(1866.)
Not having read Mr. Swinburne’s “Poems and Ballads,” I have nothing to
say on the special case in which they are involved. A few of the adverse
critiques I have chanced to see, and these almost avail to convince one
that Mr. Swinburne is a true poet. The _Saturday Review_, shocked out of
the complacency of its stark peevishness, cried, “Pretty verses these to
read aloud to young ladies in the drawing-room!” As if there were any
great book in existence proper to read aloud to young ladies in
drawing-rooms! and as if young ladies in drawing-rooms were the fit and
proper judges of any great book! I should like to watch the smuggest and
most conceited of Saturday Reviewers attempting to read aloud to young
ladies in a drawingroom certain chapters in the Bible, certain scenes of
Shakespere, certain of the very best passages in Chaucer, Spenser,
Dryden, Pope, Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Burns, Byron, Shelley.
When Mr. Swinburne answers that he writes for full-grown men and women,
the acute _Fun_ affirms that men have read his book and have condemned
it. As if our present brood of periodical critics were men! At home in
private life, some of them probably are; but in their critical capacity,
that is to say incapacity, how many of them have any virility? The
_Athenaeum_ squashes the detestable book by proclaiming that it contains
such and such things in the style of Alfred de Musset, George Sand,
Victor Hugo, Ovid, etc.; that is to say, in the style of some of the
best Latin and modern French writers! As for _Punch_, he makes a joke
worthy of his present lively condition (were it not for Mr. C. H.
Bennett, one would say that there was no blood at all left in Mr. Punch
when the great Leech dropped off), suggesting that the author should
take the appropriate name of Swine-born. But the mass of our present
critics are so far beneath contempt that we will waste no more time upon
them.
I have just one remark to make, however, before saying a few words on
the general issue raised by this particular process. A large number of
highly respectable elderly personages in gowns, for the most part
belonging to the priesthood of our very dear National Church, and who by
themselves and by good Bumbledom in general are accounted the real
clerisy of England, have devoted all, or nearly all, the years of their
maturity to what is termed the classical instruction of ingenuous youth.
The ingenuous youth thus magnificently instructed comprise young men of
the highest rank, with the most money and leisure and the reddest blood
in the nation. Is it not rather ludicrous to see the said begowned
elderly personages all wringing their hands and smiting their breasts,
weeping and lamenting in sore astonishment and perplexity and terror,
when one of these young men dares to give sign that he has actually in
some degree _assimilated_ such classical instruction, instead of merely
gulping it down hastily and then vomiting it all crude at the
examinations?
As to the general questions, I will start by avowing frankly my
conviction, that, in the present state of England, every thoughtful man
who loves literature should rejoice in the advent of any really able
book which outrages propriety and shocks Bumbledom, should rejoice in
its advent simply and exactly because it does outrage propriety and
shock Bumbledom, even if this book be nauseous to his own taste and bad
in his own judgment. For the condition of our literature in these days
is disgraceful to a nation of men: Bumble has drugged all its higher
powers, and only the rudest shocks can arouse them from their torpor. We
have still, indeed, by the inscrutable bounty of nature, three or four
great writers, the peers of the greatest in Europe; out they stand like
so many forest-trees, antique oaks of Old England, in a boundless flat
of kitchen-gardens—cabbage and lettuce, radishes and onions, and all the
many-leaved “pot-boilers,” fit only to be soddened and seethed in a pot,
and “to pot,” thank goodness, they all quickly go.
Our literature should be the clear and faithful mirror of our whole
world of life, but at present there are vast realms of thought and
imagination and passion and action, of which it is not allowed to give
any reflex at all, or is allowed only to give a reflex so obscure and
distorted as to be worse than none. But, it may be objected, suppose
Satyrs come leering into your mirror and Bacchantes whirl before it? I
answer that the business of a mirror is clear reflection: if it does not
faithfully image the Satyr, how can it faithfully image Hyperion? And do
you dread that the Satyr will be preferred to Hyperion, when both stand
imaged in clear light before us? It is only when the windows are
curtained, when the mirror is a black gulph and its portraitures are
vague dark shadows, that the beautiful and the noble can pass
undistinguished from the hideous and the vile.
If, indeed, the realities not reflected became unrealities, were
annihilated, then there would be some sense in veiling those portions of
the mirror in front of which certain features of our life are exposed.
And if that which sees not could not be seen, it would be very sensible
of the hunted ostrich to hide its head in the sand. But we all know that
in darkness what is filthy and vile grows ever filthier and viler, what
is pure and sweet sickens and decays.
“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we
have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no
health in us.”
