Fleshly School of Poetry

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http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013268887
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL

OF POETRY
yl.VI)
OTIIER PJJJiXOJJJiNA OF THIi
DAY
By
ROBERT 'BUCHANAN
pretty
ine Miietl
I'llij-.lil-.. Î'hiiL
I
rilhee
let
(iMU-er-.
are tlicsL
:'
Cr.oWN.
SiiLL-JI. fill llinii v\ik!
hf-s; he imt flrjH-ers fur mauls. '\'\\v siunv-wliiic tliiiio
A n<ri-îarin-, (loth infect the sylvuii air,
I
sicken the mseet \mW uf linmsint; kine;

purple hoiiiuLstmiâit;, wursc tlian mice
cleanly LhainberM here, attain,
comely, stiiikiiiir yooicfoot, i^roivs,
A[i otiour Uear to do^rs
\
f
oilier,
siiielliiijf
\ iioivci le.is
1
I
JilU-BI-.
Faugh
O ho
name, ye tills, the lallesl .iiui iiiobt fair?

I. OWN.
JJeatli-iiettle. lady.
1 ouch it not
I'Ha-nli.
I am sicks v II III -its fa;tid breathing fills the air,
ikc tlie mfist rank crtrruptiori of a corse.
foul
I
!
STRAHAN &
CO..
56.
LUDGATE
HILL,
LONDON.
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL

OF POETRY
AND OTHER PHENOMENA OF THE DAY
By
'
ROBERT BUCHANAN
For shame
write cleanly, Labeo, or write none.''

Hall's Satires, Book
''
Belial
came
last,
than
whom
Fell not from heaven, or
Vice
spirit
more gross
to love
Paradise Lost.
for itself."
STRAHAN &
56,
LUDGATE
II. i.
more lewd
HILL,
1872
CO.
LONDON
h.
u S ^'i-o
LONDON
PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND

CITY ROAD.
CO.,
CONTENTS.
PREFACE
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY

I.
II.
SOCIAL PHENOMENA OF THE HOUR
A LITERARY RETROSPECT THE ITALIAN FALSETTO

SINGERS AND THEIR IMITATORS
:
III.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE AND
rV. MR.
A. C.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
SWINBURNE
V. THE " HOUSE OF LIFE," &C., RE-EXAMINED

VI. PEARLS
FROM THE AMATORY POETS
I6
33
56
69
THE FINAL DEGRADATION OF VERSE,

AS A MEANS OF INTELLIGENT EXPRESSION
VII. PROSPECTS OF
NOTES
....
82
92
PREFACE.
VI
with
My
bear
to
flattery
humorsome
querulous and
and too
criticism,
to perceive the real issues of the case.
imputed crime
is
as follows
that I did not sign
my
own name to the article, and that I spoke in high terms of

my own poems.
The first account has been disposed of by the simple
statement that I did not sign the article at
If
all.
retorted that the rule of the Contemporary Review
pseudonyms or unsigned
to admit
articles, I
the same publication,
and
that, in
Dean Mansell
it
be
never
answer that
at
Review have
least three of the regular contributors to that
habitually used pseudonyms,
is
an early number of
sharply criticized Mr.
Mill in an unsigned article in which he spoke of himself in
the
third
praise, is so
is
afterwards reprinting the
person,
own name,
The second
his
as
"The
article,
with
Philosophy of the Conditioned."
count, which charges
me
with secret
self-
absurd an attempt to distract judgment that
(now suppressed
of Hamlet as
for its
weakness)
"cast" by
it
In an opening paragraph
almost unworthy of mention.
drew out a
sort of sketch
contemporary poets, Mr.
,the
Tennyson of course assuming the leading character; and
among
the
myself as
King?
list
of smaller parts I humorously spoke of
playing the part
Polonius?
of
what
Rosencranz?
Horatio
Guildenstem?
these, small or great,
imagined then that I was writing
who had read
their Shakspere, or
his great tragedy

I
that " Cornelius"

in
Scene
II. in
who had
is
at
for readers
any
rate seen
stage,
and never dreamt
am now
forced to explain)
murdered on the
should have to explain (as
Osric?
but simply that of " Cbr-
Of none of
nelius !"
The
one of those two gentlemen who appear
the usual
way of what
are technically
known
VU
PREFACE.
as " utility" people,
memorable
" In this and
exeunt in
and
uttering together this one
after
line
our duty
"
!
In a subsequent scene they return,
humility.
all
and Voltimand, the
we show
things will
all
other gentleman,
makes a speech, while
" Cornelius" stands in the usual "utility" attitude, with
and one hand
leg bent
am
the proud character I

the grand
laid gracefully
have gone in
page 46 of
is
is
my own poems"
It
Surely, if I
merits, I
will
might
at
Gravedigger
be found on
simply chronicles a
fact,
and
neither complimentary nor the reverse.
The
truth
is,
all
to
motives
stand on their
distract public
my name
was altered and
article
hubbub about the authorship
this
all
a vulgar farce, got up
of
my own
for Fortinbras or the First
pamphlet.
this
one
This
accused of arrogating to myself in
other allusion to "
The
his hips.
of contemporary performances
list
had been ambitious of obtruding

least
on
own
merits,
any alteration was made
Be
that as
it
their attention
personally.
suppressed with the best
that of letting the charges contained in
and
that of saving
persecution of a clique of Uterary
may,
at
let
Mohawks
me
but
it
from the
it is
a pity
all.
me
entreat
my
readers not to let
be distracted by any consideration of
Let them
is
My
attention.
carefully
accept
me
and weigh the
evidence brought forward in these pages, and judge the

case on
its
own
merits.
about the authorship

against
is
The
clatter that
is
being
made
only meant to excite the public
a patient examination of
this
" most damning
indictment against the Fleshly School of Poetry.
The most
curious part of the whole affair remains to be

vm
PREFACE.
It is delightful as
told.
gence.
British
showing the
become
matron
favourites with that prude of prudes, the
and
several gentlemen
no harm
aunts and grandmothers see
grandmother
fact that
enjoy
about
it,
me
tell
in
them
that their
My own
not poetical, so I have not sought her
is
But here
opinion.
ratio of public intelli-
appears that these poems of Mr. Rossetti have
It
actually
am
amazing
front to front with the
a large section of cultured people read poetry, and

without the faintest perception of what
without the
wish
without any more
slightest
it
all
is
to realise the images or
intellectual effort than they
the situations
use
"
when having
brushed
their hair
state of the aunt or
Conceive the mental
grandmother who could read such verses
as this
"I
was a
When
child beneath her touch
breast to breast
a man
we clung, even
and
she,
A spirit when her spirit looked thro' me,

A god when all our life-breath met to fan
Our
lifers-blood, till lovers
emulous ardours ran.
Fire within fire, desire in deity
and merely think them sweetly

ill
of one's relations
pretty.
hard to think
It is
but the mature females in question
must be either very obtuse, or
The
very, very naughty
truth appears to be, that writing,
be perfectly sanctified
the legal sense
details
may do
"Take
notice
delights have
at Doctors'
however nasty,
to English readers if
it
will
be moral
in
and thus a poet who describes sensual
so with impunity
if
he labels his poems
These sensations are
stxicily
nuptial ; these
been sanctioned by English law, and registered
Commons
"
We
have here
th'e
reason that
Mr. Rossetti has almost escaped censure, while Mr. Swin-
burne has been punished so severely;
for
Mr. Rossetti, in
PREFACE.
his worst
poems, explains that he
in the character of a
is
IX
is
speaking dramatically
husiand ÂAxessmg
his wife.
Animalism
animalism, nevertheless, whether licensed or not; and,
indeed, one might tolerate the language of lust more readily
on the
lips
lips
of a lover addressing a mistress than on the
of a husband virtually (in these so-called " Nuptial
Sonnets) wheeling his nuptial couch out into the public

streets.
Robert Buchanan.
" Shakspere's an infernal humbug, Pip

the devil
about, Pip
What
I never read him.
There's a lot of feet in Shakspere's verse,

but there ain't any legs vporth mentioning in Shakspere's plays, are
there, Pip ?
.
.
Let us have plenty of leg pieces, Pip, and I'll
stand by you " Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit.
is it all
'"T'HOUGH
a generation of great poets and teachers
this is
though Tennyson, Browning, Victor Hugo, Carlyle,
Emerson, and Walt Whitman are

Dickens
us
left
(essentially
amongst
still
us,
while
a poet) and Landor have not long
though much of our pubUc teaching (and notably
that of the public press)
lofty
is
and
clean, there are not
wanting signs that Sensualism, which from time immemorial

has been the cancer of
roots deeper
the
fair
all society, is
surface
Coming
of things.
remote retreat in the Highlands to
which
life
to
street
man
with
eyes
from
house
can
morial squalor of the
human
and
its
ulcerous
this
this
winter from a
great centre of
men have named London, moving from

and
see,
house,
to
what are
most impress themselves upon me
by-streets
shooting
and deeper, and blotching more and more
and
lanes,
faces (that is
no
superficiality of the
seeing
all
street
that
the
objects
which
Not
the old
imme-
slums, the hideous famine of the

the
gaudy misery
novelty)
moneyed
B
in
numberless
nor the fatuous imbecility

vulgar,
and the shapeless
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY.
women who
Ugliness of
too,
feed high and take
nor the dark blotches of

nor the
of the
new
striking that to a superstitious
Sodom
into a great
me.
All these things are passed
approach a phenomenon so strange and
and so hideous that

which way
it
or
mind
it
might seem a portent,
converts this great city of civilisation
Gomorrah waiting
for
I will, the horrid thing threatens
on the drawing-room
It lies
and dangerously
fair.
doom.
table, shamelessly
away
pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of the

tale.
Oxford-Street
covers
It
librarian,
volume novels.
It is
the
of
shelves
lurking in
naked
poem which
breathes
it
Look
and paralyzes
It is part of the pretty
the belle of the season reads, and
Hawthorne's
scale)
for ever,
fashion, nor the hideousness
public building.
side, as I
exercise (that,
where disease squats
new
of the last
follies
last
on one
life
no
on so large a
famiKar, though not perhaps
is
the
the covers of
the
girl in
great
three-
on the French booksellers' counters,
authenticated by the signature of the author of the " Visite
de Noces."
It is here, there,
ture, life, just as surely as
and everywhere,
in art, litera-
in the " Fleurs
de Mai," the
it is
Marquis de Sade's " Justine," or the "

appeals to
querulous
all tastes, to all
man
clerk has his
Monk
"
of Lewis.
dispositions, to all ages.
It
If the
of letters has his " Baudelaire," the pimpled
Day's Doings, * and the dissipated artisan
Publications of this sort are at last being taken seriously in
by the Societyfor the Suppression of Vice.
As
his
hand
I write, the following
appears in the weekly journals : " The Day's Doings again.

Bow-street police-court on Thursday, Frederick Shove, the publisher
of the Day's Doings, an illustrated paper, appeared to a fresh summons,
'
'
At
granted by Sir
Thomas Henry, charged with
publishing indecent prints
Mr. Besley (instructed by Mr. CoUette, of the

the Suppression of Vice) prosecuted Mr. Laxton, as before,
and printed matter.

Society for

Day and Mght.
The
attitude
that
streets are full
and hideous
of nude, indecent,
can
vice
of
Photographs
it.
harlots, in every possible
devise,
flaunt
from
shop-
the
windows, gloated over by the fatuous glint of the libertine
and the greedy open-mouthed

Never
veas this
of the
stare
Snake, which not
day-labourer.
the naturalists of the
all
world have been able to scotch, so
vital
now.
very sweetshops; and
It
has penetrated
among
there,
the
the
into
commoner
and poisonous as
may be
sorts of confectionery,
seen this year models of the female Leg, the whole definite
and elegant
article as far as the thigh,
with a fringe of paper
cut in imitation of the female drawers
the female fashion
When
cult to
come
to such a pass as this,

in dealing with them.
is
generally
egregiously
Leg
fatal,
is
itself;
is
Nor
is it
absurd
it
is
last
summoned
diffi-
foot-
into
the
bargain.
necessarily indecent to
at this court that all
human
a most beautiful and
defended. Mr. Besley said that a promise was
was
is
The
it
nothing indecent in the
on the contrary,
member.
in
dreadful, but the Leg-disease, though
to begin with, there
useful
things have
be quite serious
and-mouth disease
Now,
and embroidered
made when
show the
the defendant
matter or prints suggestive of
indecency should be withdrawn for the future. He produced five copies

of the Day's Doings, from which he read different articles of an obscene
and vulgar nature, and pointed out a print of a nude woman, which was,
more objectionable. Mr. Laxton contended that
the nude figure referred to was a copy of the work of a well-known
artist, and to decrease its nudity drapery had been added to the figure.
Sir Thomas Henry said the drapery was suggestive of even greater
indecency.
Sir Thomas Henry decided upon committing the case for
trial, but said he would accept bail for the appearance of the defendant
at the sessions, two sureties in ^80 each, and the defendant's recogin his opinion, even
nizances in ^150."
Leg, as some ladies do upon the stage, without in the least
But the Leg, an excellent thing
shocking our propriety.

itself,
of
insufferable if obtruded into every concern
becomes
life,
so that instead of humanity
Manx
sembling the
Shakspere
will possibly
Walk along
be
Open
the Can-Can.
and
lies
to the English
buried under
new poem. Its title

this" Leg is enough."
The shop-windows teem with Leg.
Jack enjoys
it
but that
is
stalls
altogether eclipsed
by
its
O mores
Leg
life
is
!)
just as
It is only in fashion-
of the theatre that
not because
and modest, but because
down Wapping way
Jones does in the Canterbury Hall.
becomes a
Leg again, and (O tempora
able rooms and in the
discount
intrinsic at-
the last
or similar to
this,
the streets.
Enter a music-hall
re-
subtle, secret,
It
Turn your eyes
demolished
is
hecatombs of Leg
is
own
its
atrocious suggestions.
its
spectre, a portent, a mania.

stage.
demon
see a
Leg, as a disease,
not merely on
It relies
but on
tractions,
we
coat-of-arms, cutting capers without a
The
body or a head.
diabolical.
in
there
is
in the
Leg
is
at a
more innocent
higher circles
two most formidable
rivals
Bosom and Back.

If popular writers are to
rampant
be credited, there
in English society a certain atrocious
else in the world, leer

sufficient
is
to
and ogle
at each other.
all
have not
knowledge of English poHte society to say whether
or not the terrible
of facts
running
one of which called Adultery,

and these two heads, bhnd
a monster with two heads

the other Dipsomania
is
form of vice,
but
impeachment
is
based on a careful study
do know that the writings
in
which these
facts
have been chronicled, the prurient pictures given of vice
masking
in the garb of virtue,
become
in their turn,
and

for the very
sake of the imputations they contain, the dehght
No
of vulgar d^bauchds and heartless libertines.
animal
more common than he who, when
is
folly
and immorality,
but
there
am no
is
thing
no
retorts with a smile
my
worse than
" All
neighbours
very well,
virtue
form of
charged, with
fudge
such. thing, at least in English society; every-
bought and sold;"
is
and
enlightened person,
this
hearing on the best authority that love of the best sort procurable and lust of the gaudiest sort possible are equally
in the
market
for
humour
him
seizes
a life-luxury of which he
may
told that marriage

life
is
be
Is
part I
it
that his betters in
says so.
artistic
which
English society
More than -one form
rotten ?
So does the
and
in secret the follies in
true, then, that
The smart journal
am
free lover
are equally heartless,
he indulges openly.
the period.
more than
all
commit
says so.
get thoroughly tired.

to
the social scale only
honeycombed and
making a bargain
to
a farce and continence a sham, that
Nothing, meantime,- gratifies the
forms of
purchasing his
for the highest bidder, prefers
indulgence as the
is
of literature
So does the novel of
Bohemian.
incUned to believe (though, as
For
very insufficient knowledge) that true English
have
my own
said,
on
life is infinitely
purer and better than our smart writers and lady novelists
imagine
still
lies
it
to be
that the pure rose of English
blows as brightly as ever
on the
body
that, in
surface
and has not yet eaten down into the
How
then account for the portentous symp-
social.
toms which are everywhere appalling us

is
on the
maidenhood
a word, the canker
fringe of real English society,
altogether, in
London
here, a sort of
and
Thus. T^There
chiefly, if
not
demi-monde, not com-
posed, like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but
men and women
of
artists, literary
and men of
of indolent habits and sesthetic tastes,
persons, novel writers, actors,
talent, butterflies
and
kind, leading a lazy existence from
persons " \mte for the papers."
own
at their
They
expense.
men
of genius
human
gadflies of the
hand
They
to
These
mouth.
publish books, often
They, some of them, have
good ones.
paint pictures, sometimes
titles.
They
belong to clubs and they go to dinner parties.
They compose music,
They lecture on art and literature to

)0ung ladies' schools. They read Balzac, Dumas ^f/j, and
the " cerebellic" autobiographies of Goethe. They are clever,
bad music.
generally
refined, interesting, able, querulous.
more than
to tear
seeds of moral disease

religion
insight.
harlots
is
Nothing delights them
a reputation to pieces or to diagnose the

in
Their
the healthiest subjects.
called culture, their narrow-mindedness
is
called
Their portraits are sold, along with those of nude
and
lascivious courtesans, at a shilling per
the public streets.
Two
head
in
peculiarities distinguish this class
of persons to a careful eye

fact that life has a past as
they are
as oblivious to the
that the soul has a future,
and
they are never by any chance seen in that English society
which they profess to understand so thoroughly.
Now,
cussing,
we carefully consider the question we are diswe shall in all possibility find that all the gross and
if
vulgar conceptions of
products of
Bohemian
class.
far into life
create the
the
which are formulated into certain
life
and criticism, emanate from this

members do not, we believe, penetrate
art, literature,
Its
of any kind, but where they do penetrate they

vices they perceive,
distorted
Possessing no
mirrors of their
religion,
and
reflect
own moral
phenomena
in
consciousness.
they imagine that English
life is

Having no
irreligious.
faith,
they perceive no faith any-
where.
Ingenious almost to diablerie, they
you by
critical
theory that art
is
most sweets out of one's
getting
knack, to put
it
prove to
will
simply the method of

living
'
the
sensations
metaphorically, of sucking your lollipop so
as to extract out of
it
the best possible flavour.
man
If a
speaks to them earnestly, they will smile and style him

" didactic."
If a
man
them
writes for
religiously, they will
inwardly congratulate themselves on having passed quite
beyond "
that
women
these
and
These men
of thing."
sort
compose
some of our
of our pictures, write a good deal

cism.
Is
any wonder,
it
dered public shakes
put before
scepticism and flippancy

Is
any wonder
it
like
in
there,
the
come
There
to cut
it
in
it
spreading daily like
is,
it
itself
and creating
altogether with
precautions
least
take
The
disease
is
accounts
surely to share the
rail,
lies
to
any
it
of
seat
the
Will
fringe
of society.
out
Will no physician
If
terrible
prevent
the
sore ?
cancerous diseases,
all
foulness.
some
Is
and philosophers
the
to put his finger in the true seat of
There
stroy
the poor bewilterrible
considered so shocking
Mr. Ruskin
Bohemian
no courageous hand essay
foul
at first
it
Mr. Carlyle despair?
cancer
criti-
that Leg-literature flourishes ?
wonder that wise men

like
of our formal
therefore, that
and begins slowly but
it,
some
head over the
its
alas
poetry, paint
it
we cannot
caustic, let
from
worth the remedy, the remedy
de-
us at
spreading.
is
worth a
prayer.
It is
my
business in the present pages to deal only with
one form of the moral phenomenon, to regard Sensualism

only in so far as
it
affects
contemporary poetry.
My
plan
'
was at
broader, but I find
first
To
materials.
on
in review the effects of Sensualism
drama, and above
all
far
the
Let
speak,
and
now
present
on music, on the
art,
to trace its physiological causes
consequences as expressed in
would occupy
subject.
my
beyond
it
deal with the question completely, to pass
these different directions,
all
more time than
me
and
am
able to bestow on
hope, however,
may
others
that
have spoken, adding to mine their testimony
their protest.
II.
" Whilom the sisters nine were vestal maids

