Robert Williams Buchanan

“ Nor is it necessarily indecent to show the Leg, as some ladies do upon the stage, without in the least shocking our propriety. But the Leg, an excellent thing in itself, becomes insufferable if obtruded into every concern of life, so that instead of humanity we see a demon resembling the Manx coat-of-arms, cutting capers without a body or a head. The Leg, as a disease, is subtle, secret, diabolical. It relies not merely on its own intrinsic attractions, but on its atrocious suggestions. It becomes a spectre, a portent, a mania. Turn your eyes to the English stage. ”

“ Is it true, then, that English society is honeycombed and rotten? More than one form of literature says so. The smart journal says so. So does the novel of the period. So does the artistic Bohemian. For my own part I am inclined to believe (though, as I have said, on very insufficient knowledge) that true English life is infinitely purer and better than our smart writers and lady novelists imagine it to be; that the pure rose of English maidenhood still blows as brightly as ever; that, in a word, the canker lies on the surface and has not yet eaten down into the body social. ”

“ As if the "simple and natural delights of the body" had not been occupying our poetry ever since the days of the "Confessio Amantis!" As if sane (and for that matter, insane) pleasures of sense had not been the stock-in-trade of nine-tenths of all our poets and poetasters, from Wyatt to Swinburne! As if Passion had been silent until this year of the Lord 1872, and as if, till the advent of a Rossetti, the world had entirely lost sight of the Flesh! The Flesh and the Body have been sung till the Muses are hoarse again. Two-thirds of our poetry is all Body ”

“ For what judgment is possible if critical blame is treated as personal malignity, and if to ascribe affectation to a song is the same as to insult an artist? Yet such is the impassioned spirit of coterie that this appears to be the underlying, though no doubt the wholly unconscious, postulate of the poet and his followers. We altogether disclaim such an inference; and give notice that when we say that Mr. Buchanan's attack is less damaging than Mr. Forman's defence, we do not thereby imply that Mr. Forman has a base or wilful intention to injure Mr. Rossetti. ”

“ Swinburne has attempted to surpass Baudelaire, and to excel even that frightful artist in the representation of abnormal types of diseased lust and lustful disease.
"Art," said Baudelaire in effect, "has but one object, like life—that of exciting in the reader's soul the sensation of enjoyment. What poetry is to life, the drug hasheesh is to me personally, enabling me to extract supreme enjoyment out of the sheerly diabolical ideas of my own mind. I despise humanity, and I approve the devil." ”

“ But it would be tedious indeed to trace all the morbid sensations of such a lover as this; at Paris or in the East, he is equally used up and yet insatiable; and after having tried all sorts of complexions, from the pale wax-like Jewess of the Parisian brothel to the black and lissom beauty of Malabar, he finds himself still wretched and disgusted with human nature. It is soon quite obvious that he is possessed by the demon of Hasheesh. Thoughts horrible and foul surge through his brain as the filth drives through a sewer. ”

“ There is on the fringe of real English society, and chiefly, if not altogether, in London here, a sort of demi-monde, not composed, like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of indolent habits and æsthetic tastes, artists, literary persons, novel writers, actors, men of genius and men of talent, butterflies and gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to mouth. ”

“ All the limpid flow of narrative, the concentration and pomp of subject, all the lighter humour and sparkle, are to be found in the "Decameron." All the dramatic intensity, the quaint but tender realism, are (with mighty qualities super-added) to be discovered in Dante. But the quaint saline humour, the universality of sympathy, the childlike love of nature, and the supreme piteousness of modern poetry, dawned with the divine author of the "Canterbury Tales." Chaucer was emphatically the poet of the bourgeoisie, just as Shakspere and his brethren were the poets of the feudal idea ”

“ Now, if we carefully consider the question we are discussing, we shall in all possibility find that all the gross and vulgar conceptions of life which are formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism, emanate from this Bohemian class. Its members do not, we believe, penetrate far into life of any kind, but where they do penetrate they create the vices they perceive, and reflect phenomena in the distorted mirrors of their own moral consciousness. Possessing no religion, they imagine that English life is irreligious. Having no faith, they perceive no faith anywhere. ”

“ Each feeble talent has been so fascinated by his own image as to dwindle into an intellectual daisy or pine into a poetical primrose. Our literary shame has sprung from want of knowledge of how the world wags, of how men and women live and love, of what mighty forces are sweeping across the earth their angels' wings. Let the Sultan of Literature, if there be such a person (and if not, we might do worse than elect the functionary) , issue forth an edict ordering the destruction of all looking-glasses, and the immediate silencing of all persons who introduce the subject of their own emotions. ”

“ But Baudelaire, not content with playing with wickedness occasionally, as Goethe did, not strong enough to gibe and jeer at it, as Heine did, and too morally weak ever to soar beyond it into the clear region inhabited by both these masters in their best moments, formed the monstrous disjecta membra of vice into the poetic Vampire we have been examining. There are flashes of beauty in the creature's eyes at times, but they scarcely charm us, and we willingly pass away from the moral dungeon in which it lurks. ”

“ What was absurd and unnatural in Dante, mingling with foul exhalations from the brains of his brother poets, formed the miasmic cloud which obscured all English culture, generated madness even as far north as Hawthornden and Edinburgh, obscured Chaucer for centuries, darkened the way to the vast spaces of the Elizabethan drama, and generally bred in the very bones and marrow of English literature the veriest ague of absurdity ever known to keep human creature crazy. Surrey, a naturally strong man, sickened and died in the fever ”

