But other men had thoughts, other men had passions;
political, sexual, natural, noble, vile, ideal, gross, rebellious,
agonising, imperial, republican, cruel, compassionate; and with these he
fed his verses. Upon these and their life he sustained, he fattened, he
enriched his poetry. Mazzini in Italy, Gautier and Baudelaire in France,
Shelley in England, made for him a base of passionate and intellectual
supplies. With them he kept the all-necessary line of communication. We
cease, as we see their active hearts possess his active art, to think a
question as to his sincerity seriously worth asking; what sincerity he
has is so absorbed in the one excited act of receptivity. That, indeed,
he performs with all the will, all the precipitation, all the rush, all
the surrender, all the wholehearted weakness of his subservient and
impetuous nature. I have not named the Greeks, nor the English Bible,
nor Milton, as his inspirers. These he would claim; they are not his. He
received too partial, too fragmentary, too arbitrary an inheritance of
the Greek spirit, too illusory an idea of Milton, of the English Bible
little more than a tone;--this poet of eager, open capacity, this poet
who is little more, intellectually, than a too-ready, too-vacant
capacity, for those three august seventies has not room enough.
Charged, then, with other men's purposes--this man's Italian patriotism;
this man's love of sin (by that name, for sin has been denied, as a
fiction, but Swinburne, following Baudelaire, acknowledges it to love
it); this man's despite against the Third Empire or what not; this man's
cry for a political liberty granted or gained long ago--a cry grown vain;
this man's contempt for the Boers--nay, was it so much as a man, with a
man's evil to answer for, that furnished him here; was it not rather that
less guilty judge, the crowd?--this man's--nay, this boy's--erotic
sickness, or his cruelty--charged with all these, Swinburne's poetry is
primed; it explodes with thunder and fire.
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