But since, I saw it painted on Fame's wings,
The Muses to be woxen wantonings.
.
Ye
bastard poets, see your progeny
!"
Bishop Hall.
The
true
European
history of
European poetry
is
the
history of
progress, from the narrow microscopic pedantry
of mediaeval culture to the large telescopic sweep of
thought and science.
It is
no part of
my
attempt the historical subject, except in so

the
phenomena
cate, therefore,
of the present day
how
and
modem
present plan to
far as
it
affects
need only
indi-
the ever-broadening poetry of humanity
has flowed to us in one varying stream of increase since the
day when, as
Denham
sings
" Old Chaucer,
To
like the
morning
star,
us discovered day from far."
Chaucer and his contemporaries were, as
all readers know,

under deep obligations to the poets and romancists of

mediseval
and
Italy;
a most significant token of
is
it
Chaucer's pre-eminent originality that, while

rest
had only been inspired
and solace from
Qower and
what was bad
their music, assimilated
carefully prepared a breezier
of his own.
and
No
morning
better proof can be
what was noble
had of
it,
Chaucer's
careful
with Boccaccio, then with Dante.
first
All the limpid flow of narrative, the concentration

all
in
his merit as
modern school than a
of the
star
comparison of him,
of subject,
the
in the
healthier poetic form
What is grandest and best in Chaucer is
exclusively.
the
to imitate
on the contrary, merely derived inspiration
great models, he,
and
humour and
the lighter
found in the " Decameron.''
and pomp
sparkle, are to
be
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,

of the " Canterbury Tales.''
dawned with the divine author
Chaucer was emphatically the poet of the bourgeoisie,

as Shakspere
idea
and
but with
his brethren
all
" Wife of Bath "
just
were the poets of the feudal
these writers alike, with the authoi' of the

as well
humanity was beginning
as with the creator of Falstaff,
to get
such a hearing for
itself,
and
notably on the humorous side of the question, as would be

certain in the long-run to blend both ideas, that of feudalism
and
that of the bourgeoisie, into the great
ment of popular
rights, duties,
and
modem
senti-
The
great
aifections.
dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, following in Chaucer's

footsteps, appear,
under some awful demoniac influence
individually these
men were destitute of beneficence), to have
prepared for
modem
(for
contemplation an unequalled gallery
10
human
of
and
faces
souls
gallery all-embracing in
range, photographing the meanest
and revealing to
sumptuous feudal
under
us,
all
the dazzle and glitter of a
the instincts which
style,
its
as well as the highest,
all
men have
in
common,
the compensations which each owes to the other,
and the
fair
world in which each has an equal and
putable share.
men
Simply to picture
indis-
" 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
any poet that has appeared
to
since.
Such was the dawn of our poetry; and did ever dawn
bid promise of a more glorious day
But, alas
no
to the
fulfilment.
reddening of
when
Just
promise succeeded
this fair
light
seemed
fullest,
time and
season were miraculously altered, and a period arrived, an

darkness, wherein
overclouding of the sun, a portentous
few could
tell
whether
was night or day.
it
was of a vaporous nature, miasmic.

generated
soil
first
in Italy
sucking up
after
of France, to
and then blown westward ;
that
all
This darkness
was a fever-cloud
It
finally,
was most unwholesome from the
fix itself
on England, and breed
in its
direful shadow a race of monsters whose long line has not
ceased from that to the present day.
and contemporaneously with the
Just previously to
rise
of Dante, there had flourished a legion of poets of greater

or less ability, but
foolishness,
tion,
falsetto
all
more or
and
less,
characterized
moral blindness
school, with ballads
to
their
by
singers
mistress's
affecta-
of
the
eyebrow,
sonnets to their lady's lute, and general songs of a fiddlestick
peevish
men
for the
most
part, as is the
way
of
all

fleshly
and
affected beings
and materials
subjects
as to
men
ii
so ignorant of
human
driven, in their sheer bank-
be
ruptcy of mind, to raise Hope, Love, Fear, Rage (every-
human
thing but Charity) into
body and upholstery of a
Dante walked a
woman
little
and to
as
if,
treat the
in itself,
it
In the ways of these poor
constituted a whole Universe.

devils
entities,
dollish
and he has
left
us, in his
" Vita Nuova," a book which carries the system of indivi-
dual fantasy about as near perfection as possible, and (of

course) invests a radically absurd
and tremendous
fictitious
enormously
in
fine in its
whom the world
may be
tive
freely
but
its
is
interest.
hne of thought with a
The
" Vita
interested,
pardoned.
chief value
and
to
whom many
story of
Roman
man
conceits
It is quaint, fine, subtle, suggesis this,
that
it
was composed,
tender moment, by the tremendous creature
all
in
who wrote
Catholicism in unfaltering
cipher for the study of
" is
Nuova
way, as the self-revelation of a
the
and colossal
forthcoming ages.
What was great and potent in Dante remained in the

Comedy " and bore no seed. What was absurd and
" Divine
unnatural in Dante, mingling with foul exhalations from the

brains of his brother poets, formed the miasmic cloud which
English culture, generated madness even as far
obscured
all
north as
Hawthomden and
Edinburgh, obscured Chaucer
darkened the way
for centuries,
to the vast spaces of the
Elizabethan drama, and generally bred in the very bones and
marrow of English
ever
known
to
literature the veriest
ague of absurdity
keep human creature crazy.
Surrey,
naturally strong man, sickened and died in the fever ;
a
his
limpid English just preserving his foolish subjects from

total oblivion
while Wyatt, affected in form as well as in
12
substance, lingered through a long
life
of literary disease.
Spenser and Drayton caught the complaint
men
his
it
of robust genius, survived
mighty
spirit
almost beautified disease
and clomb
off altogether,
he wrote
his plays.
possible
attacks
being
early, but,
Shakspere had
it.
but
it,
he cast
itself, till
to the heaven-kissing hill
where
Poor old John Donne had the strangest

he made a hard
recover his
to
fight
natural English health, but the reiterated relapses were too
much
for
him
and there he
breast, quaint as
How name
lies,
with his books on his
a carven figure on a tomb
over
the other victims
all
death in those days
How
call
and
bards
all
as unreal.
died literary
up before the reader the
sad shades of Davies, Carew, William

Fletchers, Habington,
and
who
Drummond,
Gliding onward through the spectral host,
the two
those once famous British
we
pass
Crashaw, a Rossetti of the period, with twice the genius
and half the advantages

of his one true note
and Suckling, immortal by
the
Wedding
Ballad on a
''
Browne, the Elizabethan Keats, with
virtue
;''
and
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
came
of the sun, and
to the cruel earth with a
Poor ghosts
digious.
were admired in
myrrh of
To
think of
their generation.
flattery
had been
it
mind
in
Frankincense of praise and
The Itahan
literature,
and
They flattered
What pleased the
Shakspere was the " quaint conceits
" wonderful " sonnets

being.
smash so pro-
All these persons
theirs to the full.
each other, and they tickled the age.

public
society.
his plays
disease
Now
it
were nowhere
"
of his
for the
raged and devastated
time
art,
was the simple sentimental
13
form, light and dainty, symptomised by such verses as "
Roses in the Bosom of Castara," "
Cupid's Death and
On
a Mole in Celia's
Burial in Cynthia's Cheeke," or "
Bosom."
Again
was the dull metaphysical type, deep-
it
seated and incurable, with

to the Platonics,"
To
Upon
its
" Negative Love,"
" Love's Visibility."
and
"Answer
its
At one time
the disease was scrofulous and foul-mouthed, sending forth
addresses "
To His
Mistress's going
At another the
the Happiness of a Flea on Celia's Body."

religious
mania supervened, and
was applied to divine things,
all
the language of passion
us with coquettish
startling
addresses to the Magdalen, to " Mary's Tear," "
But
Blessed Virgin's Bashfulness," and so on.

cases,
however extraordinary, however
The performances
could be noted.
On
Bed," and "
to
fatal,
On
the
in all these
two
results
of the diseased persons
afforded intense delight to a certain section of the public, and
the
amount of contemporary eulogy was almost always
in
proportion to the fatal nature of the disease.
With Cowley, the epidemic seemed
to culminate.
prodigy of success overdid his character, and

impossible for the lover's vein to be carried
any other ambitious Bottom.

with the
strong
when he
Roman
rose,
satire.
tonics
fortified
It
This
seemed
further
by
Milton corrected his system
of the
ancients
himself with the
and
Dryden,
disinfectant
of
Nevertheless the disease lingered in the
land, co-operating with
of P"rance.
it
new
diseases from the corrupt court
would be tiresome indeed
to
name
all
the
poor creatures, from Cowley to Spratt, who suffered and died,
more or
less
despair,
to
under the
resist
the
was
fatal influence.
It
epidemic,
English
hardened into the formal
that
cleanliness
in positive
literature
of the Addisonian
14
period.
Phillips
Classicism was used as an antidote, while Ambrose

was delighting " society " with pieces like that " On
the Little
drest to go to a Ball." *
Lady Charlotte Pulteney
False love, false heroics, false pastoral pictures, false

false
thought,
more or
all
life,
consequent on the foul
less
corruptions from Italy and France, had shaken the whole

fabric of English literature
his mock-erotic verses "
and Pope
to Bed,"
On
& Co.
Art of Sinking in Poetry
when Jonathan Swift composed

a beautiful Young Nymph going
their "
"
;
Martinus Scriblerus on the
but neither Pope nor Swift was
strong enough to inaugurate a
new and nobler
English
art.
poetry was virtually dead.
tranquil
gleam of honest English
light
came with
Cowper, whose patient and gentle services have scarcely yet

been rated
life
his
But the true seeds of a new
at their true worth.
had been scattered abroad when Bishop Percy published

" Reliques."
These seeds were slow
to
slower because they sank so deep.
At
worth came, and English
was saved.
literature
last,
spring,
the
however, Words-
Then, with
one loud trumpet-note, Byron amazed matrons and disarmed

critics.
Then, with a shining
his help,
began to
now
unjustly forgotten.
criticize, directing
Coleridge uttered stately
face,
syllables of mightiest thought.
Then,
Then
freighted with
deep as the sea
and
Southey gave
Hazlitt
men's eyes back to the true
fount of English thought and diction
and the EHzabethan drama.
too,
Then Lamb and
the
tales of
Chaucer
Scott arose, simple and
golden argosies of history
lighted with the innumerable laughter of the waves.
* These verses are worth studying, ps showing how the only effect produced on the " poet of the period " by the sight of a little female child
was the regret that the infant was not yet old enough " to be made love
to."

Then indeed poor England shook
her heart beat with a
" For
been wasted
It
;
and
felt
come
a sweet wind from heaven had
Hope had come
taint,
truer, freer pulse,
To blow
azure burst.
off her
15
her cares away."
at last
more than a gleam, a
glorious
was sad to think how many centuries had
but the invalid-literature of this country was
not quite dead.
when
Strange to say, just at that very moment,
things
looked brightest, honest Gifford had to demolish the Delia

Cruscan school, and Canning and Frere found
but particularly
festations,
small
critics
of the
poems were sung

at their
it
necessary
In both of these maniacal mani-
to destroy Dr. Darwin.
in the former,
to guitars,
embroidery frames.
society
and the
The Delia Cruscan
day delighted.
and warbled by young
ladies
They had one recommendation
they were harmless.

dirty.
They were neither demoralising nor

They died a very speedy death, when once Gifford
took the trouble to exterminate them
hardly needed so severe an operation.
In our own day
but perhaps they

v.e
have had, besides the Fleshly School under notice, the Spas-
modic School, headed by
Bailey, Smith,
and Dobell; but these
poets possessed-great purity, and were unfairly treated.
The
worst argument against them was their comparative poetic

silence after the date of Aytoun's attacks.
called Schools over-exert themselves
great poet
is
All these soin phthisis.
a law to himself, and does not work in groups.
After this last futile
development, the
would possibly have died out

died, has
and end
been due
altogether.
Italian
That
to a fresh importation of the
matter from France.
The
it
disease
has not
obnoxious
Scrofulous School of Literaturf;
i6
had been distinguishing

but
in
it
reached
its
final
Charles Baudelaire,
itself for
many
a long year in Pans,
and most tremendous development

writer to whom I must now
direct the reader's attention.
III.
Charles Baudelaire.
" Je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu "
" I seek the Black, the Empty, and the Nude !"
!
Fleurs de Mai.
HAVE
before me, as I write, the portrait of Baudelaire, the
memoir by
Gautier, the original edition of the " Fleurs de
Mai," and the collected edition of Baudelaire's works, published since his death.
Gautier's
memoir
ing hardly a
skilfully
and
picious reader.
is
a miracle of cunning writing, contain-
syllable with
which one disagrees, and yet
secretly poisoning
The
such clever trash
is
sense of the absurd
the
mind of any unsus-
best antidote I can
recommend
against
the tiniest pinch of humour, the least

for directly the
whole thing
is
put in
the proper light, contempt yields to laughter, and laughter

dies
away
whom we
in pity for the
are being introduced.
the same time, to call to
of George Sand, at
(in those
slowly
poor " sestheticized
first
It
may
also
"
be
figures
to
as well, at
mind how even the mighty genius

so promising and so
commanding
days when even Mazzini's pure soul did
it
homage),
decomposed under the inner action of the
artistic

and
self-critical
ended
instinct, until
in utter demoralisation.
intellectual fingering,
it
falsified
i;
hopes, and
all
This literary finessing,
this
constitutes a tithe of the genius of
Hugo, a half of the genius of George Sand, the whole of the

genius of Charles Baudelaire and his biographer.
little
Shaksperian sense of quiddity would soon show us what a

poor, attenuated, miserable scarecrow of humanity Baudelaire
was
in
reality,
and what a mere serving-man,
deluded and self-deluding,
who
volio,
Gautier
most
is
self-
poor old Gautier-Mal-
this
holds forth, " cross-garter'd," over his grave.

first
met Baudelaire
in " that
grand salon in the
pure style of Louis XIV.,'' where the hasheesh-eaters
of Paris were wont to hold their meetings

tion of the furniture of this
the spirit of a
chamber
French upholsterer.
is
and
his descrip-
very great, quite in
Here
is
his vignette
he appeared on that occasion
portrait of Baudelaire as
" Son aspect nous frappa il avail les cheveux coupes trSs ras et du
plus beau noir ces cheveux, faisant des pointes riguliSres sur le front
d'une eclatante blancheur, le coifFaient comme une espjce de casque
:
sarrasin
spirituel,
les yeux, couleur de tabac d'Espagne, avaient un regard

profond, et d'une penetration peut-etre un peu trop insirtante
quant ti la bouche, meublfie de dents trfes-blanches, elle abritait, sous

une legSre et soyeuse moustaclie ombrageant son contour, des sinuosits
mobiles, voluptueuses et ironiques
par Leonard de Vinci

palpitantes,
les levres des figures peintes
un peu
arrondi,
aux
semblait subodorer de vagues parfums lointains
fossette vigoureuse accentuait le
du
comme
le nez, fin et dfilicat,
menton comme
le
nariifes
;
coup de pouce
une
final
statuaire; les joues, soigneusement rashes, contrastaient, par leur
fleur bleu4tre
que veloutait
la
poudre de
riz,
avec les nuances vermeilles
d'une elegance et d'une blancheur fgminines,

apparaissait d^gage, partant d'un col de chemise rabattu et d'une
Son vetement'
fitroite cravate en madras des Indes et a carreaux.
des pommettes
le cou,
consistait en un paletot d'une 6toflFe noire lustree et brillante, un

pantalon noisette, des bas blancs et des escarpins vemis, le tout mfiticuleusement propre et correct, avec un cachet voulu de simplicite anglaise
et
comme
I'intention
de se sSparer du genre
artiste,
a chapeaux de
mou, a
feutre
vestes de velours, 4 vareuses rouges, a barbe prolixe et 4

Rien de trop frais ni de trop voyant dans cette
criniSre echevelee.
tenue rigoureuse. Charles Baudelaire appartenait a ce dandysme sobre

qui rape ses habits avec du papier de verre pour leur oter I'eclat
endimanche et tout battant neuf si cher au philistin et si dSsagreable
Plus tard meme, il rasa sa moustache, troule vrai gentleman.

vant que c'etait un reste de vieux chic pittoresque qu'il etait pueril et
bourgeois de conserver." CEuvres de Baudelaire, precedees d'une
pour
-
noti'-.e
far Theofhile
Gautier, Paris, 1869.
This interesting creature, with his nose
sniffing " distant
perfumes," his carefully-shaven cheeks, and his general

of man-millinery,
"
was
in
air
earnest conversation with the
model " Maryx, who, with the immobility acquired
in the
was reclining on a couch, resting her superb head
studio,
on a cushion, and
attired " in
a white robe, quaintly starred
Hard by, at
known as " La
Clevinger when he
!
with red spots resembling drops of blood "

the window,
Femme
sat another
superb female,
au Serpent," from having
painted his picture of that name.
on a
fauteuil " her
cious, little
Madame
humid,
sat to
The
latter,
having thrown
mantle of black lace and the most
deli-
green hood that ever covered Lucy Hocquet or
Baudraud, shook her yellow lioness-locks,
for she
still
came from the swimming school (L'Ecole de
Natation), and from all her body, clad in muslin, exhaled

like a
naiad the fresh perfume of the bath
company were Jean
Fenchferes,
"
In the same
and Jean
the sculptor,
Boissard, the latter with " his red mouth, teeth of pearl,
brilliant
most
One
complexion."
in this description,
lupanar into an "
which he
milhnery.
seizes
He
worn by both
scarcely
the
artistic
" up
sexes.
" in
He
to
and
admire
writer's fine apotheosis of the
decameron," or the avidity with
on personal
is
knows which
traits
and on male and female
both under and over-clothing, as

is,
moreover, candour
itself.
He

makes no
own.
"
secret of Baudelaire's
With an
little
19
weaknesses and
air quite simple, natural,
and
his
perfectly dis-
engaged, he advanced some axiom satanically monstrous,

or sustained with an icy sang-froid
matical exactness
for there
In a word,
development of his absurdities."

that Baudelaire was
some theory
it is
most unsympathetic of
tiiat
a cold sensualist, and that he carried into

(until
of a mathe-
was a vigorous method in the

not denied'
all
all his
beings,
pleasures
they slew him) the dandyism and the self-possession
of a true child of Mephistopheles.

After a youth spent in wanderings in the East, and in
acquiring, as Gautier naively says, " that love of the black
Venus, for
whom
he had always a
Baudelaire
taste,"
re-
turned to Paris, rented a httle chambre de gar(on, and
assumed
all the privileges of a
to
have been of a very limited nature, developed
his already
singular disposition into true literary monstrosity,
morbid nature of
that his
first
his tastes
most
in the
literary life
His reading, which seems
debauched city of the world.
may be
and the
gathered from the fact
public effort was a translation of the American
To Poe
Tales of Edgar Poe.
he seems to have borne an
extraordinary resemblance, both in genius and in character.
Equally clever, affected, and cold-blooded
equally incre-
dulous of goodness and angry at philanthropy; equally

self-indulgent
and
sensual,
he
lived
died as wretched a death, and
even more worthless
and sunless moral
the
affected innovations in
morbid themes
nature.
left
for
very dregs
useless
his
of
hfe,
legacy books
his
unhappy
Like Poe and Swinburne, he
verse,
and sought out the most
for poetical treatment.
he tried to surpass him on
as
his
Encouraged by Poe,
own ground
to
triumph
20
Encouraged
over him in the diablerie of horror.
Mr, Swinburne has attempted
turn,
and to excel even that
in
his
to surpass Baudelaire,
frightful artist in the representation
of abnormal types of diseased lust and lustful disease.