“ Simply to picture men "in their habits as they live," no matter under what motive, was the highest possible beneficence; and this, in the golden dawn of our poetry, was done inimitably, with a beauty of thought and a wealth of resource unknown to any poet that has appeared since. ”

“ The poet does not delight in the spectacle of evil." Still, Baudelaire broods over evil things with a tremendous persistency, a morbid satisfaction, which shows a mind radically diseased and a nature utterly heartless. In and out of season, he invoked the spirit of Horror. Jaded with self-indulgence, he had a mad pleasure in considering the world a charnel-house, and in posing the figures of Love and Beauty in the agonies of disease and the ghastly stillness of death. ”

“ A great and good poet, however, is great and good irrespective of manner, and often in spite of manner; he is great because he brings great ideas and new light, because his thought is a revelation; and, although it is true that a great manner generally accompanies great matter, the manner of great matter is almost inimitable. The great poet is not Cowley, imitated and idolized and reproduced by every scribbler of his time; nor Pope, whose trick of style was so easily copied that to this day we cannot trace his own hand with any certainty in the Iliad ”

“ Gliding onward through the spectral host, we pass Crashaw, a Rossetti of the period, with twice the genius and half the advantages; and Suckling, immortal by virtue of his one true note—the "Ballad on a Wedding;" and Browne, the Elizabethan Keats, with his falsetto voice and occasional tones of really delicious cunning; till latterly, in a languid and depressed state of mind, we arrive before the prone figure of Cowley, who essayed to drive the very horses of the sun, and came to the cruel earth with a smash so prodigious. Poor ghosts! ”

“ The soul's speech and the heart's speech are clear, simple, natural, and beautiful, and reject the meretricious tricks to which we have drawn attention.
It is on the score that these tricks and affectations have procured the professors a number of imitators, that the small writers of the Fleshly School deliver their formula that great poets are always to be known, because their manner is immediately reproduced by small poets, and that a poet who finds few imitators is probably of inferior rank—by which they mean to infer that they themselves are very great poets indeed. ”

“ Whitman's style, extraordinary as it is, is his greatest contribution to knowledge. It is not impossible to foresee a day when Coleridge's feeling of the "wonderfulness of prose" may become universal, and our poetry (still swathe-bound in the form of early infant speech, or rhyme) may expand into a literature blending together all that is musical in verse, and all that is facile and powerful in ordinary language. I do not think Whitman has solved the difficulty, but he sometimes comes tremendously close upon the arcana of perfect speech. ”

“ All that is worst in Mr. Swinburne belongs to Baudelaire. The offensive choice of subject, the obtrusion of unnatural passion, the blasphemy, the wretched animalism, are all taken intact out of the "Fleurs de Mal." Pitiful! that any sane man, least of all any English poet, should think this dunghill worthy of importation! In the centre of his collection Baudelaire placed the most horrid poem ever written by man, a poem unmatched for simple hideousness even in Rome during the decadence—a piece worthy to be spoken by Ascyltos in Petronius Arbiter—and entitled "Femmes Damnées." ”

“ In one word, I have no earthly objection to the Body and the Flesh in their rightful time and place, as part of great work and noble art; I do not see any great wickedness in the old-fashioned use of the gaudriole; and I am ready (as any sane man must be ready) to regard with kindness, and even sympathy, all work of a really good and honest author, even if it here and there, as I may think, exceeds the just limits of reserve, and becomes indecent, as sometimes happens, by sheer force of power. ”

“ It has been the unfortunate habit of most of our poets, and especially of those we have been specially criticizing in this article, to use Verse as the vehicle of whatever thoughts are too thin or too fantastic, too much of the sweet-pea order of products, to stand without the aid of rhythmical props. Ideas too bald for prose, too trivial to stand unadorned, appear unique enough when subjected to the euphuistic process, and robed in all the wordy glitter of rhyme. ”

“ But here I am front to front with the amazing fact that a large section of cultured people read poetry, and enjoy it, without the faintest perception of what it is all about—without the slightest wish to realise the images or the situations—without any more intellectual effort than they use when having their hair brushed! ”

“ Coming this winter from a remote retreat in the Highlands to this great centre of life which men have named London, moving from street to street and from house to house, seeing all that a man with eyes can see, what are the objects which most impress themselves upon me? ”

“ Poetry is perfect human speech, and these archaisms are the mere fiddlededeeing of empty heads and hollow hearts. Bad as they are, they are the true indication of falser tricks and affectations which lie far deeper. ”

“ In petticoats or pantaloons, in modern times or in the middle ages, he is just Mr. Rossetti, a fleshly person, with nothing particular to tell us or teach us, with extreme self-control, a strong sense of colour, and a most affected choice of Latin diction. Amid all his "affluence of jewel-coloured words," he has not given us one rounded and noteworthy piece of art, though his verses are all art; not one poem which is memorable for its own sake, and quite separable from the displeasing identity of the composer. ”

“ A suspicion is awakened that the writer is laughing at us. We hover uncertainly between picturesqueness and namby-pamby, and the effect, as Artemus Ward would express it, is "weakening to the intellect." The thing would have been almost too much in the shape of a picture, though the workmanship might have made amends. The truth is, that literature, and more particularly poetry, is in a very bad way when one art gets hold of another, and imposes upon it its conditions and limitations. ”

“ I know well how much may be said in defence of a man like this by a wise and beneficent criticism; but I know, too, that defence has been overwrought, till mercy for the sinner has enlarged into sympathy with the sin. I am well aware, moreover—no man can be better aware—of the charm of writers like Baudelaire, and even of a certain service they may do to literature by careful attention to æsthetic form. Having few ideas, they endeavour to express them neatly, and with novelty. ”