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HE praise of Venus has been often sung, but never in any existing verse
of high order with the unhesitating frankness and untempered fervor
which distinguish Mr. Swinburne’s last volume of poems* Disdaining apol
ogy or subterfuge, he lifts up his voice, and with unfaltering tongue and un
ambiguous phrase he tells in the rich music of his verse the joys of Aphrodite.
Of his capacity and his inclination to treat this theme in this manner every
attentive reader of his last two poems “ Atalanta in Calydon ” and “ Chastelard ” must be well aware. Both those poems were distinguished by a large
simplicity and directness of utterance which showed that the poet had risen
far above the plane of timid conventionality ; and the latter showed a ten
dency toward an open recognition of the power of sexual love and an intense,
if not an ideal, expression of its working. The promise of those two dramatic
poems in this regard has been amply, but somewhat hastily fulfilled in the
present volume, which, as Mr. Swinburne of course expected, is loudly con
demned by all that class of critics who are content to “ dwell in decencies for
ever.” We have heard of editors who have refused to notice the book even
by way of condemnation, lest they should thus contribute to its notoriety.
A weak, unwise, shortsighted policy. Poets of Mr. Swinburne’s grade are
not to be crushed by condemnation or extinguished by neglect; least of all
when they find their inspiration in a passion which has stirred and swayed
the world ever since it became the habitation of two sexes. If they do wrong,
if they soil their plumes by too close a contact with unmitigated human
nature, let them be convicted and condemned; but let us not fondly sup
pose, when one of them gives voice to the delight of men in the beauty of
. women and of women in the manliness of men that we can stop the world’s
ears by pretending that we don’t hear him. No, Mr. Swinburne’s book, like
all books that, whether good or bad, are bold and able and high-toned, must
be taken up and discussed and its place in literature decided by the general
judgment of men, aided through, not controlled by, the decisions of criticism.
The very fact that a Jftrge edition of the book was bought up here in three or
four days, and that it is the subject of conversation among cultivated and
thoughtful people should of itself show critics that it is not to be ignored.
We have called these poems high-toned; and this epithet against which
some of Mr. Swinburne's censors would most loudly protest, is the one of all
at our command which we regard as most particularly expressive of their dis
tinctive character. Their subject we have stated in plain terms ; and they
present that subject unveiled, simply, without mitigation, as bare of conceal
ment as a naked, un-fig-leaved statue. Yet, in the very essence of their
thought they are high-toned. They are filled full of the utterance of that joy
T
* “Laus Veneris, and other Poems and Ballads.” By Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Author’s Edition. New York: Carleton. London : Moxon & Co.
�666
MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
which to gross souls is gross, but which to all others is mysteriously no les3
imaginative than Bensuous; but there is in them not one .passage that is
vulgar, or coarse, or even immodest. There is in Pope’s “ Rape of the Lock,”
a poem which is within the reach of any girl who desires to read it, a line of
more immodesty than could be made of all Charles Swinburne’s poems concen
trated within the same compass. And by calling Mr. Swinburne’s lyrics
high-toned we do not mean merely that they are the product of genius.
They are that indeed ; but so is “ Don Juan,” a poem open to objection of the
same kind as those which are urged against “ Laus Veneris; ” but “ Don
Juan,” work of genius although it be, is as low in tone, as light and as frivo
lous as “ Laus Veneris” is high and impressive and serious. “ Don Juan ”
was written to furnish amusement by the prurient treatment of forbidden
subjects; “ Laus Veneris ” is the presentation in the naked ideal of an over
powering passion. It is not immodest but, like other things that are also not
immodest, under certain circumstances it is indecent. The line above alluded
to in the “ Rape of the Lock ” is immodest and under all circumstances inde
cent, because it belittles, and degrades, and treats with gross familiarity, and
sets up for jeers and laughter one of the most masterful of human passions,
and one which more than any other sways, through soul and sense, the whole
being of every perfect human creature. Mr. Swinburne writes with no such
motive. He shows us the figure of Love stripped bare, but never grovelling.
Yet, as we have said, his book is, or rather it becomes indecent under certain
circumstances. The man who would read in mixed society, at this day, or
read to a young woman, or, for that matter, to an old one, such a poem as Mr.