" Art," said Baudelaire in effect, " has but
like life
What
of enjoyment.
is
me
to
poetry
personally, enabling
ment out of the sheerly

humanity, and
I despise
virtually
like this
well
Go
ye and do likewise
by a wise and beneficent
by
man
by
ideas, they
and with novelty.
till
but
mercy
sin.
can be better aware
to literature
Having few
self-indulgence,
!"
criticism
been overwrought,
writers like Baudelaire,
may do
mind.
Animated by
said in defpnce of a
has enlarged into sympathy with the
no
my own
approve the devil."
how much may be
that defence has
moreover
supreme enjoy-
to extract
diabolical ideas of
exclaimed to the youth of France, with his
dying breath, "
know
object,
to hfe, the drug hasheesh
is
me
these noble sentiments, he killed himself
and
one
that of exciting in the reader's soul the sensation
and even of a
know,
man
too,
for the sinner
am well
of the
aware,
charm of
certain service they
careful attention to aesthetic form.
endeavour to express them neatly,
But no good can come to
ture from the atrocious system
of painting
life
or litera-
such figures
in the light voluptuous colours of
art
contemptible persons into
literary positions,
first-rate
of exalting such
and
of evading the moral of their Hves for the sake of pointing
an epigram and delighting the

lived
was
hue
this
and died a slave
slave's
work
to his
this
devil
every line he wrote
every picture he ever painted was in one
the dark blood-tint of his

man,
Charles Baudelaire
fool.
own
dandy of the
own shame. And yet it is

Brummel of the
brothel, this
who, adopting to a certain
Stews, this fifth-rate litt'erateur,
extent the
and querulous system of the
self-explanatory
Italian school of poets,
21
and
issues of that noble school of
carefully avoiding the higher
which
Hugo is
the living head,
has been chosen (by no angel certainly) to be the godfather as
it
were of the
modem
Fleshly School, and thus to
the select salon of English literature with a perfume to
fill
which the smell of Mrs. Aphra Behn's books

that of Catullus'
This
to
have
is
our double misfortune
it
at
rant to an unclean thing,
to
have a nuisance, and
might have been more
had been
if it
in
We have never been foolish purists,

We freely forgave Byron many a wicked
because we knew he loved much, because
much he was
we saw how
the product of national forces darkly working to
We
the light.
tole-
some sense a
soil.
here in England.
turn,
We
second hand.
product of the
and
savoury,
"lepidum novum libellum" absolutely
delicious.
is
welcomed Goethe, even when he sent the
" Elective Affinities " and the cerebellic autobiographies. But

to
be overrun with the brood of an
teer,
whose only
whose only merit was

surely that
is far
much twenty
was
originality
too
much
years ago,
much now, when
avenging
A
chief
French sonnet-
in his nasal appreciation of foul odours,

:
it
would have been a
when the Empire began
viper's nest in the heart of
too
inferior
his hideousness of subject,
France ;
it is
little
too
creating
its
a hundred times
the unclean place has been burnt with
fire.
few years before his death, Baudelaire published
his
work
too
" Fleurs
de Mai."
This book was a
strong even for Paris under the
came down, and some of the
little
Empire; so the censor
vilest
poems were
ruthlessly
12
But Baudelaire gained his end, and secured
expunged.
a
spurious
Some
notoriety.
years
Mr. Swinburne
later
thought the French poet's success worthy of emulation, and
he therefore published his " Poems and Ballads," which was

so very hot that his publishers dropped
cinder in the very

lisher,
''
who
All that
The
shall
is
month
of publication,
it
like a blazing
and only one pub-
be nameless, had the courage to
lift it
offensive choice of subject, the obtrusion of unnatural
passion, the blasphemy, the wretched
taken intact out of the " Fleurs de Mai."

sane man, least of
all
animaHsm, are
all
that
any
Pitiful
any English poet, should think
dunghill worthy of importation

lection Baudelaire placed the
In the centre of
most horrid poem ever
for simple hideousness
Rome
during the decadence
in Petronius Arbiter
Damnees."
The
to beat
is
it
and
entitled "
interlocutors in this piece are
Femmes
two women,
guilty of the vilest act conceivable in

biit
the theme and the treatment are
too loathsome for description.

of "
written
even in
piece worthy to be spoken
by Ascyltos
who have just been

human debauchery,
Encouraged by the hideous-
Femmes Damnees," Mr. Swinburne

in "Anactoria," a poem the subject
again that branch of crime which
the Sapphic passion.
It
would be
is
generally
attempted
of which
known
as
tedious, apart from the
unsavouriness of the subject, to pursue the analogy

further through individual poems.
to give
this
his col-
by man, a poem unmatched
ness
up.
worst in Mr. Swinburne belongs to Baudelaire.
much
Perhaps the best plan
is
a few specimens of Baudelaire's quality, and leave
the reader to compare
them with Mr. Swinburne's book
at
leisure.
In the very
first
poem
of his collection Baudelaire avows

his
true character,
whit better
'
'
He
and accuses
the reader of being not a
Hypocrite lecteur,
mon semblable, mon
purposes, he says, on his
down
23
to absolute Hell,
way
way
of
all
humanity)
a few of the
in review
His way
horrors he sees on his path.

" Parrai
(the
to pass
frdre
lies
les chacals, les panthferes, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,

Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants
Dans la menagerie infam de nos vices !"
And
of
The
very next
all
these monsters the most infernal
poem
is
L'Ennui
sweetly chronicles the birth of the
Poet, whose mother, affrighted and blaspheming, stretches
her hands to God, crying

pleasure,
the next
" Cursed be that night of fleeting
when my womb conceived my punishment
poem
the poet
is
compared
the
to
splendid on the wing, but almost unable to walk
comparison strikes
self,
me
In
and the
as very applicable to this poet him-
only that his whole book
is
unsuccessful attempt to begin a

short lyrics he talks
!"
albatross,
a waddHng, unwieldy, and

flight.
In a number of
of poetry, music, and
life,
without
much edification (save in a really powerful

picture called " Don Juan in Hell ") till he begins to sing, not
affording us
the delights of the flesh, but the morbid feelings of satiety.
Accustomed
to the
Swinbumian
female,
we
at once recog-
nise her here in the original, as the serpent that dances, the
cat that scratch-es
creature
who never
and
cries,
conceives.
and the large-limbed

She "
sterile
bites," of course
" Pour exercer les dents S ce jeu singulier,

II se faut chaque jour un coeur au rStelier
"
"
24
She has " cold eyelids that shut

" Tes yeux,
rien
oft
De doux
like
a jewel
ne se revile
ni d'amer,
Sont deux bijoux froids
She
cold and "
is
"
She
is,
La
femme
necessarily, like " a snake
is,
"un
the rest,
all
and purposes,
sterile
"
:
serpent qui danse," &c., &c.
Mary
in fact, Faustine,
Sappho, and
.'"
"
froide majeste de la
She
sterile
:"
Our Lady of
Stuart,
quite as nasty, and to
spite of her attraction for
in
Pain,
all intents
young
poets,
seemingly as undesirable.
impossible for me, without long quotation, to
It is quite
fully represent
the unpleasantness of Baudelaire, with his
and "
" vampires," his " cats,"

his fiends, his
cat-like
his poisons,
At one time we are
long catalogue of debaucheries.

brothel,
women,"
phantoms, his long menagerie of horrors,
and the poet
is
Jewess with " cold eyelids
lying
:
by the
his
in a
side of a dreadful
"
" Une nuit que j'etais pr6s d'une affreuse Juive,

Conime au long d'un cadavre un cadavre etendu !"
At another time we hear
" Seek not

and wearied
my
heart
as he
is,
conceits of his school
the poet saying to a fair
the beasts, have eaten
our poet
is
companion
it."
Grim
not above the favourite
" Tes hanches sont amoureuses
De
ton dos et de ses seins,
Et tu ravis les coussins

Par tes poses langoureuses
And
this
school, of
is
quite in the symbolizing style of the Italian
which
of Mr. Rossetti
I shall
give
many examples when
treating
25
" La Haine est un rvrogne au fond d'une taveme,

Qui sent toujours la soif naitre de la liqueur
Et
se multiplier
Mais
"
Et
I'hydre de X-eme.
buveurs heureux connaissent leur vainqueur,
las
Haine
la
comme
est
vouee a ce sort lamentable
De ne ;pouvoir jamais s'endormir soils la

At one time we have a poem on " her
we
of which
that, as other
learn (what indeed
.'"
table
hair," in the course
we should have
guessed)
persons delight in love's " music," he (Baude-
laire) revels in its "
He
perfume."
is still
insatiable,
and yet
uncomplimentary, actually comparing his attack on her " cold

beauty
("
"
to the attack of
comme
apres
and yet crying
a swarm of worms on a corpse
un cadavre un chceur de vermisseaux
fiercely
" Je ch^ris, O bete implacable et cruelle

Jusqu'J cette froideur par oil tu m'es plus belle
He
finds delight in tracing resemblances
person and his cat

" Viens,
griflfes
chat, sur
de
Meles de metal
it
men
tes
et d'agate."
would be tedious indeed
sensations of such a lover as this

is
between this marble
ccEur
amoureux
ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans
But
")
mon beau
Retiens
beaux yeux
(Page 135.)
to
trace
all
the morbid
at Paris or in the East,
he
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
he finds himself
nature.
It is
still
and lissom beauty of Malabar,
wretched and disgusted with human
soon quite obvious that he
demon of Hasheesh.
is
possessed by the
Thoughts horrible and
through his brain as the
filth
least half of all the " Fleurs
foul
drives through a sewer.
de Mai
"
read as
if
surge
At
they had
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OP POETRY.
26
been written by a
No
tremens.
man
To
" La Debauche
His crime
is,
solid earth,
The sun
cries
Mort
die.
rises,
words,
sont deux aimables
that he sees only these

is
two shapes on
nothing
left for
all
the
men
but
and immediately he pictures

"but
into dens
shining, not
it
of crime and ghastly
Night comes, but sleep comes not ; and he only
" Void
charmant, ami du criminel;

complice, k pas de loup le
Se ferme lentement comme une grande alc6ve,
le soir
II vient
comme un
Kt I'homme impatient
The
filles
His dreams and thoughts are wretched.
happy homes,
hospitals.
et la
own
him, in his
and avers that there
and
to sin
one of the worst stages of delirium
in
one certainly can accuse him of making
crime look beautiful.
into
"
se change en bete fauve."
gas-jets of prostitution are
faces of pale
happy
ciel
and
lit,
women and jaded men.
flare on the doomed

Some few men sit at
hearths, but the majority " have never lived."
On
such a night, doubtless, he composed such poems as
which
quote entire in
all its
morbid pain and horror
"HORREUR SYMPATHIQUE.
" 'De ce
ciel bizarre et livide,
Tourmente comme ton
destin,
Quels pensers dans ton Sme vide

Descendent ? Reponds, libertin.'
"
Insatiablement avide
De I'obscur
Je ne
et
de
I'incertain,
geindrai pas
Chassg du paradis
comme Ovide
latin.
" Cieux d^chires comme des graves
En vous
VoB
se mire
mon
orgueil
vastes nuages en deuil
this,
:

Sont
les corbiUards
Et vos
De
de mes reves,
lueurs sont le reflet
I'Enfer
oft
mon
coeur se plait
Truly enough did Edward Thierry

poetry, that "
is
it
The poet does not
27
say, in writing of this
sorrow which absolves and
justifies
delight in the spectacle of evil."
it.
Still,
Baudelaire broods over evil things with a tremendous persistency,
a morbid
satisfaction,
which shows a mind radically
diseased and a nature utterly heartless.

season, he invoked the spirit of Horror.
indulgence, he had a
mad
In and out of
Jaded with
self-
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
As a
death.
ugliness,
necessary pendant to his pictures of
book
malignity.
Looking
to
" Rdvolte,''
we
where Mr. Swinburne got
find
lessons in blasphemy.
the
of his
section
In " The Denial of
St.
"
first
Peter "
we
fleshly
Comma un
II s'endort
And
called
his
have the following picture of the Deity, quite in the
manner
human
he delighted to add a few glimpses of divine
tyran gorg6 de viande et de vins,

au doux bruit de nos ai&eux blasphSmes
after passing in review the horrible sufferings of Christ,
he concludes
bitterly
" Saint Pierre a reme Jesus.
In another poem he draws a
II a
Hen fait
series of contrasts
the race of Cain and the race of Abel,
between
in other words,
between the domestic type of humanity and the outcast type,
concluding
in these
memorable words
" Race de Cain, au
Et
monte
Dieu
ciel
sur la terre jette
"
"
28
words which bear a
sort of resemblance, in their foolish
and reckless no-meaning,
God"
Mr. Swinburne's
to that passage in
writings wherein the Devil
described as "playing dice with
is
Next comes a piece
for the soul of Faustine.
titled " Les Litanies de Satan," a prayer to the evil one

'
P6re adoptif de ceux qu'en sa noire eolere

paradis terrestre a chasses Dieu le P6re
Du
and
in conclusion
a few lines called " Prayer
" Gloire et louange %
Ciel, oft tu regnas, et
De
I'Enfer,
PrSs de
oft,
:"
dans
les
profondeurs
vaincu, tu rSves en silence
mon Sme un jour,
toi se repose,
Comme un Temple
It will
Satan, dans les hauteurs
Du
Fais que
passed
toi,
sous I'Ajrbre de Science,
S I'heure ou sur ton front
nouveau ses rameaux s'epandront."
hardly be contended that Mr. Swinburne has
this,
distorted;
en-
sur-
although his effusions are wilder and more
and we may well
meanwhile, that our
rejoice,
much
contemporary blasphemy,
as
contemporary
no home-product, but an im-
bestiality,
is
well
as
so
of our
portation transplanted from the French Scrofulous School,
and conveyed, with no explanation of
its
origin, at
second
hand.
Of
a similar character to Baudelaire's " Fleurs de
Mai
are his " Petites Pofemes en Prose," in which this cynic of

the shambles touches
on many themes besides
lust
ennui, and touches none that he does not darken.

is
here, as in the " Fleurs,"
and
There
an occasional delicacy of touch,
a frequent dehcacy of perfume, which deepens the prevalent

horror and despair of the surrounding chapters.
piece he compares the public to a dog, which
when
offered
some
delicate
scent,
flies
In one
in horror
but greedily devours

human ordure
own wares are
and although he wishes us to
his
is
something in the nature of
in his very choice of a foul
meaning.
infer that his
too fine for so coarse a monster, the reader
cannot help feeling that there
excrement
Indeed, throughout
parade of the olfactory
faculty,
that Baudelaire, like FabuUus,
metaphor
all his
had one day,

to
all
nose"
had been actually granted.
There
;
is
there
even a kind of perception, neither very acute nor very
exquisite, of the beauties of external
higher sensibility which perceives

spiritual
human
in
lib. xiii.
plenty of sensitiveness to smell, to touch, even to colour
is
Cat.,
is
is
after smelling
"make him
"Quod tu cum olfacies, Deos rogabis,

Totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasiun
that the prayer
to express
writings there
which awakens the suspicion
some choice unguent, prayed God
and
29
life
form; but of that

subtle nuances
of
and trembles to the beating of a tender
heart, there is not
like absinthe,
small
the
one
solitary sign.
This poetry
comparatively harmless perhaps
quantities
by Mr. Swinburne)
well
diluted, but fatal
in all its native strength
if
if
sipped
taken
(as
and abomina-
tion.
Here
must leave the writings of Charles Baudelaire,
only observing in conclusion that, in spite of their seeming

originality, they belong really to the Italian school, in so far as
they are the posings of an affected person before a mirror, the

self-anatomy of a morbid nature, the satiated love-sonnets of
a sensualist
who
is
harmony with the
out of tune with the world and out of

life
of men.
point of view, the reductio
They
are,
ad horribikm of
from another
that intellectual
sensualism which Goethe (in one of a giant's weak moments)
"
30
founded, and which Heine repeated with a shriller and more

in his "
mocking tone
Buch der
But Baudelaire,
Lieder."
not content with playing with wickedness occasionally, as
Goethe
Heine
enough
did, not strong

did,
into the clear region inhabited

their best
flashes of
us,
commemorated
to say,
it
willingly pass
membra
away from
Mr. Swinburne imme-
death in some verses
his
quite
Since that period, I
am
Mr. Swinburne seems to have partly shaken
in his pohtical effusions,

is
it
in,
lurks.
off the horrible influence of the " Fleurs
amours
disjecta
as
we have been examining.
ago Baudelaire died.
worthy of the deceased himself
happy
it,
beyond
by both these masters
and we
the moral dungeon in which
A few years
jeer at
beauty in the creature's eyes at times,
but they scarcely charm
diately
and
to soar
moments, formed the monstrous
of vice into the poetic Vampire
There are
to gibe
and too morally weak ever
seen sitting (as
the
same
de Mai." Although,
sterile
woman
of the
Mater Dolorosa) by the wild
wayside,
" In a rent stained raiment, the robe of a
cast-ofF bride,"
and as France,
" Spat upon,, trod upon, whored
and' although the
blasphemy
of aimless attacks on
is
repeated tenfold in a series
a Deity who
is assumed to be a
shadow, there are not wanting signs that the poet is waking
up from an evil dream. The Sapphic vein of Baudelaire
has been abandoned to begin with.
Next, let the same

blasphemous vein be abandoned too. Then, let
Mr. Swinburne burn all his French books, go forth into the
world, look men and women in the face, try to seek some
writer's
31
nobler inspiration than the smile of harlotry and the shriek

of atheism
and
Thus
there will be hope for him.
far,
he
has given us nothing but borrowed rubbish, but even in his
manner of giving
own
and
voice
hearing,
abandon the
for ever, to
His
there has been something of genius.
may be worth
when he
chooses, once
falsetto.
In the discussion which follows I have scarcely included
Mr. Swinburne, because he
is
obviously capable of rising
out of the fleshly stage altogether
and
have said
little
of
Mr. Morris, because he has done some noble work quite

outside his ordinary performances as a tale-telling poet.
have chosen rather to confine
who
is
my
wh
formally recognised as the head of the school,
poems
avows
his
taken
many
to
attention to the gentleman
be perfectly "mature," and
who has
years, of reflection before formally appealing tO'
Far too self-possessed to indulge in the
public judgment.
riotous folhes of the author of " Chastelard,"
too self-conscious
to.
and
busy himself with the dainty
infinitely
tale-telling
of the author of the " Earthly Paradise," the writer whose
works
am
about to examine has carefully elaborated a
series of lyrical
and semi-dramatic poems
in the mediseval
manner, with certain quaUties superadded which
have to
sincerities
on the
criticize
so
severely,
and with
the
faults
shall
and
in-
cunningly disguised that they seldom lurk
surface in
such a way as to awaken immediate
suspicion.
Before turning to the writer in question,
words on the Fleshly School in general.
let
me add
What a
a few
great
master has touched at one point of his poetic genius, has
been expanded by the

poetry in
itself.
erotic school into a
whole system of
32
In the sweep of one single poem, the weird and doubtful

" Vivien," Mr. Tennyson has concentrated
all
the epicene
force which, wearisomely expanded, constitutes the characteristic
of the writers at present under consideration
in " Vivien " he has indicated for
sualism in
he has in " Maud,"
art,
and
them the bounds of

in the
if
sen-
dramatic person of
the hero, afforded distinct precedent for the hysteric tone
and overloaded
style
The
Mr. Swinburne.
be described as the
the
members
which
is
now
so familiar to readers of
fleshliness of
" Vivien
" may indeed

common by all
distinct quality held in
and
of the last sub-Tennysonian school,*
a quality which becomes unwholesome when there

moral or intellectual quality to temper and control
it.
is
it is
no
Fully
conscious of this themselves, the fleshly gentlemen have
bound themselves by solemn league and covenant

fleshliness as the distinct
pictorial art
to aver that poetic expression
poetic thought,
than
poet, properly to
greater than
to sense
is
greater
and that
the
develop his poetic faculty, must be an
intellectual hermaphrodite, to
and night
is
and by inference that the body

and sound superior
the soul,
to extol
and supreme end of poetic and
whom
the very facts of day
are lost in a whirl of aesthetic terminology.
After
Mr. Tennyson has probed the depths of modern speculation

in a series of
in
him
commanding moods,
all right
and
interesting
as the reigning personage, the " walking gentlemen,"
sub-Tennysonian because these gentlemen, with all their

the Italian and French race pf sonnetteers, follow Tennyson
in the historical sense, and touch nothing in their poetry which he has
not lightly touched in some way. The ways of a great poet lead him
in all directions, into ail moods, while the way of a small poet is narrow
and without variety. The gain of ôorfinthe Pre-Raphaelite style comes
from the laureate ^vhat is bad in it comes from Italy and France.
I say
affinities to

knowing that something of the
33
expected from
sort is
all
leading performers, bare their bosoms and aver that they are
creedless;
the only possible
person
disinterested
or not
their
question here being,
whether
cares
time, nevertheless, to
It is
whether any of these gentlemen has actually

the
if
any
creedless
are
on that score being so per-
self-revelation
fectly uncalled for.
they
making of a leading performer.
would
It
ascertain
in
himself
be scarcely
worth while to inquire into their pretensions on merely

because sooner or
literary grounds,
its
own
level,
matter; but
it
whatever criticism
later all literature finds
may
say or do in the
unfortunately happens in the present case
that the Fleshly School
of verse-writers are, so to
speak,
public offenders, because they are diligently spreading the
seeds
of disease
understood.
broadcast wherever they are read
Their complaint too
many young persons. What

works, may now be seen on a
is
catching,
and
and
carries
and how
off
the complaint
it
very slight examination of
the works of Mr.
Dante Gabriel
is,
Rossetti.
IV.
Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

" Who put bayes into blind Cupid's
That he should crown what
Mr- Rossetti has been known

of exceptional powers, who,
self,
fist,
laureates
for
him list ?"

