, delicate as they are, we are convinced that it is the less delicate ear that most surely takes much pleasure in them, the dull ear that chiefly they delight.

Compare with such luxurious jingles the graver music of this "Vision of Spring in Winter":

Sunrise it sees not, neither set of star, Large nightfall, nor imperial plenilune,

Nor strong sweet shape of the fullbreasted noon;

But where the silver-sandalled shadows are,

Too soft for arrows of the sun to mar, Moves with the mild gait of an ungrown moon.

Even more valuable than this exquisite rhymed stanza is the blank verse which Swinburne released into new energies, new liberties, and new movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who know how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English heroic line. His most majestic hand undid the mechanical bonds of the national line and

made it obey the unwritten laws of his genius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels the strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But if the practice of some of the poets succeeding him had tended to make it rigid and tame again, Swinburne was a new liberator. He writes when he ought, with a finely appropriate regularity, as in the lovely line on the forest glades

That fear the faun's and know the dryad's foot,

in which the rule is completely kept, every step of the five stepping from the unaccented place to the accented without a tremor. (I must again protest that I use the word "accent" in a sense that has come to be adapted to English prosody, because it is so used by all writers on English metre, and is therefore understood by the reader, but I think "stress" the better word.) But having written this perfect English-iambic line so wonderfully fit for the sensitive quiet of the woods, he turns the page to the onslaught of such lines-heroic lines with a difference-as report the shortbreathed messenger's reply to Althea's question by whose hands the boar of Calydon had died:

Sometimes we may be troubled with a misgiving that Swinburne's fine narrative, as well as his descriptive writing of other kinds, has a counterpart in the programme-music of the new composers. It is even too descriptive,

too imitative of things, and seems to outrun the province of words, somewhat as that does the province of notes. But, though this hunting, and checking, and floating, and flying in metre may be to strain the arts of prosody and diction, with how masterly a hand is the straining accomplished! The spear, the arrow, the attack, the charge, the footfall, the pinion, nay, the very stepping of the moon, the walk of the wind, are mimicked in this enchanting verse. Like to programme-music we must call it, but I wish the concert-platform had ever justified this slight perversion of aim, this excess-almost corruption-of one kind of skill, thus miraculously well.

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Now, if Swinburne's exceptional faculty of diction led him to immoderate expressiveness, to immodest sweetness, to a jugglery, and prestidigitation, and conjuring of words, to transformations and transmutations sound-if, I say, his extraordinary gift of diction brought him to this exaggeration of the manner, what a part does it not play in the matter of his poetry! So overwhelming a place does it take in this man's art that I believe the words to hold and use his meaning, rather than the meaning to compass and grasp and use the word. I believe that Swinburne's thoughts have their source, their home, their origin, their authority and mission in those two places his own vocabulary and the passion of other men. This is a grave charge.

First, then, in regard to the passion of other men. I have given to his own emotion the puniest name I could find for it; I have no nobler name for his intellect. But other men

had thoughts, other men had passions; political, sexual, natural, noble, vile, ideal, gross, rebellious, agonizing, imperial, republican, cruel, compassionate; and with these he fed his verses. Upon these and their life he sustained, he fattened, he enriched his poetry. Mazzini in Italy, Gautier and Baudelaire in France, Shelley in England, made for him a base of passionate and intellectual supplies. With them he kept the all-necessary line of communication. We cease, as we see their active hearts possess his active art to think a question as to his sincerity seriously worth asking; what sincerity he has is so absorbed in the one excited act of receptivity. That, indeed, he performs with all the will, all the precipitation, all the rush, all the surrender, all the whole-hearted weakness of his subservient and impetuous nature. I have not named the Greeks, nor the English Bible, nor Milton, as his inspirers. These he would claim; they are not his. He received too partial, too fragmentary, too arbitrary an inheritance of the Greek spirit, too illusory an idea of Milton, of the English Bible little more than a tone;-this poet of eager, open capacity, this poet who is little more intellectually, than a tooready, too-vacant capacity, for those three august severities has not room enough.

Charged, then, with other men's purposes-this man's Italian patriotism, this man's hatred of God (by that name, for God has been denied, as a fiction, but Swinburne and his prompters temporarily acknowledge Him to detest Him), this man's love of sin (by that name, for sin has been denied, as an illusion, but Swinburne, following Baudelaire, acknowledges it to love it), this man's despite against the Third Empire or what not, this man's cry for a liberty granted or gained long agoa cry grown vain, this man's contempt

for the Boers-nay, was it so much as a man, with a man's evil to answer for, that furnished him here; was it not rather that less guilty fool, the crowd?—this man's-nay, this boy's— erotic sickness, or his cruelty-charged with all these, Swinburne's poetry is primed; it explodes with thunder and fire. But such fraternity is somewhat too familiar for dignity; such community of goods parodies the Franciscans. As one friar goes darned for another's rending, having no property in cassock or cowl, so does many a poet, not in humility, but in a paradox of pride, boast of the past of oth

ers.

