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resolved to face the responsibilities which that situation implies. And if the public protest of Lord Dundonald reminds the Canadians of the ominous risk they run, it will not have been made in vain.

That hitherto there should have been no complete and uniform edition of Mr Swinburne's poems is not a little remarkable. For Mr Swinburne holds a high and even a unique place among modern poets. Though you may find a hint of his cadences in Dryden and the Elizabethans, he seems to derive from nowhere, and displays more clearly than almost any writer of his century the authentic stamp of originality. He has played new tunes upon the English tongue, he has attempted to arouse emotions which were before foreign to our literature, and he has done all this in a style and manner at once fresh and exotic. It is not for nothing that he is the master of many tongues, that he writes in French or Greek with equal facility he has sometimes forgotten, in his enthusiasm for a foreign language, the limitations of his own, and he has used metres which are contrary to the tradition and to the genius of English. The result is that his curiosity now and again becomes eccentricity, and since it is always easier to imitate a complex talent than the classic balance of simplicity, Mr Swinburne was for many years the favourite sport of parodists. That, however, is That, however, is either forgotten or remains the

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memory of a transient phase, and after the lapse of thirty-six years we may contemplate Mr Swinburne's early poems without prejudice or passion.

But in order to help us to a right judgment concerning his works, Mr Swinburne has undertaken to be his own critic, and in a dedicatory epistle sets out to explain the meaning and purport of his poetry. This habit of self-criticism is not without without its inconveniences; and though it has enabled Mr Swinburne to write a score of entertaining pages, we hope that it will not be generally followed. Even Mr Swinburne misses his mark, and while he is obligingly candid in autobiography, he is far more brilliant in poetry than in criticism. Indeed his criticism is little else than a trumpet - call of satisfaction. He has nothing to regret, he tells us, and nothing to recant. When a writer, says he, "finds nothing that he could wish to cancel, to alter, or to unsay in any page that he has ever laid before his readers, he need not be seriously troubled by the inevitable consciousness that the work of his early youth is not and cannot be unnaturally like the work of a very young man.' That, of course, is perfectly true, though it needs not a heaven-born critic to say it. Every page 'Poems and Ballads' sparkles with the brightness and extravagance of youth. Young in spirit, young in courage, young in speed of verse and thought, it is mature only in workmanship, and very few poets have ever flashed upon

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the world with a book at once so strange and masterly as this.

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That it has conspicuous faults none will deny. It is too obviously arranged to startle the citizens. The jargon of passion, with its "lilies and languors and its roses and raptures," seems more highly artificial than it did thirty years ago. No reader of to-day, however good his intentions may be, can read 'Faustine' (for instance) without a smile. Even had the 'Ballad of Burdens' and 'Before Dawn' not been imitated to weariness, it would still be difficult to regard them quite seriously. But for а first volume of miscellaneous verse where shall you match the 'Poems and Ballads'? Where shall you find an equal skill in the management of strange metres and stranger fancies? To twist the English tongue into Sapphics may suggest the ingenuity of the exercise-maker rather than the inspiration of the poet; but if it is to be done, how could it be done with a finer beauty than in these lines which follow ?

"Then to me so lying awake a vision Came without sleep over the seas and touched me, Softly touched my eyelids and lip; and I too,

Full of the vision, Saw the white implacable Aphrodite, Saw the hair unbound and the feet un

sandalled

Shine as fire of sunset on western waters; Saw the reluctant

Feet, the straining plumes of the doves

that drew her, Looking always, looking with necks reverted,

Back to Lesbos, back to the hills where under

Shone Mitylene."

The workman's skill is so great, the stanzas are composed with so light a grace, that you forget, as you read, the difference between accent and quantity; you are persuaded to believe that a master may set our English words to the music of ancient Greece.

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In disburdening his soul, Mr Swinburne proves, as many another has proved, that, while he despises the critics, he has collated their opinions with an unnecessary care. He is amused and satisfied that scornful or mournful censors have been unable to distinguish between confessions of positive fact and "excursions of absolute fancy." Of course, the pretension of critics who made this distinction was absurd. But Mr Swinburne, in confessing that "there are photographs from life in the book, and there are sketches from imagination," seems to share their absurdity. Photography from life, or realism, is an affair of treatment as well as of observation, and Mr Swinburne, in treating experience and fancy in precisely the same spirit, has abolished the difference between them. He may have treasured "photographs from life" in his mind or in his note-book, but in composing his verses he transformed reality to imagination, and resolutely sifted from his work the lightest suspicion of actual life. Does he not, then, in attempting a false distinction, involve himself in the charge of folly which he brings against his censors?

Again, Mr Swinburne protests, with an inapposite energy,

that, though he has acknow- Mr Chamberlain, "What I ledged the sway of illustrious have said, I have said." As friends and masters, he has he would change no word of never rendered a blind obedi- his poems, as he would retract ence to any man. "Mazzini no vigorously advocated opinion, was no more a Pope or a Dic- so he is serenely content with tator," he writes, "than I was what life has brought him. He a parasite or papist. Dictation boasts with Shelley that he has and inspiration are rather dif- been fortunate in friendships; ferent things." Of course they fortunate, also, in enmities. To are, and in saying this to an have been fortunate in friendintelligent reader, he is surely ship is to have won happiness, speaking to the already con- and it is with a proud humility verted. No one would ever that Mr Swinburne declares doubt the independence of Mr that, "when writing of Landor, Swinburne's judgment. He has of Mazzini, and of Hugo, I been fighting his own battles write of men who have honoured for so many years that his me with the assurance and the worst enemy could scarce ac- evidence of their cordial and cuse him of "seeing eye to eye," affectionate regard." And, if even with Victor Hugo or he has won many an honourGiuseppe Mazzini. Nor need able friendship, he has paid he have defended himself the pleasant debt in tributary against the charge of inconverse. He has sung the sistency. What is consistency praises of Richard Burton and but the meanest of the vices, of Christina Rosetti, "the the boast of a stunted mind, saintly and secluded poetess," the idle clinging in age to the and "the adventurous and stunted formula of youth? unsaintly hero,” —and in each Even where Mr Swinburne has case the praise is perfectly changed his mind so completely genuine. as he changed it concerning Walt Whitman, the difference is

rather interesting than blameworthy, and though in politics he defends the consistency of every passing word he has uttered with the principles that he proclaimed in his youth, on the ingenious ground that "monarchists and anarchists may be advocates of national dissolution and reactionary division: republicans cannot be," we cannot think that the defence was worth making.

