ABSTRACT
Of Mr. Algernon C.Swinburne’s Atalanta we have said all that we need say, and what he has since published gives us nothing to unsay. He is a young poet with sterling qualities, and the outcry that has been made over his last published volume of Poems and Ballads is not very creditable to his critics. The withdrawal of that volume is an act of weakness of which any publisher who does not give himself up to the keeping of a milk-walk for the use of babes has reason to be heartily ashamed. We speak now of Mr. Swinburne’s play of Chastelard, and of this volume of Poems and Ballads. They belong to one another. There is precisely the same tone in both, the same-well, let us say it to the shallow pietists in plain words-the same scriptural lesson. Only Mr. Swinburne, at present, reads his lesson rather out of the Old Testament than out of the New. Old Testament poetry has fastened upon his imagination quite as strongly as the sublime fatalism of the old Greek dramatists. In his volume of Poems and Ballads we have whole pages finely paraphrased from Job, and from Ecclesiastes, and from David’s Psalms. Say that he declares himself in these two books the Poet of Lust. It is right to say that, it is right also to know what we mean by saying it. He sings of Lust as Sin, its portion Pain and its end Death. He paints its fruit as Sodom apples, very fair without, ashes and dust within. In dwelling on their outward beauty he is sensual. Men see that and say that he is a licentious writer. But again and again when he has dwelt as proper folk object to dwell on the desire of the flesh, the beauty drops away and shows the grinning skeleton beneath with fires of hell below. There is a terrible earnestness about these books. They are in utter contrast to the erotic poetry of the Restoration, which
trifled sensually. If the sternest Old Testament wrath of the Puritans could have twisted itself into verse, and made as it were the woof to a warp of Suckling, Sedley, Etheredge, and Aphra Behn, the result would have been some such texture as has been woven out of the young mind of Mr. Swinburne. Some of the pieces in his volume of Poems and Ballads were, as we learn from one of the poems, written at school. Here are the passions of youth fearlessly expressed, and stirring depths that have been stirred hitherto by no poet in his youth. He could not, and he should not, stir them in his age. It is the ferment of good wine, and we must think they are no skilled judges of the wine of thought who shake their heads over it.