Swinburne’s sonnet, rf Love and Sleep ” would commit an act so indecent as to
merit the immediate ejection from the house, which he would, probably re
ceive. But so would he be indecent if he offered the woman a caress, which,
under other circumstances, she would both desire and expect. So would he
be if he read many passages in the “ Song of Solomon,” which are in every
respect as plain-spoken and as fervid as anything that Mr. Swinburne has
written, and certain others in the fourth and the eighth books of “ Paradise
Lost.” And yet, the woman who cannot read any of these herself without harm,
is already long past mental contamination. The question is plainly this, Is
sexual love in itself impure ? or is it in itself entirely without moral charac
ter, and under certain circumstances as rightful as it is joyful, and under
others criminal, and in the end full of bitterness ? Will men who have wives
and mothers, and women who hope to be wives and mothers decide for the
former ? And if it is not impure, filling, as it does, so large a place and hav
ing so important a function in man’s life, shall it be excluded from the domain
of art, of high art ? No, but let it be draped, is th^ reply that will come
from some quarters. Surely, let it be draped, except he comes who shows
that he has the right to lift its veil. He will show his right by the way in
which he exercises it. We do not go about unclothed. We do not put any
undraped picture upon our walls, because there are few painters who have
the right to paint nude figures for pure-minded people. But when one of
those who have the right paints such a picture, then it hangs before our eyes
and we see that it is naked, and are not ashamed. What genius and high
mental tone are in art love as well as in real life—so our poet says ;
Behold my Venus, my soul’s body, lies
With my love laid upon her garment-wise.
This is the key note of his song.
To a woman who loves, the love of the
�MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
667
man she loves is as a garment. A modest woman never lays aside her mod
esty ; but as to shame, one of the greatest of moralists tells us that that may be
< taken off and put on like her petticoat. It is from this moral plane, and through
this moral medium that Mr. Swinburne contemplates his subject. We have
said that his lyrics, under certain circumstances, would be indecent: more, to
many people, they will be blasphemous. Take this passage as an example
curiously framed to elicit both those epithets :
Lo she was thus when her clear limbs enticed
All lips that now grow sad with kissing Christ,
Stained with the blood fallen from the feet of God,
The feet and hands where at our souls were priced.
Alas, Lord, surely thoH art great and fair.
But lo her wonderfully woven hair !
And thou didst heal us with thy piteous kiss;
But see now, Lord ; her mouth is lovelier.
She is right fair; what hath she done to thee ?
Nay, fair Lord Christ, lift up thine eyes and see;
Had now thy mother such a lip—like this ?
Thou knowest how sweet a thing it is to me.
Could the ingenuity of genius, taxed for the sole purpose, contrive to bring
together within twelve lines anything more shocking to the ascetic religionist
than this ? Let every man who can see in this passage only blasphemy and
impurity, let every man who measures a woman’s innocence by her physio
logical ignorance and her bodily torpidity, exclude this book from his house
and the houses of all those in whom he takes an interest, as he would keep
poison from his table; for it swells to bursting with such venom. There will
be others who, perceiving at once the dramatic spirit through the lyric form
of these poems, will find in them neither blasphemy nor the intention of
blasphemy, and who, breathing the same moral atmosphere as the poet, will
find in his song impurity neither of word nor thought. To all such readers
they will not only be harmless, but full of deep and strong delight. Their
beauty, and the joy they give, is heroic, and will consume small souls It is
like the beauty of the poet's “ Dolores,” to whom he says •
Thou wert fair in the fearless old fashion,
And thy limbs are as melodies yet.
His whole book is an expression of beauty and of passion in this fearless
old fashion: naked, free and strong. Naked not for the sake of nakedness,
but for the sake of freedom, strength and beauty. In this as in the dramatic
motive of these lyrics, and also in his way of not beginning at the beginning,
but, as it were, in the middle, and implying what has gone before, Mr. Swin
burne is very like the greatest dramatic poet the world has seen for two cen
turies—Robert Browning. A failure to perceive the purely dramatic charac
ter of almost all the erotic poems in this volume must lead to a very errone
ous and unjust judgment of the poet. Thus, in “Before Dawn" the sup
posed speaker says, that amid the fierce joys to which he has abandoned him
self, he is ready,
**’’. •
To say of shame—what is it ?
Of virtue—we can miss it;
Of sin—we can but kiss it
And it’s no longer sin.
