to a fury that knew nothing of restraint and little of regard for circumstance, but we remember that, whatever was swept aside at such moments, his motive was always the generous vindication of the things that he held most dear. He may have struck a little wildly on one or two occasions; he never once struck meanly or secretly. No great man has suffered more or viler abuse than he, none has been less careful to answer his detractors, but defamation of the art or the men that he loved he denounced fiercely and without pity, not caring then whether or no he reversed former judgments or cancelled earlier pledges. There can be no question here of defence or blame. By the witness of some dozen books we have a critic who never fails to give us full measure for our care in reading him, and it is pointless to object to the excesses that are inseparable from his method. His generosity at moments in its direct exercise leads him to overpraise men whom closer analysis would have shown him to be unworthy of his critical approval; and at other moments of reaction it leads him to severities that deliberation would have tempered. But these excesses are negligible beside the steady strength and continence of the main current of his critical opinions. And so it is with the man himself; we love the loyal eager temperament, and are content to accept its stray humours with no more than a word of dissent. There is something of most

heartening irony in the fact that this poet whose name has been flung as freely as Shelley's in vilification through the suburbs of morality should be among the few critics of authority whose attitude to the whole life of art we value not only for its acute perception of aesthetic values, but also, whether in free enthusiasm as in the Study of Shakespeare, or such close analysis of excellence and defect as the Study of Ben Jonson, or in personal reminiscence such as the essay on Jowett, for its clean wholesomeness and its delight in honourable things.

Love's Cross Currents, an epistolary novel, was published in the poet's later years and dedicated to Mr. Watts-Dunton as a "bantling of your friend's literary youth." It uses admirably the material with which he failed in his play The Sisters. It is in many ways a masterpiece of high comedy, full of wise satire unspoiled by a breath of cynicism. There is a lightness of touch both in the writing and the delineation of character that Swinburne nowhere else attempted, and to watch Lady Midhurst presiding over the love-affairs of her perplexing company of nephews and nieces and grandchildren is to watch an exquisitely controlled essay in delicate art. There is more than a prophecy of Wilde's wit in such stray passages as, "One is rather sorry for him, but it is really too much to be expected to put up with that kind of young man

because of his disadvantages," but wit is commonly outside the scope of a manner that interweaves humour so deftly with tenderness as to suggest that if Swinburne had been of an age that had stimulated instead of embarrassing his genius as a dramatic poet he might have added another laurel to that bestowed on the tragic poet. As it is Love's Cross Currents has to be considered rather as a

delightful grace separable from the body of his work, yet not altogether uncharacteristic. Right handling of the subject-matter needed the faculty known to the Augustans as good sense, which is admirable in its place but not the token of a poet. In The Sisters Swinburne attempted to shape it by the aid of strictly poetic art, and destroyed both the art and the material, but in his single novel— if novel it is he used means exactly fitted to his end. The forces of expediency and worldly wisdom are marshalled and their credentials examined with a seriousness that is free of condescension and pharisaism alike, and the style has a matter-of-fact sagacity proper to the occasion. We do not look for these qualities elsewhere in Swinburne, but such things as Reginald's fiery devotion and revolt and the tenderness of the slight sketch of Amicia and her baby are treasurable if faint echoes from his poetry. We find in this book new evidence of the range of Swinburne's art, and we find again a temper glad of life's charities.

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSIONS

THE detraction to which great poets are subjected in the days following their first wide recognition is a phenomenon that has long since ceased to have in it anything of strangeness. It would seem almost to be a law, a kind of tribute levied by the folly that shares with wisdom the rule of men. When accredited opinion has acclaimed a poet loudly and long enough to tempt popular favour into echoing its judgment, it inevitably follows that the poet is praised for many things foolishly. To praise badly is, perhaps, better than not to praise at all, but bad praise from the foolish unfortunately results always in a counterblast of equally ill-considered detraction, and this often from men who may at other times speak with authority. When a poet is praised for having no coat, quite good judges of poetry are apt to be irritated into denying his art any merit at all, without reference to the truth. But though we may see the cause of these vapours, they are not the more pleasant to contemplate.

Whilst we might hesitate to place these detractors in the company of those who, in Swinburne's words, "seek their single chance of notoriety by denying or decrying the claim and station of the greatest among all the sons of men," we cannot but remember, again with Swinburne, Blake's charge in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that "the worship of God is, Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God." Swinburne's great contemporaries, poets and others, acclaimed him with sufficient conviction to win for him a fair measure of popular applause. Popular misjudgment followed with its usual certainty, and he was reported as a poet deficient in thought, but possessed of an almost unparalleled mastery of language. The new generation of critical opinion, or many of its exponents, protested. Swinburne, they said with some justice, had great metrical command, but he knew nothing in his art of the subtle and mysterious beauties that come of the poet's rarest use of words. But with this observation the protest exhausted its claim to reason. It did not trouble to find out whether popular opinion was wrong too in its other aspect: whether, after all, Swinburne's poetry had some thought worth discovering and worthy of gratitude. It was angry,