Algernon Charles Swinburne

“ For all this, notwithstanding, the watchword of the poem is hope, and not despair. "All this horror has hope in it; the ice-cold morning chills the sky-line as with fear; at times the day begins with such a shudder that the rising sun seems a masked attack.—The coming wave of the unknown has but a dull and livid transparence, into which the light comes but by degrees; what it shows us, seems to float and drift in folds immeasurable. The expansion of form and number appals us, and it is horrible to see to-day in the darkness what ought only to be seen to-morrow." ”

“ Rossetti's magnificent lyric faculty. Full of fire and music and movement, delicate as moonlight and passionate as sunlight, fresh as dawn and fine as air, sonorous as the motion of deep waters, the infallible verse bears up the spirit safe and joyous on its wide clear way. There is a strength and breadth of style about these poems also which ennobles their sweetness and brightness, giving them a perfume that savours of no hotbed, but of hill-flowers that face the sea and the sunrise; a colour that grows in no greenhouse, but such as comes with morning upon the mountains. ”

“ That, in a most close and exact symbol, is the best possible definition I can give of Victor Hugo's genius. And the impression of that hour was upon me the impression of his mind; physical, as it touched the nerves with a more vivid passion of pleasure than music or wine; spiritual, as it exalted the spirit with the senses and above them to the very summit of vision and delight. It is no fantastic similitude, but an accurate likeness of two causes working to the same effect. There is nothing but that delight like the delight given by some of his work. ”

“ But in all great poets there must be an ardent harmony, a heat of spiritual life guiding without constraining the bodily grace of motion, which shall give charm and power to their least work; sweetness that cannot be weak and force that will not be rough. There must be an instinct and a resolution of excellence which will allow no shortcoming or malformation of thought or word: there must also be so natural a sense of right as to make any such deformity or defect impossible, and leave upon the work done no trace of any effort to avoid or to achieve. ”

“ Assuredly, as the Master has said himself in that majestic prose poem inscribed with the name of Shakespeare, the mightiest mountains can outmatch even for flowers the valleys whose whole business is to rear them; their blossoming ravines and hollows full of April can beat the meadows at their own trade; the strongest of singers are the sweetest, and no poet of the idyllic or elegiac kind can rival even on his own peculiar ground, for tender grace and delicacy of beauty, the most potent poets of a higher order, sovereigns of lyric and of tragic song. ”

“ Evil and good, and things and men, are in his hands as clay in the potter's, and he moulds them to the use and purpose of his art alone. What men are, and what their doings and their sufferings, he shows you face to face, and not as in a glass darkly; to you he leaves it to comment on the action and passion set before you, to love or hate, applaud or condemn, the agents and the patients of his mundane scheme, wide as time and space, hell-deep and heaven-high. ”

“ He cannot at once be sure whether he does right to go forward or not. It is not that he too feels the rising tide of the bitter waters of shame; it is not that he too sees a "star grow lesser in heaven." It is, if I may take up the poet's metaphor, that he sees the crowning star of a long night now dilated to a sun through the thunderclouds of the morning. He knows that this fire in heaven is indeed the fire of day; but he finds no fitting words of welcome or thanksgiving to salute so terrible a sunrise. Once more we receive from the hands of our supreme poet a book full of light and music ”

“ Cruel and curious and ignorant, all their faces are full of mean beauty and shallow delight. Hard by, a troop of Loves haul after them, with mocking mouths and straining arms, a live human mask, a hollow face shorn off from the head, old and grim and sad, worn through and through with pain and time, from the vexed forehead to the sharp chin which grates against the ground; the eyes and lips full of suffering, sardonic and helpless; the face of one knowing his own fate, who has resigned himself sadly and scornfully to the violence of base and light desires ”

“ At Florence only can one trace and tell how great a painter and how various he was. There only but surely there can the influence and pressure of the things of time on his immortal spirit be understood; how much of him was killed or changed, how much of him could not be. There are the first-fruits of his flowering manhood, when the bright and buoyant genius in him had free play and large delight in its handiwork; when the fresh interest of invention was still his, and the dramatic sense, the pleasure in the play of life, the power of motion and variety ”