Bishop Hall.
many
years as a painter
for reasons satisfactory to
him-
has shrunk from publicly exhibiting his pictures, and
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OE POETRY.
3+
from allowing anything
He
of their qualities.
like
a popular estimate to be formed
belongs, or
is
said to belong, to the
which
so-called Pre-Raphaelite school, a school
considered to
much
exhibit
indifference to perspective.
is
generally
genius for colour, and great
would be
It
unfair to judge the
painter by the glimpses I have had of his works, or by

the photographs which are sold of the principal paintings.
Judged by the photographs, he

unpleasantly,
and draws
however, with
whom
mon, he
good
for
an
there
is
conceives
and of
his capabilities
should guess that they are
any quality by which
poems are
his
spe-
a great sensitiveness to hues and tints as
it is
conveyed in poetic
who
artist
he seems to have many points in com-
cannot speak, though

if
marked,
cially
is
Like Mr. Simeon Solomon,
distinctively a colourist,
is
in colour I
ill.
epithet.
On the other hand, those
qualities
which impress the casual spectator of the photographs from
be found abundantly among
his pictures are to
There
is
the
same combination of the simple and
the grotesque, the
morbid deviation from healthy forms of
life,
of weary, wasting, yet exquisite sensuality
nothing tender, nothing completely sane
extreme
tints,
and
his verses.
same thinness and transparence of design, the
sensibility,
the same sense
nothing
virile,
a superfluity of
of delight in affected forms, hues, and
and a deep-seated
agencies, all
same
indifference to all agitating forces
tumultuous
thunderous stress of
life,
griefs
and
all
and sorrows,
the
all
the
straining storm of
Mr. Morris is often pure, fresh, and wholesome as his o\vn great model Mr. Swinburne startles us
more than once by some fine flash of insight but the mind
speculation.
of Mr. Rossetti
is
like
a glassy mere, broken only
by the

dive of
some water-bird or
brooded over by an
and a
and
the motion of floating insects,
atmosphere of insufferable closeness,
with a light blue sky above

it,
35
sultry depths mirrored within
it,
surface so thickly
sown with
water-Ulies that
it
glassy smoothness even in the strongest wind.
retains
its
Judged
relatively to his poetic associates,
be pronounced
Mr. Rossetti must
He cannot
inferior to either.
tell
a pleasant
story like Mr. Morris, nor forge alliterative thunderbolts

like
Mr, Swinburne.
that he
It
must be conceded, nevertheless,
neither so glibly imitative as the one, nor so
is
transcendently superficial as the other.
Although he has been known
for
^-
many
years as a poet as
as a painter and poet idolized by own

personal associates and although he has often
well as a painter
family and
appeared
his
in print as
a contributor to magazines, Mr. Rossetti
did not formally appeal to the public until rather more than
when he pubhshed a copious volume
a year ago,
with the announcement that the book, although

pieces
composed
at intervals
" included nothing
of poems,
contained
during a period of many years,
which the author believed to be
This work was inscribed to his brother,
mature.''
William Rossetti, who, having written
and
it
criticism, will
perhaps be
much both
known
in'-
Ml'.
in poetry
to bibliographers as
the editor of the worst edition of Shelley which has ever seen
the
No
light.
sooner had the work appeared than the
chorus of eulogy began.
"The book
end to end," wrote Mr. Morris
in the
is
satisfactory
Academy; "
from
think
these lyrics, with all their other merits, the most complete of
their
time
called great,
nor do
if
we
know what
lyrics of
are to deny the
any time are
title to
these,"
to
On
be
the
36
same subject Mr. Swinburne went

tion
into a hysteria of admira-
" golden affluence," "jewel-coloured words," "chastity
"consummate
of form," "harmonious nakedness,"

sculpture
; ''
and so on in Mr. Swinburne's well-known manner
when reviewing
Other
his friends.
critics,
with a singular
Strange to say, more-
similarity of phrase, followed suit.
over,
fleshly
What
no one accused Mr. Rossetti of naughtiness.
had been heinous in Mr. Swinburne was majestic

ness in Mr. Rossetti.
in the unfortunate "
Yet
question
if
Ballads "
Poems and
there
is
exquisite-
anything
more questionable
on the score of thorough nastiness than many pieces

Rossetti's collection.
rageous,
in
Mr.
Mr. Swinburne was wilder, more out-
more blasphemous, and
atrocious in themselves
his
subjects
were more
yet the hysterical tone slew the
animalism, the furiousness of epithet lowered the sensation
and the
feeling of disgust at
first
Veneris " and " Anactoria
ment.
It
a great
was only a
faded away into comic amaze-
"
mad boy
little
such themes as " Laus
letting off squibs
not
who might be really dangerous to

"I W// be naughty " screamed the little boy;
strong man,
society.
but, after
all,
what did
matter?
it
It
is
quite different,
however, when a grown person, with the self-control and easy

audacity of actual experience, comes forward to chronicle his
amorous sensations, and,

his literary maturity,
lessly prints
first
proclaiming in a loud voice
and consequent responsibihty, shame-
and publishes such a piece of writing
sonnet on " Nuptial Sleep
"At length
And as
"
their long kiss severed, with sweet
smart :
sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled.
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.
the last slow
as this

Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start
Of married fiowers to either side Outspread
From the knit stem ; yet still their mouths, burnt
Fawned on each other where they lay apart.
'
red.
Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams,
And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away.

Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams
Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day
Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more for there she lay."
:
This, then,
line,
is
" the golden affluence of words, the firm out-
the justice
and
man, presumably
chastity of form."
and
intelligent
men
record, for other full-grown
/Here
a full-grown
is
putting
cultivated,
most
to read, the
on
secret
mysteries of sexual connection, and that with so sickening a

desire to reproduce the sensual
epithet to convey
shudder
at the shameless
such matters.
is
a choice of
we merely
nakedness.
am no
or intellectual
spiritual
believe that such things

it
careful
sensations, that
purist
must
part,
and
neither poetic, nor manly, nor even
simply nasty.
many
of
Nasty as
readers do not think
"A
it
it
find their equivalent in art
human,
obtrude such things as the themes of whole poems.

is
in
hold the sensual part of our nature to
be as holy as the
but
mood, so
mere animal
is,
we
nice.
are very mistaken
What
to
It
if
says the author
Scourge for Paper Persecutors," in 1625, of similar
literature
?
'
Fine wit
is
shown
therein, but finer 'twere
If not attired in such
bawdy geare
But be it as it will, the coyest dames

In private read it for their closet games
38
English society of one kind purchases the Day's Doings.

English society of another kind goes into ecstasy over Mr.
Solomon's pictures
pretty pieces of morality, such as "
dying by the breath of Lust."
There
is
not
much
Love
to choose
between the two objects of admiration, except that painters

like
Mr. Solomon lend actual genius to worthless subjects,
and thereby produce veritable monsters

owes
danced
that
devils
round
like
Anthony.
St.
his so-called success with our " aunts "
mothers
"
to the
Sleep," the
same
man who
and so modest
that
causes.
is
it
the lovely
Mr.
Rossetti
and " grand-
In poems like " Nuptial
too sensitive to exhibit his pictures,
takes
him years
to
make up
mind
his
to publish his poems, parades his private sensations before
a coaTse public, and

It
gratified
by
their idiotic applause.
must not be supposed that
all
Mr.
made up
is
of trash like this.
Rossetti's
They contain some
of nature, occasional passages of real meaning,
poems
are
fine pictures
much
clever
phraseology, lines of peculiar sweetness, and epithets chosen
But the fleshly feeling is everySometimes, as in " The Stream's Secret," it adds
with true literary cunning.

where.
greatly to
our emotion of pleasure at
wrought poem
it is
somewhat held
situation
perusing a finely
at other times, as in the " Last Confession,"

in
check by the exigencies of a powerful
and the strength of a dramatic speaker
generally in the foreground, fiu'shing the whole
unhealthy rose-colour,
sickliness, as
of too
stifling the
much
dramatic, never impersonal

ing,
and describing
his
own
but
it
poem
is
with
senses with overpowering
civet.
always
Mr. Rossetti
is
never
attitudinising, postur-
exquisite emotions.
He
is
the
" Blessed Damozel," leaning over the " gold bar of heaven,"
and seeing

" Time
like
Thro'
he
39
a pulse shake fierce

the worlds
;
all
"heaven-horn Helen, Sparta's queen," whose "each

;
" he is Lilith, the first wife of
is an apple sweet
is
twin breast
Adam
he
is
and the Queen

"
Helen
in the " Staff and Scrip
man
melting her waxen
surely as he
London
is
poem
the rosy Virgin of the
he
is
called
he
"
" Ave,"
" Sister
is
these, just as
all
Mr. Rossetti soliloquising over Jenny
in her
person writing erotic
lodging, or the very nuptial
In petticoats or pantaloons, in modern
sonnets to his wife.
times or in the middle ages, he
just
is
person, with nothing particular to
tell
Mr. Rossetti, a
fleshly
us or teach us, with ex-
treme self-control, a strong sense of colour, and a most affected

Amid all his " affluence of jewelchoice of Latin diction.
coloured words," he has not given us one rounded and note-
worthy piece of art, though his verses are
which
is
memorable
for
own
its
sake,
all art
from the displeasing identity of the composer.
approach to a perfect whole

peculiar
poem, placed
dent, perhaps because
This
poem appeared
is
in a
poem
The
nearest
the " Blessed Damozel," a
in the book, perhaps
first
it is
not one
and quite separable
by
acci-
a key to the poems which follow.
rough shape many years ago in
the Germ, an unwholesome periodical started by the Pre-
Raphaelites, and suffered, after gasping through a few feeble
numbers, to die the death of

of
its
affected
title,
all
such publications.
and of numberless
out the text, the " Blessed
own, and a few lines of
In spite
affectations through-
Damozel " has merits of

real genius.
have heard
described as the record of actual grief and love,
or,
its
it
in
simple words, the apotheosis of one actually lost by the

writer
but, without having
any private knowledge of the
;;
40
circumstance of
account of the
its
poem
composition,
is
one single note of sorrow.
Read
clever one.
inadmissible.
It is a
feel
It
that
such
an
does not contain
" composition,'' and a
the opening stanzas
"The blessed damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven
Her eyes were deeper than
Of water stilled at even
She had three
And
"
Her
lilies
the depth
in her hand,
the stars in her hair were seven.
robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No
wrought flowers did adorn,

But a white rose of Mary's gift.
For service meetly worn
Her hair that lay along her back
'
Was
This
is
a careful sketch for a picture, *hich, worked into
actual colour
The
yellow like ripe corn."
by a master, might have been worth
steadiness of
hand
lessens as the
poem
seeing.
proceeds, and
although there are several passages of considerable power,
such as
down
that where, far
Spins like a
or that other, describing
the void,
" this earth
midge,"
fretful
how
" the curled moon
Was
like
little
Fluttering far
the general effect
is
the gulf,"
that of a queer old painting
very affected and very odd.

criticaster to ecstasy in this
nonsense indeed,
feather
down
or, if
on a
missal,
What moved the British

poem seems to me very sad
not sad nonsense, very meretricious

Thus,
affectation.
41
have seen the following verses quoted
with enthusiasm, as italicised
And still
"
and stooped
charm
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm.
And
the
bowed
she
Out of the
herself
circling
lilies
lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.

'
'
From
the fixed place of
Heaven she saw
Tim.e like a pulse shahe fierce
Her gaze
Thro' all the -worlds.
Within the gulf to pierce

and now she spoke
Its path
as
The
It
me
seems to
stars
still
strove
when
sang in their spheres."
that all these lines
are very bad, with the
exception of the two admirable lines ending the
and that the
italicised portions are quite
On
almost without meaning.
heartened
and amazed
at
poet who,
teenth century, talks about " damozels,''
"
citoles,''
verse,
whole, one feels dis-
the
the
first
without merit, and
in
nine-
the
" citherns," and
and addresses the mother of Christ as the
"
Lady
Mary,"
" With her
Are
five
five
handmaidens, whose names
sweet symphonies,
Cecily, Gertrude,
Magdalen,
Margaret, and Rosalys."
A suspicion is awakened that

We hover uncertainly between
pamby, and the
is
"weakening
effect, as
to
the writer
laughing at us.
Artemus Ward would express
the intellect."
been almost too much
is
picturesqueness and namby-
The
in the shape of
it,
thing would have
a picture, though the
workmanship might have made amends.
The
truth
is,
that
42
and more particularly poetry, is in a very bad

way when one art gets hold of another, and imposes upon
literature,
it its
conditions and limitations.
the "
Damozel
"
In the
first
few verses of
the subject, or part of the subject,
we have
of a picture, and the inventor should either have painted
or
left it
alone altogether
world would have

than painting
it is
too
and, had he done
lost nothing.
Poetry
is
it
the latter, the
something more
and an idea will not become a poem because
smudgy
for a picture.
In a short notice from a well-known pen, giving the best

estimate
we have
seen of Mr. Rossetti's power as a poet,
the North American Review offers a certain explanation for

,
affectation such as that of Mr. Rossetti.
gests that "
it
may
moods of mind
The
writer sug-
probably be the expression of genuine
in natures too little
comprehensive."
We
would rather believe that Mr. Rossetti lacks comprehension

than that he
is
deficient in sincerity; yet really, to para-
phrase the words which Johnson applied to

dan, Mr. Rossetti
is
have taken him a great deal of trouble
now
see
There
him
is
such an excess of
very
the sense that

the
poems
trouble.
and "
all
some of Swinburne's
look as
if
Sister
and
to
affectation
but
it
Sheri-
must
become what we
is
not in nature.*
volume spontaneous
writing in the
in
verses are spontaneous
they had taken a great deal of
The grotesque medisevalism
Town," the
are one
little
Thomas
affected, naturally affected,
"
of " Stratton Water
Helen," the mediaeval classicism of " Troy

and shallow mysticism of " Eden Bower,"
false
all essentially imitative,
and must have caused
"Why,
sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull ; but it must have taken

great deal of trouble to hecoine what we now see him such an
excess of stupidity Ls not in nature." Soswell's Life.
him
a.

the writer
much
pains.
Mr. RoBsetti
that
assimilation
time, indeed, to point out
is
a poet possessing great powers o^
is
and some
on which he
It
faculty for concealing the nutriment
Setting aside the
feeds.
"Vita'Nuova" and
the early Italian poems, which are familiar to
by
his
own
to the
translations,
excellent
described as a writer
who
moment.
power developed
also an adept.
in every
He
Mr. Rossetti may be

surrounding him
literature
has the painter's imitative
He
reproduces to a nicety the
which Mr. Swinburne
ballad, a trick in
one of these poems the tone of Mr. Tennyson
Raphaelites.
style
of Mr.
and there by the
disguised here
The
and Mrs. Browning, and

eccentricities of the Pre-
" Burden of Nineveh "
is
a philosophical
edition of " Recollections of the Arabian Nights
Confession " and " Dante at Verona
" are,
"
"A
critic
in points of phraseology,
who
will
the " Sonnets from the Portuguese."

theless, that is
Mr. Rossetti's own.
own property such
and
can
compare them with
Much
remains, never-
I at
once recognise
passages as this
"I looked up
And saw where
been largely moulded and inspired
by Mrs. Browning, especially

be ascertained by any
Last
in the minutest
and form of thought, suggestive of Mr. Browning
that the sonnets have
as his
is
Cultivated readers, moreover, will recognise
broken up by the
trick
readers
in proportion to his lack of the poet's
conceiving imagination.
manner of an old
many
has yielded, to an unusual extent,
complex influences of the
at the present
43
a brown-shouldered harlot leaned
Half through a tavern window thick with vine.

Some man had come behind her in the room
And caught her by her arms, and she had turned
With that coarse empty laugh on him, as now
"
44
He munched her necli
with
kisses^
while the vine
Crawled in her hacky
Or
this
:-
'
As
I stooped, her
own
lips rising there
Bubbled with brimming
Or
this
kisses at
my
Have
'
seen your lifted silken skirt
Advertise dainties through the
Or
this
dirt
:
"
What more
Grip and
prize than love to impel thee,

my limbs as I tell thee " *
lip
Passages hke these are the
common
ing gentlemen of the Fleshly School.

pressing
whom
mouth.'
:-
my
wonder, by the way,
seems the unhappy
it
encounter.
have lived nearly
came
have, but never yet
lot
at
stock of the walk-
cannot forbear ex-
the kind of
women
of these gentlemen to
as long in the
world as they
across persons of the other sex
who conduct themselves in the manner described. Females

who bite, scratch, scream, bubble, munch, sweat, writhe,
twist, wriggle, foam, and in a general way slaver over tfieir
lovers,
must surely possess some extraordinary
qualities to
mode
of conduct-
counteract their otherwise most offensive
however, on examination, that
ing themselves.
It appears,
their poet-lovers
conduct themselves in a similar manner.
They,
too, bite, scratch,
* Mr. Rossetti accuses
me
scream,
bubble,
munch,
sweat,
of garbling these four extracts, and alleges
when read with their context.

observe that the four poems which supply these
of coarseness from the first line to the last, and
that they have a totally different effect
In reply to
this, let
four extracts are

that
no
full
me
extract can fitly
See apres,
p. 64.
convey their unwholesomeness and indecency.

and
writhe, twist, wriggle, foam,
to hear
At
of.
slaver, in
times, in reading such
45
frightful
style
books
one
as this,
cannot help wishing that things had remained for ever in

the asexual state described in Mr. Darwin's great chapter
We
on Palingenesis.
hankering
get very, weary of this
person of the other sex
after a
drink, thought, sinew, religion, for the Fleshly

is
its
no
Holy
religious
Willie
justification
much
protracted
seems meat,
School^^There
and Mr. Rossetti
limit to the fleshliness,
own
it
finds in
same way
in the
it
as
:
"
Maybe thou
let'st this fleshly
thorn
Perplex thy servant night and
mom,
'Cause he's so gifted.

If so, thy hand must e'en be borne,
Until thou hit
Whether he
is
writing of the holy Damozel, or of the Virgin
herself, or of Lilith, or of
the street-walker, he
hair to the
is
Helen, or of Dante, or of Jenny
fleshly all over,
of his toes
tip
his identity into that of the
never tender
thing in
from the roots of his
never a true lover merging
beloved one
never
spiritual,
"
always self-conscious and aesthetic.
human
remorseless
as
it."
not
life,"
says a
modern
writer, "
is
No-
so utterly
love, not hate, not ambition, not vanity
the artistic or aesthetic instinct morbidly developed to
the suppression of conscience
do we
feel
more
fully
and
feeling;"
impressed with
the perusal of " Jenny," in

in the volume,
and
some
and
this truth
at
no time
than after
respects the cleverest
in all respects the
poem
poem
best indicative
of the true quality of the writer's humanity.
It is
a pro-
duction which' bears signs of having been suggested by
own
quasi-lyrical
poems, which
it
copies in the style of
my
title.
46
and
by "Artist and Model;"* but certamly
particularly
Mr. Rossetti cannot be accused, as
have been accused, of
The
maudlin sentiment and affected tenderness.

lines are perfect
" Lazy laughing languid Jenny,

Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea
and the poem
is
a soliloquy of the poet
;"
who
spending the evening in dancing at a casino

partner,
whom
two
first
"
has been
over
he has accompanied home to the usual
of lodgings occupied by such

asleep with her head
upon
ladies,
and who has
his knee, while
his
style
fallen
he wonders,
in a
wretched pun
" Whose person or whose purse may be
The
The
lodestar of your reverie ?"
and
some parts beautiful, despite

we are listening to an emasMr. Browning, whose whole tone and gesture, so to
soliloquy
is
long,
in
a very constant suspicion that
culated
speak,
is
and
there glimpses of actual thought
and
occasionally introduced with startling fidelity
there are here

insight, over
and
and above the picturesque touches which
long to the writer
be-
true profession, such as that where, at
daybreak
" lights creep
in
Past the gauze curtains half diawn-to,

And the la?np''s doubled shade grows blue.*'
What
*
I object to in this
Commenting on
"never read"
my
thirteen years ago.
this
poem
remark,
pcems, and
that,
is
not the subject, which
Mr. Rossetti avers that he has

moreover, "Jenny" was written

any
may be
writer
fairly
to
left
4?
choose for himself; nor
anything particularly vicious in the poetic treatment of
it
nor any bad blood bursting through in special passages.
But the whole tone, without being more than usually coarse,
seems
He
Rossetti.
to the seducer
and
There
heartless.
not a drop of piteousness in Mr.
is
just to the outcast,
is
even generous
severe
sad even at the spectacle of lust in dimity
Notwithstanding
fine ribbons.
all
this,
and a
certain
delicacy and refinement of treatment unusual with this poet,
poem
the
is
the "
and one
repelling,
after its perusal.
Song of the
likes
Mr. Rossetti
least
The " Blessed Damozel " is puzzling,

Bower " is amusing, the love-sonnet is
depressing and sickening, but "Jenny," though distinguished
by
is
makes the reader
apparent at a glance
"
burne, "
perfect
is
The whole
worthy to
life-blood
of a
London
Town and
human
tenderness than because
workj," (" Jenny,") writes
fill its
street
jot more,"
to
'Eden Bower;'
which
last
is
just the
in none.
"Vengeance of Jenny's
in all,
just as
'
Troy
much, and
statement I cordially assent
bad blood
this
There
interest in this episode
and lodging as In the song of
for there is
such a poet as
Mr. Swin-
place for ever as one of the most
and breadth of poetic
the song of
'
no
its
poems of an age or generation.
same
Its fleshliness
possessed an inherent quality of Ani-
like all the others,
malism.
lose patience.
one perceives that the scene was
fascinating less through

it,
thought and style than any of
less special viciousness of
these, fairly
and breadth of poetic

case,"
comes fawning over
compassion in one eye and
aesthetic
indeed
interest
!
when
her, with tender
enjoyment in the
other
It is
time
that I permitted
Mr. Rossetti to speak
for
48
himself,
which
poem
entire
do by quoting a
I will
fairly representative
" LOVE-LILY.
"Between the hands, between the brows,

Between the lips of Love-Lily,
spirit is born
whose iirth endows
My blood with fire to burn through me ;

Who breathes upon my gazing eyes,
Who laughs and murmurs in mine ear.
At whose
least
my
touch
And whom my life
colour
grows
flies,
faint to hear.
" Within the voice, within the heart,
Within the mind of Love-Lily,
A spirit
is
bom who
lifts
apart
me
His tremulous wings and looks at

Who on my mouth his finger lays,
And
shows, while whispering lutes confer.
That Eden of Love's watered ways

Whose winds and spirits worship
" Brows, hands, and
lips, heart,
her.
mind, and voice.
Kisses and words of Love-Lily,

bid me with your joy rejoice
Oh
Till riotous
Ah
let
But
longing rest in
not hope be
still
me I
distraught,
find in her its gracicius goal,
Whose
speech Truth knows not from her thought.

her body from her soul."
Nor Love
With the exception of the usual " riotous^longing," which

seems
to
make Mr.
Rossetti a burden to himself, there
is
nothing to find fault with in the extreme fleshhness of these

verses,
and
to
many people
Without pausing
might
me
we
to
dissect a
they
criticize
cobweb
may even appear
a thing so
or anatomize
trifling
beautiful.
as well
a medusa
ask the reader's attention to a peculiarity to which
the students of the Fleshly School

their attention
mean
must sooner or
let
all
later give
the habit of accenting the last
syl-
49
words which in ordinary speech are accented on
lable in
the penultimate
" Between the hands, between the brows,

Between the lips of Love-Liku /"
which may be said to give to the speaker's
voi<;e
a sort of
cooing tenderness just bordering on a loving whistle.

better as an illustration are the lines
" Saturday night
Still
market night
is
Everywhere, be it dry or wet,

And market night in the Haymar-*i
.'"
which the reader may advantageously compare with Mr.