�668
MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
And of a beautiful woman it is said elsewhere,
All her body was more virtuous
Than souls of women fashioned otherwise.
These passages cause sentence to be pronounced upon him in various quarters
for the crime of asserting that delight purges sin of wrong and that beauty
makes vice virtue. But the poet is not preaching, he is painting. And the
spirit, if not the very thought of both these passages is expressed by Brown
ing in one of his finest poems, “ Pippa Passes.” Lucca’s wife Ottima is with
her paramour Sebald, to whom she says,
Sebald, as we lay
Rising and falling only with our pants
Who said, Let death come now—'tis right to die !
Right to be punished—naught completes such bliss
But woe ?
. . . Bind it [her hair] thrice about my brow
Crown me your queen, your spirit’s arbitress,
Magnificent in sin.
True, Browning makes the voice of Pippa singing “ God is in his heaven ”
rouse Sebald from his guilty trance, to loathe his paramour. But so Swin
burne closes his poem thus :
Lest all who love and choose him
See Love and so refuse him ;
For all who find him lose him,
But all have found him fair.
Whoever will read this scene of Browning’s—poet without reproach—will find
in it an expression of delight in physical beauty and of abandonment to pas
sion which it would almost seem that Mr. Swinburne had imitated and not
surpassed. And in Browning’s “ Dramatic Lyrics ” and in his “ Men and
Women” are other passages that glow with all the amorous fire that burns in
Mr. Swinburne’s pages. There is this great difference, however, among others,
between the poets, that Browning has not published a volume devoted to the
celebration of sexual love and fleshly beauty. But that Mr. Swinburne fias
done so is at once his sin and his salvation, as a poet writing for the general
public. Whoever takes up this volume knows beforehand exactly the en
tertainment to which he is bidden; no reader finds himself 'betrayed into
reading erotic poetry. For one of the poems in this book we can, however,
find no excuse, even in its marvellous beauty, because its subject is without
the pale of nature. True, it is purely dramatic ; but why the poet should
choose such a subject as that incomprehensible, monstrous passion known as
“ Sapphic love,” and name his poem by the Greek word “ Anactoria,” i. e.,
sovereignty, we cannot conjecture. Had he exhausted nature and the love
of man and woman for each other? Yet, in this poem, as we have already
intimated, are some of the finest passages that he has written, some of the
very finest in all modern poetry. We do not refer only or chiefly to such ex
quisite expressions of love as,
The fervent under lid, and that above
Lifted with laughter or abashed with love,
Thine amorous girdle, full of thee and fair,
And leavings of the lilies in thine hair.
The poem passes beyond these limits, and deals not reverentially with sub-
�MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
669
jeets higher and vaster than mere human passion. In a passage of this kind
are the following lines, of strange power and awful beauty :
For who shall change with prayers and thanksgivings
The mystery of the cruelty of things ?
Or say what God above all gods and years
With offering and blood and sacrifice of tears,
With lamentation from strange lands, from graves
Where the snake pastures, from scarred mouths of slaves,
From prison, and from plunging prows of ships
Through flame-like foam of the sea’s closing lips—
With thwarting of strange signs, and wind-blown hair
Of comets, desolating the dim air,
When darkness is made fast with seals and bars
And fierce reluctance of disastrous stars,
Eclipse, and sound of shaken hills, and wings
Darkening, and blind inexplicable things—
With sorrow of laboring moons, and altering light
And travail of the planets of the night,
And weeping of the weary Pleiad’s seven,
Feeds the mute, melancholy lust of heaven
This may be frightfully impious, even when put into the mouth of the
heathen Sappho ; but it is not, therefore, one whit less grand. Has there
lived more than one other poet who could think such thoughts and use lan
guage with such supreme mastery ? We do not remember in all poetical
literature a passage which expresses with such sustained power the vague
terror and mysterious woe of the whole universe. It is in his daring use of
language and his ability to justify his daring that half Mr. Swinburne’s power
resides. In the above passage this power is very striking. The very phrase
“ disastrous stars,” against which the etymological criticism might be brought
that it is tautological—“ disastrous ” having come to mean fraught with
calamity because it first meant ill-starred—is yet evidence of the poet’s right
ful consciousness of a power which places him above all such pedagogic con
siderations in his choice of words. A scholar himself, he can yet leave his
scholarship out of sight and out of mind, while yet with the trained skill of
an intellectual athlete he does feats of language which to mere scholars would
be impossible. He is the master, not the servant of words, and uses them
for the service that they can do to-day, not for that which they could do in days
gone by. Yet that he can use them thus, as if he had been born four hun
dred years ago, he shows in “ The Masque of Queen Bersabe ” and “ St.
