Algernon Charles Swinburne

“ We live in an age when not to be scientific is to be nothing; the man untrained in science, though he should speak with the tongues of men and of angels, though he should know all that man may know of the history of men and their works in time past, though he should have nourished on the study of their noblest examples in art and literature whatever he may have of natural intelligence, is but a pitiable and worthless pretender in the sight of professors to whom natural science is not a mean but an end ”

“ No one now writes or speaks as if he supposed that every man born in what is called the aristocratic class must needs and naturally, if he should make verses, take his place beside Shelley or Byron; the assumption would be felt on all hands as an impertinence rather than a compliment offered to that class; and how can it be other than an impertinence offered to a larger class to assume, or pretend to assume, that any one born in the opposite rank who may be put forward as a poet must naturally be the equal of Béranger or of Burns? ”

“ It is no light thing for a man who has any interest in the poetic production of his time to be ignorant of works which have won from the critic, who of all others must be most competent to speak on the subject with the authority of the most intimate acquaintance, such eloquence of praise as has deservedly been lavished on Mr. Buchanan. A living critic of no less note in the world of letters than himself has drawn public attention to the deep and delicate beauties of his work ”

“ In the name of all divine persons that ever did or did not exist, what on earth or in heaven would the critic in such a case expect? Is it from the believers in a particular god or gods that he would look for exposure and denunciation of their especial creed? Would it be natural and rational for a man to attack and denounce a name he believes in or a person he adores, unnatural and irrational to attack and denounce by name a godhead or a gospel he finds incredible and abominable to him? ”

“ It is not enough in their eyes to admit that all study of details is precious or necessary to help us to a larger and surer knowledge of the whole; that without the invaluable support and illumination of practical research and physical science, the human intellect must still as of old go limping and blinking on its way nowhither, lame of one foot at best and blind of one eye ”

“ It is not more praiseworthy or more pardonable to write bad verse about costermongers and gaol-birds than to write bad verse about kings and knights; nor (as would otherwise naturally be the case) is it to be expected that because some among the greatest of poets have been born among the poorest of men, therefore the literature of a nation is to suffer joyfully an inundation or eruption of rubbish from all threshers, cobblers, and milkwomen who now, as in the age of Pope, of Johnson, or of Byron, may be stung to madness by the gadfly of poetic ambition. ”

“ If the word Democracy mean anything—and to Whitman it means much—beyond the mere profession of a certain creed, the mere iteration of a certain shibboleth; if it signify first the cyclic life and truth of equal and various humanity, and secondly the form of principles and relations, the code of duties and of rights, by which alone adult society can walk straight; surely in the first and greatest sense there has never been, and never can be a book so infinitely democratic as the Plays of Shakespeare. ”

“ There is the critic who believes that no good thing can come out of such a Nazarene generation as the men of his own time; and there is the critic who believes first in himself alone, and through himself in the gods or godlings of his worship and the eggs or nestlings hatched or addled under the incubation of his patronage. Between these two kinds there rages a natural warfare as worthy of a burlesque poet as any batrachomyomachy that ever was fought out. ”

“ Buchanan. Can a figure more pitiful or more shameful be conceived? The only atonement that can ever be made for such a rascally form of malevolence is that which is here offered in the way of confession and penance; the only excuse that can be advanced for such a viperous method of attack is that envy and hatred of his betters have ever been the natural signs and the inevitable appanages of a bad poet, whether he had studied in the fleshly or the skinny school. ”

“ Effeminate therefore I suppose the modern poetry of England must be content to remain; but there is a poet alive of now acknowledged eminence, not hitherto assailed on this hand, about whom the masked or barefaced critics of the minute are not by any means of one mind—if mind we are to call the organ which forms and produces their opinions. To me it seems that the truth for good and evil has never yet been spoken about Walt Whitman. There are in him two distinct men of most inharmonious kinds; a poet and a formalist. ”

“ We read, and regret that ever the fascination of verse should have so effectually closed our eyes and ears against all perception of these deplorable qualities in a poet whose name we have cherished from our childhood; and as we read there rises before us the august and austere vision of a man well stricken in years, but of life unspotted from the world, pure as a child in word and thought, stern as an apostle in his rebuke of youthful wantonness or maturer levity ”

“ Tennyson's heroine for a lover so much beneath her noble and faithful husband is as mean an instance as any day can show in its newspaper reports of a common woman's common sin. In the old story, the king, with the doom denounced in the beginning by Merlin hanging over all his toils and triumphs as a tragic shadow, stands apart in no undignified patience to await the end in its own good time of all his work and glory, with no eye for the pain and passion of the woman who sits beside him as queen rather than as wife. Such a figure is not unfit for the centre of a tragic action ”