Morris's
" Then
Thanked be thou
said the king,
neither for nothing
Shalt thou this good deed do to
me ;"
or Mr. Swinburne's
" In
either of the twain
Red
roses full of rain
She hath
for
bondwomen
All kinds of flowers."

It is
unnecessary to multiply examples of an affectation which
disfigures all these writers
who, in the same
spirit
which
prompts the ambitious nobodies that rent London theatres
"empty" season to make up for their dulness by

new readings," distinguish their attempt at
in the
fearfully original "
leading business by affecting the construction of their grand-
and
fathers
and the accentuation of the
great-grandfathers,
poets of the court of James
I.
remarkable genius, from
this
"
was " with " grass," " death
It is in all respects
"
" fountain," " love " with " of,"
so on
ad nauseam.
am
far
point
of view,
a sign of
to
with " lieth," " gain
rhyme
"
with
" once " with " suns,"
and
from disputing the value of
so
bad rhymes used occasionally

verse, but the case
is
to break
and not the exception, when
rule
up the monotony of
hard when such blunders become the

writers deliberately lay
themselves out to be as archaic and affected as possible.
Poetry
is
perfect
human
speech, and these archaisms are
empty heads and hollow
the mere fiddlededeeing of
hearts.
Bad
as they are, they are the true indication of falser tricks
and
affectations
as
heart's
and
drawn
how
showing
air,
and the
tiful,
which
lie far
deeper.
the wind blows.
speech are
They are trifles light

The soul's speech
clear, simple, natural,
and beau-
which we have
reject the meretricious tricks to
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
known, because
great poets are always to be
their
manner
is
immediately reproduced by small poets, and that a poet
who
finds few imitators
which they mean
great poets indeed.
On
rankby
probably of inferior
is
to infer that
they themselves are very

they are imitated.
It is quite true that
the stage, twenty provincial " stars " copy Charles Kean,
whUe not one
copies his father; there are dozens of actors
who reproduce Mr.
Charles
Dillon,
and not one who
attempts to reproduce Macready.
But what
is,
is
really
most
that these imitators
droll
seem
to
and puzzling in the matter

have no
difficulty
whatever
in writing nearly, if not quite, as- well as their masters.

is
It
not bad imitation they offer us, but poems which read
just
like
the originals; the fact being that
reproduce sound when

sense,
it
has no
and simple enough to
cull
strict
it
is
easy to
connection with
phraseology not hope-

interwoven with thought and
lessly
spirit.
these gentlemen are so easily imitated
proof of their
their faults
on
gentleman as
more
get
A great and good
he
great because
because his thought
a revelation
manner
manner of
great matter
is
time
great
day we cannot
certainty in the Iliad ; nor
trace
Donne,
Shakspere's blank
the most difficult and Jonson's the most easy to
imitate of all the Elizabethan stock
all
true
nor Pope, whose trick of
nor Sylvester, nor the Delia Cruscans.
is
The
almost inimitable.
easily copied that to this
own hand with any

is
light,
it is
generally accompanies great matter, the
scribbler of his
was so
verse
manner
in spite of
and, although
and
great
is
not Cowley, imitated and idolized and reproduced
by every
his
and often
easier
is
he brings great ideas and new

is
that a great
style
poet, however,
animal
if
make poems, nothing
irrespective of manner,
is
with
lie
young gentlemen have
All
rid of.
good
poet
damning
merits they have
though few have brains; and
faculties without brains will
is
that
fact
easily as the measles, only they are rather
faculties,
in the world.
The
the most
and can be caught by any young
the surface,
difficult to
animal
What
inferiority.
is
51
the best verse, because
it
and Shakspere's verse
combines the great
qualities of
contemporary verse, with no individual affectations
so perfectly does this verse, with
all its
with the style of contemporaries at their
undertake to select passage
a good judge to
tell
after
and
splendour, intersect
best,
that
we would
passage which would puzzle
which of the Elizabethans was the
Marlowe, Beaumont, Dekker, Marston, Webster, or
author
Shakspere himself.
The
thunder of a great Idea
great poet
;
is
Dante,
full
of the
and Milton, unapproachable
the serene white light of thought
in
and sumptuous wealth of
52
style
and Shakspere,
succession
ferent to
poets by turns, and
all
men
all
in
and Goethe, always innovating, and ever indifinnovation for its own sake; and Wordsworth,
;
and deep as the sea
clear as crystal
his vivid range, far-piercing sight,
and Tennyson, with
and perfect speech ; and
Browning, great, not by virtue of his eccentricities, but

Lost," the " Divine
Comedy,"
by Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear

lation of " Faust
though
its
;"
speech
is
naked prose
in
;
" Paradise
Tell
because of his close intellectual grasp.
do the same
read Mr. Hayward's trans-
take up the " Excursion," a great poem,

nearly prose already
turn the " Guine-
vere" into a mere story; reproduce Pompilia's
Reduced
speech without a line of rhythm.

these poems, and
all
great poems, lose
all
much do they not retain ?
They
are
bom
and depths of being, poems
poems
in
the soul, and treat them as cruelly as

will remain.
So
however low in
it is
their
with
rank
Wedding " and " Clever
so
Tom
is
it
dying
much
but
how
to the very roots
and delivered from
you may, poems they
good and thorough
all
last
to bald English,
creations,
with the " Ballad on a
Clinch," just as
much
as with
the " Epistle of Karsheesh," or Goethe's torso of " Prome-
theus;" with Shelley's "Skylark," or Alfred de Musset's
"A
la
Lune," as well as Racine's Athalie, Victor Hugo's
" Parricide," or
first
Hood's " Last Man."
poem is a poem,
The fleshly persons
as to the soul, next as to the form.
who wish
to create
form for
nouncing their own doom.
sake are merely pro-
But such form
Raphaelite fervour gains ground,

songs like this
own
its
we
shall
"When winds
Hard
is
the
do
life
roar,
and
rains
of the sailor ;
If the
Pre-
soon have popular
do pour,

He
scarcely as he reels can tell
The
He
and so on,
raving
side-lights
from the binnac^s ;
looketh on the wild water,"
madmen.
Of
own
for its
a piece with other affectations
its
the
Thus
relevancy.
Why did you melt your waxen man,

Helen
Sister
To-day
is
the fleshly persons are very
sake, quite apart from
Mr. Rossetti sings

"
Sec.
the English speech seems the speech of
till
device of a burden, of which
fond
53
is
.'
the third since you began.
The time was
long, yet the time ran.

Little brother.
(
O mother, Mary
mother.
Three days to-day between Heaven and Hell.]"
This burden
repeated, with
is
thirty-four verses.
About
as
or no alteration, through
little
much
to the point is
a burden
of Mr. Swinburne's, something to the following effect
" We were three maidens in the green com,

Small red leaves in the mill-water
Fairer maidens were never bom,
Apples of gold for the king's daughter."
Productions of
this sort are
"
silly
sooth " in good earnest,
though they delight some newspaper

are copied by
critics
of the day, and
young gentlemen with animal
bidly developed
by too much tobacco and too
faculties
little
mor-
exercise.
Such indulgence, however, would ruin the strongest poetical

constitution
and
it
unfortunately happens that
masters nor pupils were naturally very healthy.
poein as "
tion,
Eden Bower "
properly so called.
there
It is
is
neither
In such a
not one scrap of imagina-
a clever grotesque in the
worst manner of Callot, unredeemed by a gleam of true
poetry or humour.
No good
poet would have wrought
54
into a
poem
the absurd tradition about Lilith
content to glance at
it
Goethe was
merely, with a grim smile, in the
great scene in the Brocken.
may remark
here that pro-
ductions of this unnatural and morbid kind are only tolerable
when they embody a profound meaning, as do Coleridge's

" Ancient Mariner " and " Cristabel."
Not that we would
insult the memory of Coleridge by comparing his exquisitely
conscientious
Bower
"
work with
composition
unmistakable.
is
the influence of that

all his
this affected
rubbish about "
Eden
and " Sister Helen," although his influence in their

Still
more unmistakable
unwholesome poet, Beddoes, who,
is
witli
great powers (unmistakably superior to those of any
of the present Fleshly School), treated his subjects in a
thoroughly insincere manner, and
The
now justly
is
forgotten.
great strong current of English poetry rolls on, ever
mirroring in
its
bosom new prospects of fair and wholesome
Morbid deviations
thought.
there must be
are
endless and inevitable;
marsh and stagnant mere as well as mountain
and wood.
Glancing backward into the shady places of
the obscure,
writers each
we have seen
now consigned
and Gower
still
tongue
the once prosperous nonsenseto his
own
little
limbo
Skelton
playing fantastic tricks with the mother-
Gascoigne outlasting the applause of
all,
and
living
own works buried before him ;* Sylvester doomed

oblivion by his own fame as a translator; Carew the idol
courts, and Donne the beloved of schoolmen, both
to see his
to
of
buried in the same oblivion
the fantastic Fletchers winning
* Gascoigne's verse is noticeable, like Mr. Swinburne's, for its

laboured and wearisome alliteration ; but the " Good Morrow " and
" Good Night " are simple and graceful enough to save his fame from
litter
shipwreck.

wonder of
the
collegians,
and fading out through sheer
Cowley shaking
poetic impotence;
and perishing with them
pindarics,
55
England with
all
;
his
Waller, the famous,
saved from oblivion by the natural note of one single song *
and
so on, through league
after
league of a
desolate country which once was prosperous,
till
flat
and
we come
again to these fantastic figures of the Fleshly School, with

their droll mediseval garments, their
and the
marks of
fatal
and deUcate
whom
we have
judgment on Mr.
meantime confine
him another
in
my
Rossetti, to
judgment,
is
sub-
North American Reviewer, who believes
stantially that of the
that "
My
visage.
in the
funny archaic speech,
consumption on every pale
literary
poetical
man, and a man
markedly poetical, and of a kind apparently, though not

radically,
weight;"
from any of our secondary writers of
different
we have not
poetry, but that
and
that he
is
"so
in
him a new poet of any
affected, sentimental,
painfully self-conscious, that the best to

is
to
hope that
of so
much
good than
my
it
this
that
be done
book of his, having unpacked
is
unhealthy,
his
bosom
may have done him more
has given others pleasure." t
Such, I say,
opinion, which might very well be wrong,
and have
if Mr. Rossetti were younger and

His " maturity " is fatal.
undergo modification,
self-possessed.
and
in his case
is
to
less
" Go, lovely Rose."
f It is only fair to add that the Reviewer merely gives this as the
judgment he was " inclined " to pronounce, only that to say so in as
many words might lead to the misconcection that Mr. Rossetti had no
literary
merit whatever.
"
56
V.
"The House
I
HAD
of Life," &c., Re-examined.
Mr.
written thus far of
reading them for the
Western
of Scotland
Isles
my
published
criticism
Rossetti's poems, just after
time
first
in the
Rossetti,
ill-advised
sympathy of
goaded
my
preface),
into a sense of grievance
critic
his personal acquaintance,
incompetence and
explained in
by the
his friend the editor of the Athenautn,
" replied " to the audacious
by
Contemporary Review for
the
in
October (under circumstances
when Mr.
when cruising among the

summer of 1871, and I had
who, not being honoured
dared to accuse him of poetic
literary immorality.
Mr.
Rossetti's letter,
forming a whole page and a quarter of his favourite weekly

print,
now
consider
After
it
lies
in
before
some
he
is
show he
and
*
am bound
a preamble somewhat personal
Rossetti arrives at his

that
me and
is
(that
in
honour
to
detail.
first
point,
to
myself,* Mr.
which amounts to
this
going to write a long article of self-defence to
He
indifferent.
then formally opens his case,
he may not hereafter accuse
me
of "garbling"
Here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open

would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice, however,
not by enunciation,) that if the anonymous in criticism was as itself
'
'
signature,
but an early caterpillar stage,
originally inculcated
is
the nominate too
found to be no better than a homely transitional chrysalis, and that
the ultimate butterfly form for a
and yet
critic
who
likes to sport in sunlight
pseudonymous." Surely
never so tortured itself to clothe a simple meaning in
to elude the grasp, is after all the
human ingenuity
The only parallel is the author's poetry,

cumbrous and affected words
where a simple kiss becomes a " consonant interlude," and the ink in
a love-letter is called " the smooth black stream that makes thy (the
!
letter's)
whiteness
fair

his letter) I will
quote his very words, only
in certain places
57
italicising
them
" The primary accusation, on which this writer grounds all the rest,
seems to be that others and myself ' extol fleshliness as the distinct and
supreme end of poetic and pictorial art aver that poetic expression is
greater than poetic thought and, by inference, that the body is greater
than the soul, and sound superior to sense.' As my own writings are
alone formally dealt witt in the article, I shall confine my answer to
myself; and this must first take unavoidably the form of a challenge
to prone so broad a statement.
It is true, some fragmentary pretence
at proof is put in here and there throughout the attack, and thus far an
;
opportunity
"
is
given of contesting the assertion.
A Sonnet,
entitled Nuptial Sleep,' is quoted and abused at page

338 of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a whole poem,' describing merely animal sensations.' It is no more a whole poem in reality,
than is any sinê stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem,
'
'
'
written chiefly in sonnets,
and of which
this is
one sonnet-stanza,
is
The House of Life and even in my first published instalment of the whole work (as contained in the volume under notice)
entitled
'
'
ample evidence
is
the one headed
'
included that no such passing phase of description as

Nuptial Sleep could possibly be put forward by the
author of ' The House of Life ' as his own representative view of the
subject of love. In proof of tkis, I will direct attention (among the lovesonnets of this poem) to Nos. 2, 8, 11, 17, 28, and more especially 13,
which, indeed, I had better print here.
'
LOVE-SWEETNESS.
Sweet dimness of her loosened hair's downfall
About thy face her sweet hands round thy head
In gracious fostering union garlanded
;
Her tremulous smiles her glances' sweet recall

Of love her murmuring sighs memorial
;
Her
On
Back
mouth's culled sweetness by thy kisses shed

and neck and eyelids, and so led
cheeks
to
What
her mouth which answers there for all
In lacking which
The
And
sweeter than these things, except the thing

all
these
would
confident heart's stUl fervour
soft subsidence of the spirit's
lose their sweet

;
the swift beat
wing.
Then when it feels, in cloud-girt wayfaring.

The breath of kindred plumes agaiiist its feet
58
'
Any reader may bring any
above sonnet; but one charge
charge he pleases against the

would be impossible to maintain
against the writer of the series in which it occurs, and that is, the wish
on his part to assert that the body is greater than the soul. For here
all the passionate and, just delights of the iody are declared somewhat
figuratively^ it is true^ hut unmistakably to he as naught if not enartistic
it
nobled hy the concurrence of the soul at all timS. (!)* Moreover, nearly
one half of this series of sonnets has nothing to do with love, but treats
of quite other life-influences. I would defy any one to couple with
fair
quotation of Sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 41, 43, or others, the
was not impressed, Bke all other thinking
slander that their author
men, with the
responsibilities and higher mysteries of life; while

Sonnets 35, 36, and 37, entitled The Choice,' sum up the general
view taken in a manner only to be evaded by conscious insincerity.
Thus much for 'The House of Life,' of which the Sonnet 'Nuptial
Sleep
is one stanza, embodying, for its small constituent share, a
beauty of natural universal function, only to he reprobated in art if
'
'
dwelt on (as
I have shown
that
other highest things of which
Thus
Mr. Rossetti ; and although
wonder
poem, so
its
It
is
as
an uncompleted whole.
far
from changing
my
rather hard to
with sensualism from the
a very hotbed of nasty phrases
unwholesomeness
its
true character.
first line
but
reference
makes me
opinion,
at the writer's misconception of
It is flooded
is
it
refer again to
House of Life"
to this
it
not here) to the exclusion of those

harmonious concomitant." f
the
poems so unsavoury, I have no option

accept the challenge, and judge Mr. Rossetti by " The
have to
but to
far
it is
it is
to the last
its nastiness
or
goes
deeper than any phraseology
opens with a sonnet entitled " Bridal Love," wherein we
far
are told that " Love,"
"
Bom with her life,

And
creature of poignant thirst
exquisite hunger,"
My complaint
precisely
is,
that
vast deal too easily.
The
italics are
mine.
R. B.
Mr. Rossetti's " soul " concurs a

is
warm hands our couch;" and
preparing "with his
intense grows
"
so
the poet's enthusiasm at this information
he exclaims, wildly addressing
that
59
thou
who
at
his lady in
Sonnet
II.,
Love's hour ecstatically
Unto my lips dost evermore present

The body and Hood of Lave in Sacrament /"
which
a pretty good beginning, quite apart from the
is
blasphemy, for a writer in whose eyes a "beauty of natural

merely a " harmonious concomitant
universal function "
is
of higher
Sonnet
things.
III.,
entitled
"
"Love's Light,"
describes harmlessly enough how,

"
in the dark hours (we two alone)
Close kissed and eloquent of
Thy
still
replies
twilight-hidden glimmering visage
lies
"
;
but in Sonnet IV. another and higher stage is reached, for

the lady gives her lover a " consonant interlude " (which is
the Fleshly for " kiss
true,
"),
but unmistakably
baby, to afford him
"
and
" somewhat
proceeds,
full fruition
breast to breast
we
it
is
" I was a child beneath her touch
When
figuratively,
as a mother suckles a
(!),
a man
clung, even I and she,
A spirit when her spirit lookt thro' me,

A god when all our life-breath met to fan
Our
life-blood, till love's emulous ardours ran.