Dorothy.” And the name of the latter poem reminds us to mention it as one
that for its spirit might have been written by a saintly nun. It is a poetic
exaltation of the legend of the Christian virgin who died in Rome by the axe
rather than enter the service of Venus, as that service was in the decadence
of the Empire. There are other poems of like spirit in the volume. Such are
“Itylus,” one of the sweetest and tenderest, as well as most musical lyric
poems in the language, “ A Lamentation ” and “ Amina Ancepsand
although such as these are rare, those are frequent which tell terribly of
the woes that wrongful love may bring. There is not a sadder, more
remorseful poem to be read than “ The Triumph of Time.” But magazines
have limits, and we must stay our hand. Mr. Swinburne’s poems are
not without faults, but these are trifling indeed compared with the strange,
fresh beauty of the pages that they spot. One blemish of frequent occur
�670
MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
rence we have noticed—the more because it should not have appeared in the
work of a poet who is so fertile .of fancy, so rich in language, and who has
such a remarkable gift of rhyme. The kisses that, whether implied or named
must needs be plentifully scattered over the pages of an erotic poet, are too
often used for sound as well as sense by Mr. Swinburne—who ought to be
above making "kiss” rhyme to “bliss”—and, moreover, are incessantly repre
sented as stings or wounds. The lips that give and take them are described
as flecked with blood and very often with salt foam ; so often, indeed, that it
provokes the thought that Mr. Swinburne gets his lovers into a very sad
pickle. This blemish is one symptom of the general evil of these poems—
that they are overwrought and have too little of the repose which is a neces
sary condition of all high art. The turbulence is grand, the passion is real
as well as fervid; but we do not li_a to live in a tempest. We cannot refrain
from remarking that Mr. Swinburne has the high distinction of being the first
poet since Shakespeare who has written lines that Shakespeare might have
written. We do not mean to liken him to Shakespeare; and we refer not to
his thoughts but to his turn of phrase, which is sometimes like Shakespeare’s
in his sonnets. We can only quote as example these lines from the beautiful
poem upon the myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis :
Where between sleep and life some brief space is
With love like gold bound round about the head,
Sex to sweet sex with lips and limbs is wed,
Turning the fruitful feud of hers and his
To the waste wedlock of a sterile kiss.
That last line Mr. Swinburne might have recovered from some lost sonnet
of Shakespeare’s; so might he this whole passage.
To what strange end hath some strange god made fair
The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?
Hid love in all the folds of all thy hair
Fed thee on Summers, watered thee with showers
Given all the gold that all the seasons wear
To thee that art a thing of barren hours ?
But wide as are the bounds of our admiration, our expression of it must
be compressed within narrow limits. Let no one misunderstand us. These
poems are of the flesh fleshly. They are not of the kind that “ will not bring
a blush to the cheek of innocence,” and they should be shunned and execrated
by all people who believe that a blush of awakened consciousness is the first
warning of the flight of purity. Nor would those who do not so believe, and
who think that these dramatic lyrics have their place in poetry, and that no
mean one, be pleased to see any friend, young or old, male or female, choose
them for frequent perusal. They are not written virginibus puerisque. Yet
the spirit that animates them is not that of Aretino ; the pictures that they
present do not bring up those that Giulio Romano drew. The men and
women who speak through them are such as Raphael painted -after he had
touched the lips of the Fornarina. Let every man avert his eyes who be
lieves that there is sin in passion or pollution in beauty.
Richard Grant White.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
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Title
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Mr Swinburne's poems
Creator
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White, Richard Grant [1832-1907.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: [665]-670 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Review of 'Laus Veneris, and other Poems and Ballads' by Swinburne. Author's edition. New York: Carleton; London: Moxon & Co. From Galaxy 2. Attribution: Virginia Clark catalogue.
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[s.n.]
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[n.d.]
Identifier
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G5315
Subject
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Poetry
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Mr Swinburne's poems), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English