“ By the depth and exaltation of its dominant idea, by the rapture of the music and the glory of the colour which clothe with sound and splendour the subtle and luminous body of its thought, by the harmony of its most passionate notes and the humanity of its most godlike raptures, it holds a foremost place in the works of that poet who has now for two generations ruled and moulded the hearts and minds of all among his countrymen to whom the love of poetry has been more than a fancy or a fashion ”

“ Son of Goliath or son of Jesse, this David or Samson or Jephthah of our days, the man who has taught our hands to war and our fingers to fight against the Philistines, must as a poet have sat long and reverently at the feet of their Gamaliel. And as when there is a high and pure genius on either side a man cannot but get good from the man he admires, and as it was so in this case if ever in any, he must have got good from that source over and above the certain and common good which the sense of reverence does to us all. ”

“ Garnett for Shelley has opened for us to enter and possess for ever; where the pleadings of Christ and Satan alternate as the rising and setting of stars in the abyss of luminous sound and sonorous light. We have now but to await the final gift of a perfect and critical edition of the whole works, the supreme tribute of love and worship yet owing to the master singer of our modern race and age; to the poet beloved above all other poets, being beyond all other poets—in one word, and the only proper word—divine. ”

“ His genius was so great, and in its greatness so many-sided, that for some studious disciples of the rarer kind he will doubtless, seen from any possible point of view, have always something about him of the old magnetism and magic. The ardour, delicacy, energy of his intellect, his resolute desire to get at the roots of things and deeper yet, if deeper might be, will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould and temper. But as a poet his place is indisputable. It is high among the highest of all time. ”

“ Itself the flower of a splendid youth, it has the special charm for youth of fresh first work and opening love; "the dew of its birth is of the womb of the morning;" it has the odour and colour of cloudless air, the splendour of an hour without spot. The divine admixtures of earth which humanize its heavenly passion have the flavour and bloom upon them of a maiden beauty, the fine force of a pure first sunrise. No poem shows more plainly the strength and wealth of the workman's lavish yet studious hand. ”

“ Of all Coleridge's poems the loveliest is assuredly "Christabel." It is not so vast in scope and reach of imagination as the "Ancient Mariner;" it is not so miraculous as "Kubla Khan;" but for simple charm of inner and outer sweetness it is unequalled by either. The very terror and mystery of magical evil is imbued with this sweetness; the witch has no less of it than the maiden; their contact has in it nothing dissonant or disfiguring, nothing to jar or to deface the beauty and harmony of the whole imagination. As for the melody, here again it is incomparable with any other poet's. ”

“ With all its great and affluent beauties, 'The Maid's Tragedy" leaves a less absolute and inevitable mark upon the mind of a student than "The Broken Heart." No poet is less forgetable than Ford; none fastens (as it were) the fangs of his genius and his will more deeply in your memory. You cannot shake hands with him and pass by; you can not fall in with him and out again at pleasure; if he touch you once he takes you, and what he takes he keeps his hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and parcel of your spiritual furniture for ever ”

“ Beauty may be strange, quaint, terrible, may play with pain as with pleasure, handle a horror till she leave it a delight; she forsakes not such among her servants as Webster or as Goya. No good art is unbeautiful; but much able and effective work may be, and is. Mere skill, mere thought and trouble, mere feeling or mere dexterity, will never on earth make a man painter or poet or artist in any kind. ”

“ Even of the giant-god his rival we cannot be sure that his divine faculties never clashed or crossed each other to their mutual hindrance.
But here, where both the sister powers serve in the temple of one mind and impel the work of one hand, their manner of service is smooth, harmonious, perfect; the splendid quality of painting and the subtle faculty of verse gain glory from each other without taking, reign side by side with no division of empire, yet with no confusion of claims, with no invasion of rights. No tongueless painter or handless poet could be safer from the perils of mixed art ”