Fire within fire, desire in deity."
malignant
critic,
who has dared
these sweet lines of " fleshliness

this
!"
to attaint the author of
Let the reader examine
passage phrase by phrase and word by word, dwelling par-
ticularly
on the descriptive animahsm of the
Why, much
last three lines.
the same charge might be brought against that
delicious effort of
Thomas Carew,
entitled "
The Rapture,"
6o
wherein (quite after the modern fleshly

ness of love
chronicled in sublime
is
" Then
will I visit with a
wandering
The bower of roses and
whole busi-
style) the
and daring metaphor :

kiss
the grove of bliss,
Thence, passing o'er thy snowy Appenine,

Retire into thy grove of eglantine." *
Sonnet V.
is
our favourite already quoted, " Nuptial Sleep,"
and Sonnet VI., or " Supreme Surrender,"

"
To
all
the love-sown fallow field
My lady lies
apparent
Calls to the deep
is
of sleep
and the deep
and no one
hut /."
sees
also this dainty touch about her
hand
" First touched, the hand now warm around
Taught memory long
to
mock
The
is
meaningless, but in the
and Worship." Sonnet IX.,
a good sonnet and good poetry, despite
Portrait," is
the epithets of " mouth's
mould
Sonnet X., the " Love Letter,"

stops
neck
manner of Carew and Dr. Donne ; and the same may be
said of Sonnet VIII., " Passion
"
my
desire."
Sonnet VII., " Love's Lovers,"

best
how
the spirits of love that wander by.
Along
There
us
tells
short
of nastiness.
Sonnets XII. to
XX.
"
is
Sonnet
and " long

fleshly
XL
is
and
lithe throat."
affected,
but
also innocuous.
are one profuse sweat of animahsm,
containing, amongst other gems, this euphuistic description
of a kissing match
" Her moHth's
On
Back
*
culled sweetness
to her
mouth which answers
For a production quite
in our
better refer to this extraordinary
word.
by thy
kisses shed
cheeks, and neck, and eyelids, and so led

there for
modem
poem.
all
;"
maimer, the reader had

quote another
dare not

and scores of the
author's pet phrases, the veriest pimples

style, like "
on the surface of
memorial,"
sighs
6i
flowers," "
wanton
murmuring
"sweet confederate music favourable,"
" hours eventual," " Love's philtred euphrasy," " culminant
changes
cans
"
all familiar
enough
to us
from the Delia Cms-
but culminating, in Sonnet XX., with an image in
which the Euphuist would have rejoiced

" Her
set gaze gathered, thirstier than of late,
And
as she kissed, her
(!)
Mouth became her Soul !"
In Sonnet XXI., called " Parted Love," the lady has retired
to get breath
and arrange her
clothes,
and the lover
is
despairingly waiting from " the stark noon-height " to the
Sonnets XXII. and XXIII.
"sunset's desolate disarray."
are too vague for description, but
Landor would have stared
Words-
to see his famous sea-shell image (which he accused
worth of stealing) turned by the euphuistic-fleshly person

into
" The speech-bound
The next
four
sea-shell's
called
sonnets,
low importunate strain."
by the
" Willow-wood," contain, besides the

of brimming kisses,"
some
affected
gem about
fresh variations of a kiss
" Fast together, alive from the abyss,

Clung the soul-wrung implacable close
An
"implacable
" So
" kiss
Also
of
kiss."
when
And
The supreme
title
" bubbling
the song died did the kiss unclose,

her face fell back drown' d."
silliness
and worthlessness of " Willow-wood,"
however, could only be shown by quoting the four sonnets
62
TBE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY.
entire.
Sonnet XXVIII., or " Still-bom Love,"
will
doubt-
Mr. Rossetti's admirers other similar themes,

"
speedily have poetry on " Love's Cross-birth
less suggest to
and we
shall
and "Love's
XXXI., Mr.
and
may
very, very
Sonnets XXIX., XXX., and
Anaesthetics."
Rossetti particularly challenges
me
impeach
to
at once admit that they are not nasty, though
silly.
In Sonnet XXXII., however, we get back
to the old imagery
" Even as the thistledown from pathsides dead

Glean'd by a girl in autumns of her youth,
Which one new year makes soft her marriage bed."
Mr. Rossetti
is
never so great as on " kisses
and " beds.''
"
In spite of euphuisms without end, we get nothing very

spicy
till
we come
Mr. Rossetti
calls
to
Sonnet XXXIX., one of those which
immaculate.
Here, not content with
picturing " Vain Virtues " as Virgins writhing in Hell, he
describes
metaphor
the
Fire as
the
Bridegroom, and pursues the
to the very pit -of beastliness

" Virgins ....
whom
the fiends
compel
Together now, in snake-bound shuddering sheaves

Of anguish, while the scorching Bridegroom leaves
Their refuse maidenhood (.') abominable !"
There are ten sonnets to come, but must
them
Surely I have quoted already
ad nauseam.
quote from
After the
sonnets comes " Love-Lily," which I have already given

full;
in
then "First Love Remembered;" then " Plighted Pro-
mise,''
a lyric which I
am bound
to copy, as
been equalled since the famous

" Fluttering fold thy feeble pinions
of the " Rejected Addresses
:"
"-
it
has never
63
"PLIGHTED PROMISE.
" In a soft-complexioned sky
Fleeting rose and kindling grey,
Have you seen Aurora
At
the break of day
So my maiden,
fly
?
my plighted may
so
Blushing cheek and gleaming eye

Lifts to look my way.
" Where the inmost
leaf is stirred
With the heart-beat of the grove.

Have you heard a hidden bird
Cast her note above
.'
So my lady, so my lovely love

Echoing Cupid's prompted word,
Makes a tune thereof.
" Have you seen, at heaven's mid-height,
In the moon-rack's ebb and tide,
Venus leap
forth burning white
Pearl-pale and hide
So my bright breast-jewel, so my bride

One sweet night when fear takes flight
Shall leap against
" soft-complexioned sky " the " heart-beat of the grove

!
"Aurora, Cupid, Dian!"

this
rub
my
can be the nineteenth century,
their " bright breast-jewel," recall
really quotations of this sort
"
my side''
The House
though
them,
of Life
"
sensuous in
poems,' swarming, with
to
my
"
subject.
become the merest
is
if
But
iteration.
Four of
have no direct
the
extreme,
The
other four are sickly love-
affectations.
My
extracts,
"Song
must, close with this verse from the
Bower"' (Mr. Rossetti
wondering
the last lines, with
till
contains eight songs more.
reference to nasty subjects.
ever',,
me
eyes,
'
great in " bowers ")
were my prize, could I enter thy bower,

Thia day, to-morrow, a{ eve or at mom
What
.'
howof the
64
Large
lovely
Bosom
arms and a neck
then heaving that
like
now
a tower,*
lies forlorn,
Kindled with love-breath, (the sun's kiss is colder !)

Thy sweetness aU near me, so distant to-day
My hand round thy neck and thy hand on my shoulder,
My mouth to thy mouth as the world melts away."
In
this
and a thousand other passages one thing is apparent
either
Mr. Rossetti
bume,
or Mr. Swinburne has
is
from Mr.
stealing wholesale
been
all his life
Swiij-
robbing Mr.
Rossetti.
Having so far complied with Mr. Rossetti's request, and

re-examined " The House of Life," I retain unchanged my
impression that the sort of house meant should be name-
but
less,
is
" Jenny."
probably the identical one where the writer found
Once more,
should like to quote Mr. Rossetti,
in the further passages of his high
abusive that I
vindicating "
am bound
argument
but he is so very
The House
to condense his statement.
After
of Life," he proceeds to say that
the four extracts given in p. 44 are grossly garbled, and
printed " without reference to any precise page or poem,"
and
that the
poems themselves,
found perfectly beautiful and
poems
four
in question.
The
read wisely, would be
if
Turn, then, to the
artistic.
first is
"
Last Confession,"
which describes, in Mr. Browning's favourite manner, how
an
Italian,
This
for,
maddened by
Italian,
it
jealousy,
may be remarked,
murdered
is
besides being disagreeably affected, he
habit of brooding over unclean ideas
his mistress.
very like our author,
had a morbid
and suspicions
* Compare Greene's " Menaphon's Eclogue "

" Her Heck like to an ivory shining tower," &c.
:
inso-

much
that, as
by the
frenzy
Mr. Rossetti truly observes, he
driven to
is
resemblance between
fancied
or
real
also," continues the bard, " that these are but
poem
is
Observe, I say in turn, that the whole
morbid and unwholesome, and must be drunk
as a whole to leave
its full
of murder, madness,
possesses
first
seven lines in
of five hundred, not one other of which could be
classed with them.''
poem
the
" Observe
laugh of the harlot and that of his mistress.
b5
lies in
bad
and morbid
the intensity of
moment when
lust,
its
in
It positively reeks
flavour.
and whatever merit
it
ugly thoughts, from the
the Italian began his courtship in this
extraordinary fashion
" What I knew I told
Of Venus and of Cupid, strange
till,
bhnded with
dered her, and
lustful rage,
dreams
tells his
till
all
he confesses having mur-
In justice
that a
has Mr. Rossetti's
madman
gift,
to
Sucked
a poet
who wrote
As
if
it
" She had a mouth

the underlip
in^
becomes a
speaking
bring death to hfe,
as if it strode
to kiss itself.''^
With the Delia Cruscan, the attempt

striking
is
for here is the sort
of conceit with which he delights the priest
Made
.'"
between her fingers hiss
we should observe
madman
my dream
the darkness reeked of it.
I heard the blood
but this
" She VFrung her hair out in

To-night,
"
old tales
positive mania.
thus
to
seem
Her nose inclined to heaven.

up at itself
tried to turn
subtle
What would be
and
said of
"
"
66
Yet the one metaphor
is
every whit as sensible and brilliant
as the other.
The second of the four poems is the "bubble'' poem

"The House of Life." The third is from "Eden
from
Bower," a production which
"Here
again,"
naturally the reader

is
would gladly quote
"no
reference
the contrary,
snake-woman and a snake."
Exactly
is
described
The
School are invariably snake-like

lipping,
"
Eden Bower
"
complete epitome of the

coterie poets.
again.
may be
art
is
is
that of a
but will Mr.
lovers of the
Fleshly
fairly
and indeed, on
considered as a
of love as practised by the
Since Mr. Rossetti
His book
and
in their eternal wriggling,
munching, slavering, and biting
reflection,
entire.
given,
poems where a
Rossetti describe a single passage in his
human embrace
is
would suppose that a human embrace
The embrace, on
described.
fabled
observed,
is
it
us try
is dissatisfied, let
we draw blindfold but
a lottery-bag
are always sure of a prize
" Bring thou close thine head till it glisten

Along my breast, and li^ me, and listen
!
Once more,
"
conjugal
great joys
Sweet
close rings
heart in
result (next verse)
"
What
is
Lilith
bright babes had Lilith and

in the
Adam
.''
woods and waters," &c.
savoury, and the whole
Compare Carew
"
and
Shapes that coiled
All this
Adam
had Adam and Lilith

of the serpent's twining,
heart lay sighing and pining." *
What
As
The
bliss of
poem
is still
more
so
Now in more subtle wreaths I

My sturdy limbs, ray legs and
will ent-vyine
thighs, with thine
so
67
that the reader feels a horrible sense of sliminess, as
were handling a yellow serpent or a conger
more
blindfold once
prize
for
another " draw."
Town
from " Troy
is
once more premise that the

sillier
if
he
me
try
This time
;" but, before I quote, let
poem
than any extract.
herself
Let
eel.
as a
whole
is fleshlier
Helen's breasts,
my
me
and
described by
" Each twin breast

*
Mine
is
an apple sweet
grown to the south

[O Troy Town !)
are apples
Grown to taste in the days of drouth,

Taste and waste to the heart's desire
Mine are apples meet for his mouth ! "
So that
suckled
poor fellow, has a
Paris,
by Helen, and
is likely, after
prospect of being
fair
" tasting " her " apples"
or " breasts meet for his mouth," to " waste " them (whatever that means) " to his heart's desire."
But already
" Hold,
all
I hear the
enough
"
amazed reader
out of one small volume of verse
go on quoting for pages more.

sinuation that
I
my
criticism
do not know Mr.
cry, with
Rossetti,
and
at
present than
phenomenon
that
there
is
might readily
was based on private grounds.

have no grievance against him,
but in his poetry
I reject altogether the in-
and I can quite believe that in private

exemplary person
Macbeth,
have thus piled example upon example,
life
to
he
is
a most
go no further
very small phase of a portentous
a veritably stupendous preponder-
ance of sensuaUty and sickly animalism.
I base that belief,
not merely on stray expressions such as I quoted, not

merely on lines about the " lipping of limbs," bubbling of
kisses, "
fawning of
lips " in
bed, munching of mouths, and
68
all
the inordinate coarseness of the fleshly vocabulary, but
on the persistent choice of subjects repulsive in themselves,
and capable of
Jenny
the
fleshly treatment,
the street-walker,
dirt,'"
and
poem about
serenaded by the poet in a brothel
is
Lilith the Snake,
and general
such as the lyric abeut
" advertises dainties through
who
and her gripping and
arts of fornication
the
lipping,
and the nuptial sonnet
which Mr. Rossetti studiously refrains from quoting, knowing
would condemn him
that
it
said,
and
and that
deplorable,
said,
and
say, that
writer's treatment
fatally in all
treatment
their
phase, I
no means morbid
at that
and
if I
go a
little
phenomenon of which he
prostituted,
art
in itself: all this
but
decency outraged, history
find
sacrificed,
offensive
even when, as very seldom happens, he
without going beyond Mr. Rossetti
and look
is
I
is
morbid habit penetrates into the
the
chooses a subject by
further,
decent eyes.
very choice of these subjects
say, that the
language
falsified,
perverted,
is
purity
religion
outraged, in one gibbering attempt to apotheosize vice and
demolish art with the implements of blasphemy and passion

I find that
harlot,
Mary
Sappho a
of Scotland
scandals and abortions

into this
and
men
of real though
own
that
a number of
very limited ability are, blinded by
knowledge, the praise of
the applause of a heartless

ruin,
inquiry
no grudge,
only, with
animosity whatever
their
little
my
religion distorted into lust,
on public grounds
with no personal
and Christianity
further
the very language of religion, I take
lust raving in
literary
a biting and scratching
and pursuing
phenomenon, finding
occasion to say
is
lustful wild beast, Christ
vile
clique, rushing
minds, and
headlong to
and dragging many of the young generation

What Mr.
with them.
Rossetti says in explanation
to the point in so far as
himself
is
6g
utterly unconscious of his
own
offences
does not,
between passion and sensuality
in fact, discriminate
only
is
deplorably convincing that he
it is
and
endeavours, writhing under what he thinks an unmerited

imputation, to save himself on the plea of personal purity
No
and dramatic motive.
one can rejoice more than
do
Mr. Rossetti attaches a certain importance to
to hear that
the soul as distinguished from the body, only I should like
very
much
to
know what he means by
the soul
for I fear,
from the sonnet he quotes, that he regards the feeling
young woman's person,
face, heart,
In the
quite a spiritual sentiment.
Lily " he expressly observes that

"
body from her
soul
It is precisely this
Rossetti as
longing,"
it
"
they are
and mind, as
poem
becomes so
tell Lily's
so inextricably blended.
with what he
intolerable
entitled " Love-
Love cannot
confusion of the two which,
eternally does
for
in itself
to
filling
calls
Mr.
"riotous
readers with a less
mystic sense of animal function.
VI.
Pearls from the Amatory Poets.

" Belial came last, than whom a spirit more lewd
Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love
Paradise Lost.
Vice for itself."
I
HAVE thus
not because
carefully
it is
gone through Mr. Rossetti's poetry,
by any means the best or worst verse of
kind, but because, being avowedly "mature,"
had the benefit of many
years' revision,
it
is
its
and having
perhaps more
70
truly representative of its class than the grosser verse of
Mr.
Swinburne, or the more careless and fluent verse of Mr.
The main charge
Morris.
kind
is
truth in
some
its
my own
bring against poetry of this
if
there be any
Theory of Literary Morality,
as enunciated
sickliness
and effeminacy; but
years ago in the Fortnightly Review, the charge of
indecency need not be pressed at

fact of artistic
any book
is
as
all,
determinable by
settled
it is
The
and poetic incompetence.
by the
morality of
value as literature
its
im-
moral writing proceeding primarily from insincerity of vision,
and
therefore being
betokened by
those signs which
all
enable us to ascertain the value of art as

sent case the matter
and the
that the silHness
but at second hand

the merest echoes
is
insincerity
is
vile,
admirable.
for
and
He
to his laurels.
perceive
come, not by nature,
is
original in
this
loath
in
this
That gentleman
is
that
they
connection to
is
so prolific, so
generally so innocent (despite the
ever-present undertone of fleshliness), that he

left
we
while other imitators reproduce
am
incriminate Mr. Morris.

fertile in resources,
In the pre-
art.
;
Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne being
strikingly
merely echo what
what
ludicrously simple
is
open to the same
as the others, but, while often ingenuous,
is
may
fairly
be
literary criticism
never altogether
unclean.
It
may be
interesting for the reader to compare, in a brief
glance, the various poets of the Italian-English school with
each other.
To do
so thoroughly would involve the serious
task of perusing three-fourths of the forgotten English poets

for,
since
weeds ever grew quicker than
the poetic trash

verse-writers,
left
flowers, the
bulk of
behind by successive generations of
from Surrey to Spratt,
far
outweighs the
little
which may justly be esteemed
collection of true poetry
and unimpeachable.
classic
71
But
may be observed here

name be
it
that all the poets of this school, though their

legion, write very
and often
(which
is
much
the soul of poetry),
consent of parts (which

ing
only
They
alike.
expressions,
are generally affected,
" All that regards design, form, fable
nasty.
is
all
that concerns exactness or
the body), will probably be want-
pretty conceptions,
metaphors, glittering
fine
and something of a neat cast of verse (which
are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry),
may be found
narrowly."
Their colouring entertains
in their verses.
the sight, but the lines and
Such
is
are not to be inspected too
life
Pope's criticism on Crashaw, and
it
will
apply to any one of the school, certainly to Mr. Swinburne

or Mr. Rossetti.
It
need cause no wonder that
verse-writers of this sort find
admirers in proportion to their shallowness and affectation.
This has been the case from the beginning, and
now.
The poems and
it is
the case
plays of the egregious Cartwright,
published in 1651, are preceded by panegyrics from

wits of the time,
no
less
than
fifty
all
the
number, quite in the
in
Donne was
style of the Fleshly
School and
its Critics.
pride of collegians.
Cowley was
actually considered the glory
and the wonder of
his generation.
mous
press
but there
is
still
a tremendous check on
It is the interest of
sons and schoolmen to exalt
themselves -can
some
this sort
the anony-
of humbug,
linger old-fashioned journals with strings in
the hands of a clique.*
to get
Nowadays
the
fairly
sort of
hope to
all
artificial
rival the stuff
a position.
If
* See Notes.
educated per-
products, for they
they praise and
hothouse plants are in
"
72
favour,
any clever young fellow from a university can force
them.
And
thus happens that the Fleshly School, with-
it
out ever reaching the general public,
amateurs
literary
who
yearly
college,
and ruin
every-
free of charge.
From
time immemorial, poets of the Artificial School have
same way, and been admired
written in the
tricks
in favour with the
by writing anywhere and
the profession of literature
where
is
swarm from
for the
same
and indeed our modern poets can stand no com-
parison, even in subtle grossness, with their
progenitors.
Here
in
are Cowley's lines
lemon, and read by the
on a paper written
fire
juice of
" Nothing yet in thee is seen

But when a genial heat warms thee within,
;
A new-bom wood of various lines there grows,

Here buds an L, and there a B,
Here spouts a V, and there a T,
And
all
the flourishing letters stand in rows ;"
which the reader
may
description
Rossetti's
advantageously compare with Mr.

of a love-letter in
The master above
volume.
the following awful passage

"
198
p.
of his
quoted, in his " Davideis," has

:
The sun himself started with sudden fright,

To see his beams return so dismal light
!
This
performing a miracle certainly, but Mr. Rossetti

performs a greater ^he makes the " Silence " speak
is
" But therewithal the tremulous Silence said

Lo, Love yet bids thy lady,' " &c. (Page 206.)
:
'
Thus
sings, or screams,
Mr. Swinburne
"Ah, that my lips were tuneless lips, but pressed

To the bruised blossom of thy scolirged white breast
.
Ah,
On
that
my mouth,
for
Muses' milk, were fed
the sweet blood thy sweet small
wounds had bled

That with
The
my tongue
faint flakes
them and could
I felt
Thy
taste
from thy bosom to the waist
That I could drink thy veins
as wine,
and
73
eat
breasts like honey."
Dr. Donne, however, had anticipated him in the same

vein
As
As
As
the sweet sweat of roses in a
still,
which from chaf'd muskats' pores doth

the almighty balm of the early east,
Such are the sweat drops of my mistress' breast
And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They seem no sweat drops, but pearl coronets."
that,
trill,
These poets ever dehght in the strangest and most
far-
Cleveland has a magnificent com-
fetched comparisons.
parison of the sun to a coal-pit ; but Rossetti, twenty times
more cunning and
subtle, sees that
" vows
" are the
merest
bricks
"
We strove
To build wiHii Jire-tried vows the piteous home

Which memory haunts." (P^ge 208.)
Cowley compares
his heart to
a hand-grenado
in
a similar
Rossetti compares the Soul to a town, and (bent to
spirit,
hunt the simile to death)
and
there,
that
us that there are by-streets
tells
Hopes go about hunting
the public-houses
for adventures at
" So through that soul in restless brotherhood.
They roam together now, and wind among

It's bye-streets,
Dr. John
" globes,
Africa
;"
Donne
is
knocking at the
great
on Tears
nay worlds," containing

and
" (Page 231.)
they are at one time
their "
Europe, Asia, and
at another they are " wine," bottled " in crystal
vials" for the tipple
of lovers.
military spirit, thus describes a

"
(tf-sty inns'.
Mr. Rossetti, in a semi-
Moan :
moan, the sighing wind's auxiliary! "
74
Quite in the
of Mr. Rossetti's fleshlier and
spirit
commoner
manner, in which he talks about his lady's hand teaching

" memory to mock desire," is Cowley's exquisite meditation,
addressed to his mistress
" Though
in thy thoughts scarce any tracts have been
So much as of original sin,

Such charms thy beauty wears,
Desires in dying saints excite
This
is
way Dr. John Donne
the
the seventeenth century

" Are not thy
As
as
might
"
!
writes in the beginning of
kisses, then, as filthy,
and more,
worm
sucking an envenom'd sore ?