But the distinguishing mark of Mr Swinburne's preface is a wise arrogance. He says, with

Charles Lamb, as Mr Swinburne reminds us, wrote for antiquity, and in a similar spirit he declares that "when he writes plays it is with a view to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black Friars," and we need not complain if we never see "Marino Faliero" or "Locrine" with any other eye than that of the mind. Indeed, Mr Swinburne has been so loyal to the dramatic tradition of the seventeenth century that he could not (and does not) expect his dramas to win popularity. How should an audience, well

trained to hear a Girl from Somewhere, tolerate blank verse upon the stage? No; Mr Swinburne's plays are written to be read, and to carry on an ancient and august tradition. If their inspiration is from books more than from life, what of that? Mr Swinburne, at any rate, does not share the modern contempt of literature, and in an elegant passage defends books against reproach hurled at them by the laureates of action, who forget, in their facile denunciation, that they too are known to the world merely through the printed page. "Not to the very humblest and simplest lover of poetry," writes Mr Swinburne, "will it seem incongruous or strange, suggestive of imperfect sympathy with life or deficient inspiration from nature, that the very words of Sappho should be heard and recognised in the notes of nightingales, the glory of the presence of dead poets imagined in the presence of the glory of the sky, the lustre of their advent and their passage felt visible as in vision on the live and limpid floorwork of the cloudless and sunset-coloured sky." He at any rate is no "half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things"; he does not "see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life." In his poetry, at any rate, books have meant more to him than life, and his eulogy of them is an act of loyalty. But he, too, has looked out upon the earth and

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sky; he, too, has watched "the revels and the terrors and the glories of the sea. Nevertheless, books have been his constant inspiration, and he has paid the debt exacted by his preference. He is too obviously artistic to claim a place among the serene masters of the world; he is too highly skilled in rhetoric and sleight of hand to go down the ages as the voice and prophet of his time; and yet so long as music appeals to the ear, so long as the brain delights in the mastery of words, so long will the poems of Mr Swinburne be read with admiration and delight. し

"Marlowe and Shakespeare, Eschylus and Sappho," says Mr Swinburne, "do not live for us only in the dusty shelves of libraries." But there is a kind of literature which, not altogether deservedly, seldom emerges from the dust, and which interests the historian rather than the poet. Such is the literature discussed with the utmost skill and erudition in Professor Ker's 'The Dark Ages' (W. Blackwood & Sons). But even the "Dark Ages" are rather a name than a reality

a convenient label which denotes a period, while it does small justice to its character. The long night of the middle age, if it were not broken by flashes of sunlight, was interrupted by strange and even splendid dreams. The classical tradition was not dead, indeed it never died, and the Teutonic nations, at a time when the world was "darkest," brought new material and an originality

of style into the literature of Europe. On the one hand was a poetry whose naïveté proclaimed it a fresh thing; on the other hand was a literature in Latin, the real language of the Dark Ages, which preserved the classical forms both in verse and prose. There were books, there were schools, there were learned men, who studied not merely Latin but Greek, and had some knowledge of the far East. But even though the Age were dark in name only, it was an interlude in the history of literature. As Professor Ker says, "Dr Johnson is hardly farther from 'Beowulf' than Chaucer is." But that is because, while Johnson and Chaucer speak the same tongue, the writers of the Dark Ages wrote either a Latin which was the decadence of a great tradition, or a vernacular which rarely rose to a literary language. "To go back to the ninth or tenth century," says Professor Ker, "is to find a different world. Not only are the languages of a more ancient type; the ways of imagination are different, the tunes of poetry are different, and there are still older things than those of the ninth century with which the traveller has to be acquainted." It is not strange, therefore, that the Middle Age was long regarded as the dark period of time. Goldsmith, who is not commonly esteemed a scholar, attempted to correct the popular fallacy. "The most barbarous times," said he, "had men of learning, if commentators, compilers, polemic divines,

and intricate metaphysicians deserve the title." Moreover, the Dark Ages played their part in the great Romantic movement, wherein Gray and Percy were eminent forerunners. Even Ossian was for something in the revival, and, in Professor Ker's words, "the success of Macpherson proved that the Dark Ages were not in themselves enough to alarm the reader."

But if the writers who flourished before the Crusades were not distinguished, we cannot but admire the universality of their interest. There was no kind of literature which they did not essay. They studied grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic with the utmost energy; they imitated Cicero and Virgil; they found opinions ready-made in Plato; the Venerable Bede composed a treatise on prosody; and Apuleius and Lucian were examples to many whose names are long since forgotten. In other words, the Dark Ages were learning all things, they were reconstructing the old mythologies and inventing new allegories, and if they can be called dark theirs was the darkness which comes before sunrise. For history the writers of the Middle Age had little aptitude. As Professor Ker says, "The historical genius was muffled in Latin prose." But that mythology was not dead is proved by the 'Edda.' Nor was the period destitute of Epic poetry, which might boast such works as 'Beowulf' and 'Roland.' But though the medieval epics have some touch in them of the Homeric spirit,

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