And yet one might rather choose to make use of one's fellow-men's old shoes rather than to put their old secrets to usufruct, and dress poetry in a motley of past passions, twice corrupt. Promiscuity of love we have heard of; Pope was accused, by Lord Hervey's indignation and wit, of promiscuity of hatred, and of scattering his disfavors in the stews of an indiscriminate malignity; and here is another promiscuity-that of memories, and of a licence partaken.

But by the unanimous poets' splendid love of the landscape and the skies, by this also was Swinburne possessed, and in this he triumphed. By this, indeed, he profited; here he joined an innumerable company of that heavenly host of earth. Let us acknowledge his honorable alacrity here, his quick fellowship, his magnificent adoption, his filial tenderness-nay, his fraternal union with his poets. No tourist's admiration for all things French, no tourist's politics in Italy-and Swinburne's French and Italian admirations have the tourist manner of enthusiasmprompts him here. Here he aspires to brotherhood with the supreme poets of supreme England, with the sixteenth century, the seventeenth, and the nineteenth, the impassioned centuries of song. Happy is he to be admit

ted among these, happy is he to merit by his wonderful voice to sing their raptures. Here is no humiliation in ready-made lendings; their ecstasy becomes him. He is glorious with them, and we can imagine this benign and indulgent Nature confounding together the sons she embraces, and making her poets-the primary and the secondary, the greater and the lesser-all equals in her arms. Let us see him in that company where he looks noble amongst the noble; let us not look upon him in the company of the ignoble, where he looks ignobler still, being servile to them; let us look upon him with the lyrical Shakespeare, with Vaughan, Blake, Wordsworth, Patmore, Meredith; not with Baudelaire and Gautier; with the poets of the forest and the sun, and not with those of the alcove. We can make peace with him for love of them; we can imagine them thankful to him who, poor and perverse in thought in so many pages, could yet join them in such a song as this:

And her heart sprang in Iseult, and she drew

With all her spirit and life the sunrise through,

And through her lips the keen triumphant air,

Sea-scented, sweeter than land-roses were,

And through her eyes the whole rejoicing east

Sun-satisfied, and all the heaven at feast

Spread for the morning; and the imperious mirth

Of wind and light that moved upon the earth,

Making the spring, and all the fruitful might

And strong regeneration of delight That swells the seedling leaf and sapling man.

He, nevertheless, who was able, in high company, to hail the sea with such fine verse, was not ashamed, in low

company, to sing the famous absurdities about "the lilies and languors of virtue and the roses and raptures of vice," with many and many a passage of like character. I think it more generous, seeing I have differed so much from the chorus of excessive praise, to quote little from the vacant, the paltry, the silly-no word is so fit as that last little word-among his pages. Therefore, I have justified my praise, but not my blame. It is for the reader to turn to the justifying pages: to "A Song of Italy," "Les Noyades," "Hermaphroditus," "Satia te Sanguine," "Kissing her Hair," "An Interlude," "In a Garden," or such a stanza as the one beginning

O thought illimitable and infinite heart Whose blood is life in limbs indissolute

That all keep heartless thine invisible part

And inextirpable thy viewless root Whence all sweet shafts of green and each thy dart

Of sharpening leaf and bud resundering shoot.

It is for the reader who has preserved rectitude of intellect, sincerity of heart, dignity of nerves, unhurried thoughts, an unexcited heart, and an ardor for poetry, to judge between these poems and an authentic passion, between these poems and truth, I will add between these poems and beauty.

Having had recourse to the passion of stronger minds for his provision of emotions, Swinburne had direct recourse to his own vocabulary as a kind of treasury wherein he stored what he needed for a song. Claudius stole the precious diadem of the kingdom from a shelf and put it in his pocket; Swinburne took from the shelf of literature-took with what art, what touch, what cunning, what complete skill!-the treasure of the lan

guage, and put it in his pocket.

Into the pocket he thrusts urgently for his hate in the word "blood," for his wrath in the word "fire," for his wildness (he is anxious for his wildness) in the word "foam" with hyphenjoined companions, for his sweetness in the word "flower," also much linked, so that "flower-soft" has almost become his, and not Shakespeare's. For in that compound he labors to exaggerate Shakespeare, and by his insistence and iteration goes about to spoil for us the "flower-soft hands" of Cleopatra's rudder-maiden; but he shall not spoil Shakespeare's phrase for us. And, behold, in all this fundamental fumbling Swinburne's later critics see nothing but a "mannerism," if they see even thus much offence.

One of the chief pocket-words was "Liberty." Who, it has been well asked by a citizen of a modern free country, is thoroughly free except a fish? Et encore even the "silent and footless herds" may have more inter-accommodation than we are aware. But in the pocket of the secondary poet how easy and how ready a word is this, a word implying old and true heroisms, but significant now of an excitable poet's economies. Yes, economies of thought and passion. This poet, who is conspicuously the poet of excess, is in deeper truth the poet of penury and defect.

What, finally, is his influence upon the language he has ransacked? A temporary laying-waste, undoubtedly. That is, the contemporary use of his Vocabulary is spoilt, his beautiful words are wasted, spent, squandered, gaspillés. The contemporary use-I will not say the future use, for no critic should prophesy. But the past he has not been able to violate. He has had no power to rob of their freshness the sixteenth century flower, the seventeenth century fruit, or by his