Doth not thy fearful hand in feeling quake.
a
As one which
gathering flowers
still
fears a
snake ?"
Could anything more closely resemble the horrible manner,

of Mr. Swinburne's "Anactoria?"
It is difficult to believe that our present school of poets
have not drunk deep at the
muddy Aganippe
of their pre-
decessors here in England, as well as at the poetic fountain

polluted by the influx of the
Parisian
sewers.
There
is
a coincidence of affectation in the following parallel passages
THE TROJAN HORSE.

"
A mother,
In end,
" That
The
was without tnother bom,
all arra'd,
ray father I brought forth
whose populous
was death." ^RosSETTl
horse, within
birth
Again, Mr. Rossetti, in Sonnet
"a Lady"
with
men," finding "
whom
all
"
Drtjmmond.
womb
(p. 229).
XXIX., compares Life
to
he wandered from the "haunts of
bowers amiss"
(!)
till
he came to a place
75
" where only woods and waves could hear our kiss," and
who, as an awful result, bare him three children, Love, Song
"Whose
Blew
And
Nearly as absurd, but

passage in
we have
hair
a flame and blossomed liice a wreath,

Art, whose eyes were worlds by Godfound fair,^^
like
subtle
less
Drummond's "'Hymn
and
harassing,
is
the
to the Fairest Fair," wherein
the following incarnate metaphor of no less shadowy
a shape than " Providence

"
With
!"
faces two, lUce sisters, sweetly
fair,
Whose
blossoms no rough autumn can impair.

Stands Providence, and doth her looks disperse
Thro' every corner of the universe."
Nor must
meet
in
it
be hastily concluded that Mr. Rossetti's
for the
mouth"
one passage
simile
is
quite original.
''
apples
Drummond
calls his mistresses' hearts
" Fruits of Paradise,

Celestial cherries that so sweetly
and
in another
close
upon
the following
and the " munching

"
modem
the best
Who
smeU
"
;
sonnet comes tremendously

manner, minus the " lipping''
"
:
hath not seen into her
saflfron
bed
The morning's goddess mildly her repose,

Or her of whose pure blood first sprang the
LuU'd
rose
a slumber by a myrtle shade ?

Who hath not seen that sleeping white and red
Makes Phoebe look so pale, which she did close
In that Ionian hall to ease her woes.
in
Which only Hves by her dear kisses fed

Come but and see my lady sweetly sleep,
.'
* It is perhaps needless to remark the utter confusion of metaphor

which makes a love-act with Life as Lady precede the birth of Love,
&c. The language of this school wUl not bear a moment's serious
investigation.
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF
76
POETRY-.
sighing rubies of those heavenly
The
lips,
The Cufids which ireasts' golden apples keep.

Those eyes which shine in midst of their eclipse
And he them all shall see, perhaps and prove
She waking but persuadeth, now forceth love."
I
have quoted
modern
this
poem
and would
spirit,
entire,
because
certainly,
if
it is
quite in the
printed in either Mr.
Swinburne's or Mr. Rossetti's poems, have been considered

partly because I should like the reader to
beautiful;
and
compare
it
with the Swinburnian conception of " Love and
Sleep, as
known
to the
moderns
''
" Lying asleep between the strokes of night

I saw my love lean over my sad bed.
Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head.
Smooth-skinned and dark with bare throat
Too wan
for blushing
and too warm
made
But
perfect coloured without white or red
And
her lips opened amorously, and said
I wist not what, saving
one word
to hite
for white,
Delight!
And all her face was honey to my mouth,

And all her body pasture to mine eyes
The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire,
The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south.
The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs.
And glittering eyelids
of my soul's desire."
Swinburne's Poems and Ballads,
The reader whom

Donne's eighteenth
been written
compared
to
this fascinates
had better turn
elegy, every line of
p. 316.
to Dr.
which might have
wherein the nude female
in our generation,
is
a Globe for the lover's exploration, and the
whole Voyage
is
described with a
terrific
realism of detail
and daring strength of metaphor which would

Rossetti with envy
and
despair.
It
is,
too strong to quote, though not a grain more
above sonnet.
Let
me
turn,
fill
even Mr.
unfortunately, rather
by way of
filthy
than the
disinfectant, to a
77
conceit in the true Delia Cruscan style, from Mr. Rossetti's
works.
very shadowy Entity
"A
affectedly called
" Look
speaking, in a
is
poem
Superscription:"
my name is Might-have-heen
No-more^ Too-late, Farewell
Unto thine ear I hold the dead sea-shell," &c. (Page 234.)
am
my
in
face
also called
This passage, although quite in the ancient manner, was

perhaps composed on one of those days when Mr. Rossetti
goes poaching in Mr. Swinburne's French " Slough of Uncleanness,"
we
for
similar language
Baudelaire making use of very
find
" Trois mUle
Chuchote
D'lnsecte,
six cents fois
Souviens-toi
Maintenant
par heure, la Seconde
Rapide avec
dit
sa voix
suis Autrefois
Je
Fleurs de Mai,
Truly, this sort of reading

I
is
wearing to the brain
p. 245.
have already alluded more than once to the foolish
fleshliness
which permeates the contemporary treatment of
even avowedly
religious themes.
For example, when Mr.
Rossetti writes about the Virgin Mary, he begins in the

true fantastic spirit of those older writers
who
spiritualised
sensualism in their addresses to the Bridegroom and the
Magdalen.
" Mother of the Fair Delight "
!
he
exclaims
jargon
and
then
proceeds
with
the
following
'
'
Handmaid
perfect in God's sight,
Now sitting fourth beside
the Three,
Thyself a woman-Trinity,
Being a daughter bom to God,
Mother of Christ from stall to rood,

And Wife unto the Holy Ghost ! !"
The poem improves
as
it
proceeds, but
it is
fleshly to the
78
last fibre,
poem on
"
quite, in fact, in the spirit of
The Weeper
"
What
Richard Crashaw's
"
bright soft thing
Sweet Mary, thy
is this ?
fair eyes'
A moist spark
A watery diamond
expence
it is,
;
from whence
The very term, I thinlc, was

The water of a diamond.
"
'tis
not a
found,
tear,
'Tis a star about to drop
From thine eye its sphert

The sun will stoop and take
Proud
will his sister
it
up.
be to wear
This thine eye's jewel in her ear.
"
a tear,
'tis
Too
true a tear
How sad so
Rain so
Each drop
Weeps
for
no sad eyne,
e'er.
true a tear as thine
leaving a place so dear
for itself,
is its
own
tear.
" Such a pearl as this is

(Slipt from Aurora's dewy breast)
The
And
With
rose-bud's sweet lip kisses,

such the rose itself when vext
ungentle flames, does shed,
Sweating in too wann a bed."
This
is
meant reverently, but what
Rossetti's " Love's
connection
is
shall
we
say of Mr.
Redemption" in which the act of sexual
outrageously and vilely
compared
administering of the sacramental bread and wine

"
Compare,
generally,
thou,
also,
who
Love's hour ecstatically," &c.*
with Mr. Rossetti's pseudo-religious poems
those passages
language of passion
spiritual
at
and
to the
and
of
Crashaw
lust is
religious sensations
in
which
all
the
used to describe purely
* See ante, p. 59.

"
Amorous languishments, luminous
79
trances,
Sights which are not seen with eyes,
and soul-piercing glances

pure and subtle lightning flies
to the heart, and sets the house on
Spiritual
Whose
Home
And melts it down in
sweet desire
Yet doth not stay

ask the windows leave
To
fire
to pass that way.
" DeUcious deaths, soft exhalations
Of soul
dear and divine annihilations
A thousand unknown rites

Of joys and rarified
delights
"
!
On a Prayer Book
This might have been pardonable in a
Selden's time, but the echo of
the nineteenth century

I close this
reading.
Catholic of
positively dreadful.*
" person.
try to gather
some thought, some

I find
Roman
M. R.
in a " mature " person of
book of the " mature
Swinburne's volumes.
pression,
is
it
sent to Mrs.
light,
I close
some
from what
Mr.
definite imI
have been
my mind jaded, my whole body
sick
and
distressed, a dull pain lurking in the region of the medulla
oblongata.
am
I try to
picture
up Mr.
Rossetti's poetry,
dazzled by conceits in sixteenth-century costume,
* Hall, in the ninth satire of
Book
I.,
and
" rosy
took occasion to attack this
blending of incongruous ideas and symbols into afiected religious verse.

" Hence, ye profane !" he cried,
"
mell not with holy things,
That Sion's Muse from Palestina brings.

Parnassus
is
transformed to Sion Hill,
And iv'ry-palms her steep ascents done fill.

Now good St. Peter weeps pure HeHcon,
And both the Maries make a music moan
Yea, even the prophet of the heav'nly lyre.
Great Solomon, sings in the English quire,
And is become a new-found sonnetist,
Singing his love, the holy spouse of Christ,
Like as she were some light-sldrts of the rest," &c.
8o
hours,'' "
''with "gonfalons," damsels with "citherns,"
Loves
" soft-complexioned "
apple-blossoms, lutes
of humanity
flowers,
skies;
I hear only the
most
men and women

alliteration
sterile
part,
and often blasphemous.

;
and
lo
the Bac-
Dolores sweats, serpents dance,
wrench, wriggle, and foam in an endless
(quite in Gascoigne's
meaningless
sign
heated ravings of an affected
attempt to describe Mr. Swinburne
chanal screams, the
jewels, vases,
fruits,
no gleam of nature, not a
I see
lover, indecent for the

I
words,
the
veriest
manner) of heated and

garbage
of
Baudelaire
flowered over with the epithets of the Delia Cruscans.

.
"One moment
!"
observes a candid person as I write
" the emptiness and grossness of these
may be
admitted
but are not these writers quite unimpeachable on the ground

of poetic
yiirwz,
thing on
this
said that
that
and
that not a certain merit?"
head has been said already.
no unsound
what holds
trufe
manner and
true of
is
soul
Let
it
Some-
be further
clad in a sound form
is
and
of matter and thought holds equally
style
but neither will bear
both
may seem
rapid and strong,
five minutes' criticism.
Imagine an
English writer pluming himself on his careful choice of

diction,
and publishing such a verse

" Nothing
Than
is better,
love
as the following
I -well think,
the hidden
mell-vis.ter
Is not so delicate to drink
This was well seen of rae and her."
Swinburne's Poems and
Or
this other of
Mr. Rossetti
" In painting her I shrined her face

'Mid mystic trees, where light falls in
Hardly at all a covert place
Where you might think to find a din
;
Ballads.
8i
Of doubtful talk, and a live flame

Wandering, and many a shape whose name
Not itself knoweth, and old dew,
And your own footsteps meeting you,
And all things going as they came."
(Page
128.)
Apart altogether from the meaninglessness, was ever writing

so formally slovenly
to pile
who
and laboriously limp ?
example on example
will
not have to hunt
as,
"O
far or
Of
writing in our language.
long for some of the worst
"in grove the facile
covert of
my
" her soft body, dainty thin
"
;
some Jenny mine

soul
have no time
a piece are such expressions
their glance is loftiest dole I"
Spring trembles
I leave that task to the reader,
" smouldering senses
"
;
"
"a
little
spray of tears
changes ;" " wasteful warmth of tears
;"
"
;
" hand-
" the rustling
"
;
" culminant
"
" the sunset's deso-
;
" " watered my heart's drouth ; " " the wind's
wellaway " " a shaken shadow intolerable " " that swallow's
late disarray
;
soar
''
(a swallow, by the way, does not soar)
wide open, had the run of some ten weeds to

a thousand others, as
Rossetti's small
sands
to
bad
volume
or worse,
all to
rest
"
my
upon
be found
eyes,
"
and
in
Mr.
besides the thousands upon thou-
be found in the works of his more
fruitful
brethren.
It
would be wasting time
to criticize details so worthless,
save for the purpose of showing that insincerity in one

respect argues insincerity in
all,
and that where we
find a
man choosing worthless subjects and affecting trashy models,

we may rely on finding his treatment, down to the tiniest
The affectation of
detail, frivolous, absurd, and reckless.
carefulness in composition
of subtlety of theme
is
and the
in proportion to the affectation
result
is
a lamentable amount,
not of valuable poetic form, but of sound and fury, signify-
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRV.
82
ing absolutely next to nothing, and as shapeless and undigested as chaos
itself.
VII.
" Away with love
rhyme
verses, sugared in
the intrigues, amours of
idlers.
Fitted for only banquets of the night, where dancers to late music
slide
The unhealthy
pleasures, extravagant dissipations of thefew."
Waxt Whitman.
Is this
London?
That peep of
1872?
Is this the year
blue up yonder resembles the sky, and these figures that
What
men and women.
pass seem
malignant influence
is
upon me?
evil
dream, then, what
Weary
of surve)ang the
poetry of the past, and listening to the amatory wails of

'
generations, I walk
stare
down
the streets, and lo
again harlots
from the shop-windows, and the great Alhambra
posters cover the dead-walls.
crowded
and
nightly,
bestialities
go to the theatre which
listen in absolute
of Genevihje de Brabant.
day, and a dozen hands offer
me
a bookseller's shop, and behold
amaze
the
walk in the broad
indecent prints.
!
to
is
I step into
am recommended
to pur-
chase a reprint of the plays and novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn.

I
buy a cheap republican newspaper, thinking
some
least, I shall find
oratory,
and
"Fanny
am
Hill.
reUef, if
that there, at
only in the wildest stump
saluted instead in these words
Genuine
edition, illustrated.
Two
volumes,
2J. 6ii.
Lovers' Festival, plates, 3J. 6<i. .Adventures of a Lady's Maid,

Intrigues of a Ballet Girl, 2s. (>d.
IS. dd.
Aristotle, illustrated, 2s.
each.
French Transparent Cards, is. the

List two stamps.
London: H.
11.
set.
Cartes de Visite from

,
15,
St.
life, is.
d,
THE FLESHLY SCIfOOL OF POETRY.

"Fanny
Hill, coloured
piece, plates, 2s.
(id.
2 vols.
4^.
Master-
Aristotle's
Life of the celebrated Moll Flanders,
Mysteries of a Convent,
E.
plates,
83
B
n S
B
9, R
"The Bachelor's Scarf Pin,
1,
c,s.
bd.
List sent on receipt of two stamps.
is.
E.
containing secret photos of pretty-
women, 24 stamps French Cards, is. the set Life of a Ballet Girl,
2s. 6d.; Bang-up Reciter, 2s.; Maria Monk, ls.6d.;
Fanny Hill,
with plates, y. bd. Lists two stamps. C. N
's S
4,
;
Avenue,
."
Step where I may, the snake Sensualism spits
upon me.
The deeper
probe the pubHc
terrible I find its nature.
perience
he only shakes
he knows.
his head,
I consult the police
of unapproachable crime as
ing home,
meet a
my
ask
friend,
fill
and dares not
me
tells
me
utter all
such details
my soul with horror.
who
more
physician for his ex-
they give
venom
its
sore, the
Return-
that the Society for
the Suppression of Vice has at last stirred
itself,
and that
the Lord Chamberlain, moreover, has interdicted the last

foul importation
from France.*
for a scourge to
these money-changers of Vice for ever out of the
Now, God
poet with
desiring to
encourage debauchery and to deI believe that
both Mr. Swinburne
and Mr. Rossetti are honest men, pure according

loving what
what inspiration
realise
forbid that I should charge any living English
morahse the public.
lights,
whip
Temple
is
lies
within
to their
conscientiously following
beautiful,
them.
They do not
quite
that they are merely supplementing the literature of
An
interdiction which, says the
of liberty, and
violation
modem
Athenaum, "
is
the most wanton
the most unwarrantable interference with
have witnessed " It is to be hoped, however,

will not be dispirited by the indignation of
Sir Charles DUke's journal, which, as the leading organ of the Fleshly
School, is as peculiar in its notions of literary decency as Sir Charles
Art, that
that the
times'
Lord Chamberlain
himself in his notions of political propriety.
"
84
Holywell
Street,
and writing books well worthy of being
Much of Mr. Swinburne's

mad aggressiveness of youth,
under "sealed covers."
sold
grossness has
come
of the
by reading the worst French
fostered
Nearly
poets.
all
Mr.
effeminacy comes of eternal self-contemplation,
Rossetti's
of trashy models, of want of response to the needs and the
What
duties of his time.
stuff is this
they are putting
ward, or suffering their coterie to put forward for

is
for-
them ?
It
time, they say, that the simple and natural delights of the
Body should be sung
as holy
it is
unbearable, they echo,
that purists should object to the record of sane pleasures of
sense
it
just,
is
they reiterate, that Passion should have
poetry and the Flesh
its
and natural
its
vindication.*
delights of the
As
if
the " simple
body " had not been occupying
our poetry ever since the days of the " Confessio Amantis
As
if
had not been the stock-in-trade of nine-tenths of

poets and
poetasters, from
Wyatt
Passion had been silent until
and
sane (and for that matter, insane) pleasures of sense
as
if, till
to
Swinburne
of the Flesh
sung
the
Muses
our
As
if
year of the Lord 1872,
the advent of a Rossetti, the world
lost sight
till
this
all
The Flesh and
are hoarse again.
the
had
entirely
Body have been
Two-thirds of our
is all Body
nine-tenths of our poets are all Flesh.
One would think, from this outcry, that the amative faculty
was a new organ discovered by some phrenological bard of
poetry
the period,
and never before traced
on the human
modem
One would
race.
criticisms, that the
as having
fancy, from
any influence
some of our
only English poets up to
this
period had been Milton, holy Mr. Herbert, and the author
* See, for example,
"A
addressed by an English
Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman,"

to W. M. Rossetti (1870).-
Lady

of the " Christian Year "
One would
85
swear, to hear these
Cupids of the new Fleshly Epoch, that English
literature
been veritably getting blue-mouldy with too much
and that the
Imagination had lived in a nunnery,
Spirit of
on pulse and cold
fed
had
virtue,
water, since Chaucer's time, instead
of rioting in a lupanar, fed on hot meat and spiced wine, for
hundreds upon hundreds of years

Perhaps,
much
is
of the Body.
no more
than
it
we have had a little too

we push the matter home, it
the truth were told,
if
Perhaps,
if
rational to rave of the "just delights of the flesh"
would be
to talk of the "glorious liberty" of " sweat-
ing' and the "sane celebration" of the right to "spit."