“ The time was when all boys and girls who paddled in rhyme and dabbled in sentiment were wont to adore the presence or the memory of Byron with foolish faces of praise. It is of little moment to him or to us that they have long since ceased to cackle and begun to hiss. They have become used to better verse and carefuller workmen; and must be forgiven if after such training they cannot at once appreciate the splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength. Without these no poet can live ”

“ Rigour of judicial accuracy might refuse to this work the praise of a noble picture; for to that the final imprint and seal of beauty is requisite; and this beauty, if a man's hand be but there to bestow it, may be wrought out of homely or heavenly faces, out of rare things or common, out of Titian's women or Rembrandt's. It is not the lack of prettiness which lowers the level of a picture. Here for imagination we have but intellect, for charm of form we have but force of thought. Too much also is matter of mere memory ”

“ Before I pass on to speak of any other painter, I will here interpolate what I have to say of Mr. Watts's bust of Clytie. Not imitative, not even assimilative of Michel Angelo's manner, it yet by some vague and ineffable quality brings to mind his work rather than any Greek sculptor's. There is the same intense and fiery sentiment, the same grandeur of device, the same mystery of tragedy. The colour and the passion of this work are the workman's own. Never was a divine legend translated into diviner likeness. ”

“ With the intense and subtle beauty of this June landscape, where the witness could see no sympathy with the human trouble of the time, we may compare that former picture of the grim glory of a November sky after sunset, seen from the invested walls of Paris, when heaven did seem in harmony with the time, and the watcher saw there a reflection of war and mourning, from the west as white as a shroud to the east as black as a pall and along the line of horizon the likeness of a blood-red sword let fall from the hand of a god after some battle with a giant of equal stature. ”

“ In sureness of choice and scope of interest, in solidity of subject and sublimity of object, the general worth of his work excels the rate of other men's; he wastes no breath and mistakes no distance, sets his genius to no tasks unfit for it, and spends his strength in the culture of no fruitless fields. What he would do is always what a poet should, and what he would do is always done. Born a light-bearer and leader of men, he has always fulfilled his office with readiness and done his work with might. ”

“ The passion of the cast-off temptress, in whose nets of woven hair all the souls are entangled of her rival's sons through all their generations, has such actual and instant flame of wrath and brilliance of blood and fragrance of breath in it, that we feel face to face the very vision of the old tale, and no symbol or shadow, but a bodily shape and a fleshly charm, dominant in ear and eye. The tragic might of the myth, its fierce and keen significance, strikes through us sharpest at the end, as with the supreme sting of triumph and final fang of the transfigured serpent. ”

“ The poorest villager feels that it is not so small a thing that he should not be loth to lose the little that life can yield him. Let the wiser man, like him, trust without fear the joys that are; life has room for effort and enjoyment, though at sight of the evil and sorrow it includes one may have abjured false faith and foolish hope and fruitless fear.
The majesty and composure of thought and verse, the perfect clearness and competence of words, distinguish this from other poetry of the intellect now more approved and applauded. ”

“ Without spirit, without humour, without grace, it encumbers the scene as with dried and congealed filth. In the face of much exquisite work of painter and sculptor, poet and humourist, which is anything but conventionally decent, we cannot allow that art must needs "lean to virtue's side," and lend her voice or hand to swell the verdict or prop the pulpit of judge or moralist; but two things she cannot away with; by the very law of her life, by the very condition of her being, she is bound to reject whatever is brutal, whatever is prurient ”

“ Rossetti excels that of any English poet of our day. It has the fullest fervour and fluency of impulse, and the impulse is always towards harmony and perfection. It has 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 fire ”

“ These two poems have the fiery concentration and condensation of the ballad; but they have a higher rapture of imagination, a more ardent affluence of colour and strenuous dilation of spirit, than a ballad can properly contain; their wings of words beat and burn at fuller expansion through a keener air. The song of Lilith has all the beauty and glory and force in it of the splendid creature so long worshipped of men as god or dreaded as devil; the voluptuous swiftness and strength, the supreme luxury of liberty in its measured grace and lithe melodious motion of rapid and revolving harmony ”