“ I could never understand, and certainly I could never admire, the habit of mind or the form of energy which finds work and vent in demonstration or proclamation of the incompetence for all good of other men; but much less can I admire or understand the impulse which would thrust a man forward to shriek out in reply some assertion of his own injured merit and the value of the work which he for instance has done for the world even in this much maligned generation. ”

“ As in one rank we find for a single Byron a score of Roscommons, Mulgraves, and Winchilseas, so in another rank we find for a single Burns a score of Ducks, Bloomfields, and Yearsleys. And if it does not follow that a poet must be great if he be but of low birth, neither does it follow that a poem must be good if it be but written on a subject of low life. The sins and sorrows of all that suffer wrong, the oppressions that are done under the sun, the dark days and shining deeds of the poor whom society casts out and crushes down, are assuredly material for poetry of a most high order ”

“ Whether the men of this time be men of a great age or a small is not a matter to be decided by their own assertion or denial; but in any case a man of any generation can keep his hand and foot out of the perpetual wrangle and jangle of "the petty fools of rhyme who shriek and sweat in pigmy jars," which recur in every age of literature with a pitiful repetition of the same cries and catchwords. ”

“ To that strong and severe figure we turn from the sexless and nerveless company of shrill-voiced singers who share with Milton the curse of enforced effeminacy; from the pitiful soprano notes of such dubious creatures as Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Gray, Coleridge, Shelley, Landor, "cum semiviro comitatu," we avert our ears to catch the higher and manlier harmonies of a poet with all his natural parts and powers complete. ”

“ It is vain to reply, while admitting that truth cannot be reached by men who take no due account of facts, that each fact is not all the truth, each limb is not all the body, each thought is not all the mind; and that even men (if such there be) ignorant of everything but what other men have written may possibly not be ignorant of everything worth knowledge, destitute of every capacity worth exercise. One study alone, and one form of study, is worthy the time and the respect of men who would escape the contempt of their kind. ”

“ He is resolved that his country shall not always have cause to complain how little she knows of her greatest sons. Time may have hidden from the eye of biography the facts of Shakespeare's life, as time has revealed to the eye of criticism the grossness of his works and the purity of his rival's; but none need fear that the next age will have to lament the absence of materials for a life of Buchanan. Not once or twice has he told in simple prose of his sorrows and aspirations, his struggles and his aims. ”

“ We have been looking up too long from the microscope; it is time to look in again and take note of the subject. We find indeed one American name on which our weekly critics cluster in swarms of praise; one poet whom they who agree in nothing else but hate agree to love and laud as king of American verse; who has sung, they tell us, a song at last truly national and truly noble. ”

“ It is not the mere fluid melody of dulcet and facile verse that is wanting to him; that he might want and be none the worse for want of it; it is the inner sense of harmony which cannot but speak in music, the innate and spiritual instinct of sweetness and fitness and exaltation which cannot but express itself in height and perfection of song. ”

“ We cannot hang upon the actor's lips with the same breathless attention when we know not whether it be master or pupil who speaks behind the mask. What in the elder actor was a natural gift of personation is but an empirical knack of imitation in his copyist. At least we would fain know for certain whether the moral gambols performed before us are those of the old showman or his ape. Or say that we come thither as to church or lecture: it cannot tend to edification that we should not know whom we sit under. ”

“ These among others are reasons why I think it foolish to talk of Whitman as the probable founder of a future school of poetry unlike any other in matter as in style. He has many of the qualities of a reformer; he has perhaps none of the qualities of a founder. For one thing, he is far too didactic to be typical; the prophet in him too frequently subsides into the lecturer. He is not one of the everlasting models; but as an original and individual poet, it is at his best hardly possible to overrate him; as an informing and reforming element, it is absolutely impossible. ”

“ If it should ever be a clerical writer, whether of the regular or the secular order—an amateur who officiates by choice or by chance, or a registered official whose services are duly salaried—that may happen to review a book in which you may happen to have touched unawares on some naked nerve of his religious feeling or professional faith, you are not moved to any surprise or anger that he should liken you to a boy rolling in a puddle, or laugh at you in pity as he throws aside in disgust the proof of your fatuous' ignorance ”

“ The poet of democracy must sing all things alike? let him sing them then, whether in rhyme or not is no matter, [2] but in rhythm he must needs sing them. What is true of all poets is among them all most markedly true of Whitman, that his manner and his matter grow together; that where you catch a note of discord there you will find something wrong inly, the natural source of that outer wrongdoing; wherever you catch a note of good music you will surely find that it came whence only it could come, from some true root of music in the thought or thing spoken. ”

“ I imagine, gathered about the pulpit, a little flock of penitents who come gladly to be admonished, who ask nothing better than to be convinced of sin, who listen humbly to the pastoral rebuke, accept meekly the paternal chastisement, of the preacher who summons them before him to judgment; what will be their consternation if they have cause to suspect that it is not an orthodox shepherd of souls whose voice of warning is in their ears, but a new-comer who has climbed into the sheepfold! ”