Perhaps, after
done so
little
since so
all,
for poetry,
and
Spirituality a trial,
many
it
centuries of Sexuality have
might be advantageous to give
to see if her efforts to create a litera-
ture are equally unsuccessful.
In answer to
all this, it
may be
form of retort known to mankind

that I
retorted
that
would emasculate our poets
would substitute
for passion the
" Atys."
obliterate
Rabelais,
My
fear
am
favourite ancient poet
and hold (with Coleridge)
pure as the sea.
know no
am
that I
is
the author of
and
would not
however coarse, of Chaucer.
line,
that I
not a purist in the
I prefer Shakspere to Milton,
Philistine,
and
merest humanitarian and
Puritan in a certain sense, I trust I
worst sense.
altogether,
Well, although
other "sentiment."
in the easiest
/ am
that
he
is
love
deep and
pleasanter reading for an idle
hour than La Fontaine, no richer reading
for a thoughtful
hour than certain (by no means unimpeachable) novels of

Balzac.
I see the
strangest erotic forces in the loves of
Wilhelm Meister, but
admit
their beauty
and
their worth.
86
welcome Heine, and could
Don
Byron's books I best love "
Hugo, and
nothing in him that
I see
I reverence
Juan."
shocking, save,
is
"L'Homme
perhaps, certain abominable eccentricities in

qui
Rit."
laughter for
I love Byron better than Tupper, and of
a summer day.
all
mad
listen to his
beguile
still
many an
when snug
hour,
at
anchor in some lovely Highland loch, with the inimityet
able,
Paul de
and
know no
life
thinking, there
no grander passage
is
between
that tremendous scene
Pippa Passes
:"
left
Ottilia
by
some
sweeter poet in
than the egregious Alfred de Musset.
respects
in "
of Parisian
pictures
questionable,
Kock
To my
literature than
in
and her paramour,
no one accuses the author of
that,
and of the " Ring and the Book," of neglecting love or

overlooking the body
and yet
the genius of Robert Browning.

tial
I do daily homage to
deem "Vivien" an essen-
pendant to that wonderful apotheosis of Masculine
Chastity,
which
is
the heart of that Arthurian epic
the laureate has poured
all
his
have praised Whitman, and hope

again.
know no
certain novels
fresher, finer
to praise
work of
objection to the
him over and over

generation than
this
by Mr. Charles Reade, who
considered an ascetic author.
on which
orient poetic wealth.
In one word,
is
not generally
have no earthly
Body and the Flesh in their

work and noble art ;
rightful time
and
place, as part of great
any
great wickedness in the old-fashioned use of the gaudriole;
and
am
ready
(as
do not
see
any sane man must be ready) to regard
with kindness, and even sympathy,
and honest author, even
if it
all
work of a
here and there, as I
really
may
good
think,
exceeds the just limits of reserve, and becomes indecent, as
sometimes happens, by sheer force of power.
But Flesh,

much
merely as the Flesh,
is
querulous, affected,
uninteresting.
too
absurd manner of considering
none of
its
" munching
coil
it
is
me.
itself
I find
the Soul.
even in the way
enjoy them without making such a
it
The world never
it
is
and
of real passion
tires
but fleshhness
and may abound
natures
in
There are many other functions of the
utterly passionless.
not the custom to perform in pubHc, but
which are quite as interesting

spere calls " the deed."
flesh, it is certain to
what Shak-
to third parties as
Really,
we
if
set
no
limit to the
It has
disgrace us in the long-run.
already created a literature in Holywell Street.

it
it
;" only, let
not necessarily passion,
suffer
its
grudge
of " lipping''
hsten to Burns's love-songs for ever
which
foolish,
it
do not admire
just delights,
about them.
will
flesh
for
87
to found a poetry in St. John's
Shall
we
Wood ?
English Verse-poetry has been, up to the present moment,
almost
exclusively the
property
of
querulous
engaged in contemplating their own images
persons,
either in an
ordinary looking-glass or in the eyes of a fantastic female.
We
have had a certain number of great poets who have
our very
chosen to use rhymed and metrical speech
many
Bacon, Bunyan, and Thomas
indeed, have spoken in this
such
as
way
chosen to use simple prose as
and the
last
remarkable
their
Verse
is
an
couraged at
greatest,
of our noblest
Carlyle
have
means of expression
of these prose-poets has very recently, in a
letter to
a gentleman who had sent him some
verses, protested energetically that
preferred a
but
good
bit of solid
artificial sort
this
he would
simple prose
of thing, by no
time of day.
infinitely
have
that, in fact.
means
to
be en-
Rough and sweeping
as this
condemnation of Verse appears to be, there
is
a certain
88
homely
truth about
it.
of most of our poets,
has been the unfortunate habit
It
especially of those
and
specially criticizing in this
article,
to
we have been
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
Ideas too bald for
without the aid of rhythmical props.
enough
prose, too trivial to stand unadorned, appear unique
when subjected
to the euphuistic process,
situde,"
call
and compare Life
the world
till
he found a
in all
in
good
Death " a seizure of malign
vicis-
the wordy glitter of rhyme.
round prose, were to
and robed
If
to
fit
any English author,
a Lady with
"
bower
whom
he ranged
" for nuptial
perform-
or if any author were to narrate for us, still in

;
good round prose, such a savoury narrative as that of " The
ances
Leper"
in
Mr. Swinburne's poems, surely he would very
soon receive his just deserts.

ideas
and such
stories are
Yet simply because such
told in lines cut into certain
lengths and jingling at the ends; solely because,
the public, verse
gether
artificial
christened Art,
is
and
form of speech, the trash of windy
and
alto-
men
is
one ray of imagination
writers without
are accredited with the genius of song.

that, in the
by one-half
recognised as an unnatural
It
thus happens
many people, the word " poet " is

"madman;" and we are told again and
opinion of
synonymous with
again not to judge such and such compositions too severely,

as " they are only poetry.''
It thus
happens that we every
day behold the melancholy spectacle of

themselves the
airs
of great
men
inferior
men
giving
merely because they can
Why, I will venture to say that

there is more real genius and more true literary brilliance in
any one of Mr. G. A. Sala's " Dutch Pictures " than in all
write meretricious verses.
89
the fleshly products heaped together, and yet Mr. Sala only
calls
himself a " special correspondent," and
is far,
very
far,
from being a " poetical" person.

If
poetry
Verse-poetry
impediment
to progress, if
to be anything else than
is
become something
to
it is
an
better
than the resource of feeble talents unable to stand without

artificial aid, it
must be more and more approximated to the
natural language of
men
must be weeded of the hideous
it
phraseology of the schools, and sown with the fresh and

idioms of daily speech
beautiful
great issues in which

"
all
damnable face-making
where,
notably in
men
"
and
it
must deal with
are interested, not with the
of Narcissus in a mirror.
Germany, such
experiments
Elseare
en-
couraged as tend to broaden and strengthen the resources

of poetry, and to multiply
its
facilities
but here in Eng-
land every fresh experiment in language
disliked, unless
it
and quadrupling the
limitations
rhyme.
Mr. Swinburne's eternal
affected
harpsichord-melody,
ridiculed
sympathy has been shown

often exquisite, of Mr.
the van of thought),
and Mr.
ancient
for the metrical importations,
Matthew Arnold, the never-ending
has
left
Hugh Clough
no one who
(a giant
fills
of genius
and
such
it
who
his place in
and the wonderful poetic prose, or
Walt Whitman.
of talent, anxious to increase

;
they
but not one grain of
The
public appears to be
willing that verse-poetry should remain the property of
limitations
and
Rosseti's
admired, though
are
experiments of the late Arthur

died young, and alas
of
affectations
jingle,
throw us back hundreds of years
prose-poetry, of
is
be a retrograde experiment, trebling the
its
men and women

Hugo, Reade, Emerson, Haw-
thus happens that our
as Carlyle,
men
already almost insuperable
go
tliome
have written
some of the best poetry of
gene-
this
ration in simple prose.*
The name
at
of Poet was once a
soon to be a
fair
one period held
human
utterance
be
to
the
of honour
title
The form
of ridicule.
title
it
does in the
swaddling-clothes of infant speech, will possibly be

less
abandoned as time
rolls
more or
on by the thinkers and dreamers
The word poetry may one day be
of the world.
bids
kind of
noblest possible
but that form, remaining as
it
of Verse was
identical
with absurdity; and no one will jingle the cap and bells of
rhyme but a
fool.
the blundering
and
Is there
all
no hope
Yes, a gleam.
All
the time-wasting in our literature have
Each
been caused by eternal posturing before the mirror.

feeble talent has
been so fascinated by
his
own image
as to
dwindle into an intellectual daisy or pine into a poetical

primrose.
Our
shame has sprung from want of
literary
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,
there be such a person (and

elect the functionary),
destruction of
of
all
poets,
if
issue
who
least
an edict ordering the
and the immediate
introduce the
This would at
if
we might do worse than
forth
all looking-glasses,
persons
emotions.
not,
if
subject
have the
silencing
of their
effect of driving
own
our
they must see themselves, to see themselves in
flowing Rivers or the mighty Sea, and to wail aloud,
they must, to the four
Winds
come
how
in time to find
of Heaven
little
if
wail
and thus they might
account they themselves are
* "The French Revolution," "Les Mis&ables," "The Cloister

and the Hearth," Emerson's first set of Essays, and "The Scarlet
Letter" all these works are "poems " in the noblest sense.

in the great
scheme of nature, and how much
is
gt
to
be done
on earth besides making night and day hideous with sensual

shadows and dreams.
evasion even then
Yet, after
for ten to
all, I
fear there
one you would
would be
find
some
Simple Simon of the amatory type, driven to despair by the

universal destruction of looking-glasses,
filling
the family
washing-tub with water from the pump, and pining away

into a
shadow
for love of his
own image hovering
therein
NOTES.
Page
Since
the above
Mr. Rossetti's "Jenny."
45.
was
written, the Quarterly
my own
very similar language to
and
Review has spoken
I agree with
its
in
strictures in
every passage, save those which are levelled against Mr. Tennyson.
The poet
open to judgment, and
is strong enough to bear

be in all respects lamentable that he has been
censured in the same breath as the men who owe to him what little
The Review speaks thus of
in their writings is good and worthy.
" Jenny: "
it
laureate
but I hold
"
it
is
to
We purpose to close our remarks on Mr. Rossetti's verse with some
reflections
on
poem which, we
think, reveals characteristically the
incapacity of the literary poet to deal with contemporary themes in an

effective
and straightforward manner.
women.
A man
'
Jenny
'
is
poem on
the
supposed to have followed

a girl of this description to her house, where she falls asleep with her
head on his knee, while he moralises on her condition. The majority
of poets have, as we think wisely, avoided subjects of this sort. But
assuming that success might justify its treatment, one of the first
elements of success is that a piece should be brief and forcible.
Jenny is nearly four hundred lines long. The metre at the opening
reminds us of one which Mr, Browning uses with characteristic force,
but which in Mr, Rossetti's hands soon degenerates into feeble octoThe thought throughout is pretentious but commonsyllabic verse.
place.
The moralist, beginning with something like a rhapsody on
the appearance of the girl as she lies asleep, wonders what she is
thinking about he then reflects that her sleep exactly resembles the
sleep of a pure woman
her face he feels might serve a painter as
the model of a Madonna.
are thus imperceptibly edged on into
subject of unfortunate
'
is
'
We
the author's favourite regions of abstraction

'
Yet, Jenny, looking long at you
The woman almost
fades from view.
NOTES.
A cipher of man's changeless

Of lust
93
sum
and to come
Is left.
A riddle that one shrinks
To challenge from the scornful sphinx.'
past, present,
So
this profound philosopher, whose somewhat particular

on the charms of the sleeper have brought him at last face
to face with the mystery of evil, cooUy remarks
Exactly.
reflections
Come, come, what good
'
in thoughts like this
packs some gold in the girl's hair, and takes his leave. What good
indeed ? But why in that case, and if Mr. Rossetti had no power to
deal otherwise with so painful a theme, could he not have spared u
an useless display of affected sentiment and impotent philosophy ?

" The style of the poem is as bad as the matter. Descriptions repulsively realistic are mixed up with imagery like that in Solomon's Song
the most familiar objects are described by the most unusual paraphrases
childish
the
London
elf,'
woman
schoolboy, for instance, being called
while the similes are painfully far-fetched.
is
said to
'
a wise un-
The
heart of
be
Like a rose shut in a book

In which pure women may not look,
For its base pages claim control
'
To crush the flower within the soul

Where through each dead rose-leaf that
clings.
Pale as transparent Psyche wings.
To the vile text, are traced such things

As might make lady's cheeks indeed
More than a living rose to read
So nought save foolish foulness may
Watch with hard eyes the sure decay
And
so the life-blood of this rose,
Puddled with shameful knowledge, flows

Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose.'
make the application of this difficult enough.

however, escape notice that the simile is radically false, for
Affectation and obscurity

It will not,
whereas the point
is
that the
woman's heart is alive

which the heart
corruption, the rose in the book, to
dried and dead."
in the midst of
is
compared,
is
NOTES.
94
Page
Coterie Glory.
71.
That the system by which the school of verse-writers under
made
has
notorious
itself
is
at
last
defeating
itself,
criticism
evident
is
" Coterie Glory," in the Saturday

Review a journal which, I believe, has been more than once made
use of by the friends of the gentlemen in question. The author of
" Coterie Glory," in a number of decisive and perfectly well-tempered
remarks, surveys the whole question, and on coming to the Fleshly
School, openly admits, as if on certain knowledge, that the personal
from a recent
article,
entitled
friends of the poets write all the reviews.

This also, observes the
reviewer, was the case with the once famous " Delia Cruscan School,"
surviving now only, if it can be called survival, in Gifford's ponderous

but effective satire.
"
little circle of mutual admiration contrived, by ingenious devices
of criticism, to create in the outer world what for awhile looked like
real fame.
school, to wliich the
Afterwards we had the mystic
authors of Pestus, the Roman, and other kindred spirits, chronicled in
'
'
by Mr. GilfiUan, belonged."

After glancing at the kind of poetry produced by the Fleshly School,
the writer continues
full
" It
clear that poetry of this order can appeal only to a limited
is
It claims to
class.
however,
been
is
be
by a
tried
special jury of cultivated persons.
a very dangerous position for the jurors.
This,
They who have
of mastering such special qualifications, by a natural

them as the only canons of taste nothing which does
them has the true ring. Having conquered caviare,
at the pains
law, soon regard
not conform to
they find
all
that pleases
'
the general
'
PhiUstinism
tasteless.
itself is
not more adverse to discrimination than this Pharisaic isolation. Once

in this frame of mind, men rapidly unlearn judging in favour of
they feel that they do right to be partisans in such a cause
they taste the keen delights of initiation into a creed hidden from the
vulgar ; they reject all moderating or hostile criticism from the laity
believing
men
without, as proceeding from
not specially qualified
pass from faith into fanaticism.

criticism
Hence
Goethe somewhere calls the
of our
decreed
they tend to
being of the tolerant or sceptical order already described, the
ielievers at first write all the reviews,
case
also, the general attitude of
later
may
'
'
Pre-Raffaelites
certainly
and fnan
critical Zion.'
'
is
every bastion of what

it has been so in the
That
denied nowhere.
Cfrowns thus
and uninvidiously be described as
'
Coterie
Glory.'
"
A curious sign, lastly, confirms
advanced.
the position which
It is the very essence of faith to
be
we have
uncritical
here
to regard
NOTES.
the day for criticism as passed.
the artist and
liis
95
seems to be simply impossible for

on his art as
It
circle of believers to regard a criticism
anything but a criticism on himself. Many of our readers who may

have watched with amusement the recent squabble between Mr.
Buchanan and Mr. Rossetti will recognise > proof of our statement.
Into the merits of the case we decline to go we do not ask whether
Mr. Buchanan's attacks were well founded, whether he was entitled to
use a pseudonym, or whether his article exliibited that good taste
which is nowhere more called for than when a question of taste is the
matter in discussion. Our point is, that the Fleshly School of Poetty'
dui, in the main, attempt to try Mr. Rossetti' s verses, and not Mr.
Rossetti himself as distinct from Mr. Rossetti the author, by critical
;
'
rules.
That the
poet, rudely roused from, the security
offame gene-
rated by the too friendly voices of disciples, should have regarded his
reviewer as actuated by base personal motives was natural. But it is
under the same impression.
characteristic that the followers should be
One
of the latest of them has just published a further reply to Mr.
Buchanan, which rivals what we had too fondly believed was the tone
of discussion and the form of argument peculiar to the odium theologicum.' Mr. Forman, the writer, is so hurried away by zeal for his
faith that, though known only as a critic, he prefixes to his paper a
cruel (and in this case, we are sure, an inapplicable) motto, describing
critics as the offspring of jealousy and literary failure.
To re-state Mr.
Buchanan's arguments in his own vocabulary appears to Mr. Forman,
and we do not doubt appears in perfect good faith, equivalent to their
refutation.
To quote in full Mr. Rossetti's sonnet on 'Nuptial Sleep
is proof of its maiden modesty of phrase so absolute that a man must
'
'
be,
we cannot
whole
is,
venture to say what,
tUst every criticism
against the author.

really
is
What
an ungentlemanly
made
who
denies
against the
The
it.
book
is^
reads like a remark that a
libel
on the rhymester.
of the
gist
in fact levelled
rhyme
is
weak
is
It is obvious that this
the canon, not of criticism, but of fâtic faith
nay, that
it
im-
For what judgment is possible if critical

blame is treated as personal maUgnity, 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 Jlr. Buchanan's attack is less damaging than Mr. Forman's
defence, we do not thereby imply that Mr. Forman has a base or wilful
He is only what some writer calls
intention to injure Mr. Rossetti.
'that worst of enemies, your worshipper.'" Saturday Review, Yeh.
plicitly treats criticism as sin.
24th, 1872.
NOTES.
96
These remarks are worth attention, firstly, for their inherent truth
and secondly, because they come from a quarter which can certainly
;
not be accused of friendlin ss to myself.
Page
87.
Walt Whitman.
There is at the present moment living in America a great ideal prophet,

who is imagined by many men on both sides of the Atlantic to be one
of the sanest and grandest figures to be found in literature, and whose
books, it is believed, though now despised, may one day be esteemed
as an especial glory of this generation.
It is no part of my present
business to eulogize
Walt Whitman,
misconceptions concerning him

asked,
honestly enough,
how
or to prote.st against the popular
but
it
just
happens that
that I
despise
so
have been
much
the
Fleshly School of Poetry in England and admire so much the poetry
which is widely considered unclean and animal in America ? It is
it
is
urged, moreover, that Mr. Rossetti and ilr. Swinburne merely repeat
the immodesties of the author of "Leaves of Grass," and that to be

quite consistent I must
condemn
all alike.
Very
true, if
Whitman be
poetry be shot through and through

with animalism as certain stuffs are shot through and through with
a poet of this complexion,
if his
silk.
But it requires no great subtlety of sight to perceive the difference
between these men. To begin with, there are Singers, imitative and
shallow while that other is a Bard, outrageously original and creative
in the form and substance of his so-called verse.
In the next place,
Whitman is in the highest sense a spiritual person every word he
he is a colossal mystic but in s.Vl his great
utters is symbolic
work, the theme of which is spiritual purity and health, there are not
more than fifty lines of a thoroughly indecent kind, and these fifty
lines are embedded in passages in the noblest sense antagonistic to mere
lust and indulgence.
No one regrets the writing and printing of these
fifty lines more than I do.
They are totally unnecessaiy, and silly in
;
degree silly as some of Shakspere's dirt is silly silly in

way of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Victor Hugo^from sheer excess
the highest
the
of aggressive
the Bible
life.
book nearly as big as

and unpardonable in themsejves but
Fifty lines, observe, out of a
lines utterly stupid,
be forgiven, doubtless, for the sake of the spotless love and,

chastity surrounding them.
It is Whitman's business to chronicle all
human sensations in the person of the " Cosmical Man," or typical
to
Ego
and when he comes to the sexual instincts, he tries to blend

emotion and physiology together, to the utter destruction of all natural
;
NOTES.
97
Judging from the internal evidence of these passages, I should

Whitman was by no means a man of strong animal passions.
There is a frightful violence in his expressions, which an epicure in lust
would have avoided.
This part of his book, I guess, cost him a good
deal of trouble it is not written con amove ; and, apart from its double
or mystic meaning, is just what an old philosopher might write if he
were trying to represent passion by the dim light of memory. At all
effect.
say that
events, here
men
at
Whitman
is tallring
some unfortunate moment
nonsense, as
or other.
is
the
way of
Elsewhere, he
is
wise
perhaps
all
the most mystic and least fleshly person that ever wrote.
It is in a thousand ways unfortunate for Walt Whitman that he has
been introduced to the English public by Mr. William Rossetti, and been
loudly praised by Mr. Swinburne. Doubtless, these gentlemen admire
the American poet for all that is best in him but the British public,
having heard that Whitman is immoral, and having already a dim
guess that Messrs. Swinburne and Rossetti are not over-refined, has
come to the conclusion that his nastiness alone has been his recommendation. All this despite the fact that Mr. William Rossetti has
expurgated the fifty lines or so in his edition.
I should like to disclaim, in this place, all sympathy with Whitman's
pantheistic ideas. My admiration for this writer is based on the wealth of
his Itnowledge, the vast roll of his conceptions (however monstrous), the
nobility of his practical teaching, and (most of all perhaps) on his close
approach to a solution of the true relationship between prose cadence
and metrical verse. Whitman's style, extraordinai-y as it is, is his
It is not impossible to foresee a
greatest contribution to knowledge.
day when Coleridge's feeUng of the " wonderfulness of prose" may
become universal, and our poetry (still swathe-bound in the form of
early inSant speech, or rhyme) may expand into a literature blending
together au 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
;
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THE FLESHLY SCHOOL

OTIIER PJJJiXOJJJiNA OF THIi

sicken the mseet \mW uf linmsint; kine;

name, ye tills, the lallesl .iiui iiiobt fair?

THE FLESHLY SCHOOL

write cleanly, Labeo, or write none.''

Fell not from heaven, or

PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND

THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY

SOCIAL PHENOMENA OF THE HOUR

A LITERARY RETROSPECT THE ITALIAN FALSETTO

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE AND

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

V. THE " HOUSE OF LIFE," &C., RE-EXAMINED

FROM THE AMATORY POETS

THE FINAL DEGRADATION OF VERSE,

to perceive the real issues of the case.

that I did not sign

own name to the article, and that I spoke in high terms of

retorted that the rule of the Contemporary Review

the same publication,

least three of the regular contributors to that

habitually used pseudonyms,

sharply criticized Mr.

Mill in an unsigned article in which he spoke of himself in

afterwards reprinting the

Philosophy of the Conditioned."

count, which charges

absurd an attempt to distract judgment that

almost unworthy of mention.

contemporary poets, Mr.

Tennyson of course assuming the leading character; and

of smaller parts I humorously spoke of

playing the part

these, small or great,

imagined then that I was writing

who had read

his great tragedy

that " Cornelius"

and never dreamt

should have to explain (as

but simply that of " Cbr-

one of those two gentlemen who appear

" In this and

uttering together this one

In a subsequent scene they return,

and Voltimand, the

makes a speech, while

" Cornelius" stands in the usual "utility" attitude, with

and one hand

the proud character I

neither complimentary nor the reverse.

was altered and

hubbub about the authorship

a vulgar farce, got up

for Fortinbras or the First

accused of arrogating to myself in

other allusion to "

had been ambitious of obtruding