We have suppressed mention of all facts which Bumble would fain ignore,
and utterance of all opinions likely to disturb his sacred peace; we
have canted enough to nauseate the angels, and have continually lied for
God as for a man to pleasure him; so our popular books are fit for
emasculated imbeciles, the _Times_ is our leading journal, and the
_Daily Telegraph_ boasts the largest circulation in the world! And in
the meanwhile the police-reports are full of putrid flesh, all the
blue-books are crammed with statistical dry bones; flesh from the
carcases and bones from the skeletons in that mass of death and
corruption under our imperial whited sepulchre.
I do not complain of the kitchen-garden literature; many of the
vegetables are very wholesome and savory in their season, very good for
eating to-day and forgetting to-morrow; I complain that in the interest
of kitchen-gardens the rearing of all grander and loftier vegetation,
the growth of secular forest-kings has become almost impossible in
England. The stupidest popular book would not be popular did it not find
a large number of people still more stupid than itself, to whom it is
really entertaining and instructive. These stupid people one does not
blame, one can only pity or envy them according to one’s mood. But what
shall one say of that large number of educated people who are not
stupid, who are familiar with continental literature; who yet, if an
English book appears advocating ideas such as they have been delighted
with in a French or German dress, feign astonishment and horror, and
join with all the poor little curs of Bumbledom in yelping and snarling
at it? These men who know well what they are doing are the accomplices
of Bumble who does not know what he is doing, who fondly fancies that he
is doing something very different, in starving on thin diet and
stupifying with narcotic drugs the intellect of our nation once so
robust and active; and assuredly if the process goes on much longer we
shall come to rank mentally as a third-rate Power in Europe.
No intelligent man in England, without (which is a contradiction in
terms) his ideas are exactly coincident with the non-ideas of Bumble, or
without he is rich and independent, can afford to devote himself to
honest treatment of any great religious or social, moral or
philosophical question. If treated in a book, he must himself pay the
expense of publication; if treated in an article, not even by payment
could he get the portals of any popular periodical to open unto him. For
periodicals—newspapers, magazines, reviews—are the Fools’ Paradise of
the commonplace, the mediocre, the orthodox, the respectable. As the
strength of a chain must be measured by its weakest link, so the thought
of a periodical must be measured by the thought of its most imbecile
subscribers. A periodical to live must be a commercial success; the
faintest thrill of new ideas would affect its circulation by shocking
off some of its regular readers; it must suit its articles to the size
of its customers—a very little hat for a very little head, a very little
thought for a very little brain. Thus, though in thinking of their
criticisms I spoke so contemptuously of our critics, I do not doubt that
many of them are much wiser than their articles. The most honest of them
must live by their pen, so they do not attempt to tell the whole truth
though they will not tell a lie; many, however, undoubtedly are as apt
for the sin of commission as for the sin of omission.
A noteworthy instance occurs to me as I write. An eminent English
author, in some respects even a great author, complained that in our
country no one since _Fielding_ had dared to attempt the full and
faithful portraiture of a man, and he set himself to the task in a work
published by instalments. As he entered upon certain phases of common
virile life, the circulation of the serial began to decrease. This
author was eminent, well-off, much more honest and wise and brave than
ninety-nine authors in a hundred: of course, having begun his work he
would honestly finish it, he would not only tell the truth and nothing
but the truth, he would also tell the whole truth?—he quietly left off
painting the features objected to, finished such as were agreeable to
the public, and said with a cynical scorn (flavored perhaps with some
bitterness of self-scorn), “_So you don’t want to see and hear the whole
truth? Very well!” This author was revered by the great and
noble-hearted Charlotte Brontë; this author was *Thackeray_, strong with
all the prestige of _Vanity Fair_; he could not think of continuing a
course injurious to his “circulation,” so “Pendennis” is not almost
worthy (as it might, else have been) to stand beside “Un Grande Homme de
Province à Paris” of Balzac.
When such is Thackeray, what must be Gigadibs?
If I write this rather strongly it is because I feel that I am writing
in the interest of strength and health and purity and freedom, at a time
when the mass of our literature is infected with servile weakness and
disease and that “obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine
beauty in life.” For all obscene things batten on darkness, and light is
fatal to them. But for the Bumble who rules over us, the naked beauty is
obscene and the naked truth is blasphemous; he thinks that the Venus de
Medici came out of Holywell Street, and is inclined to believe that all
the fossil records of geology were forged by the Devil to throw
discredit upon the book of Genesis. One cannot without a keen pang of
shame and rage think of what we are when one remembers what we were,
when one recalls our old and glorious literature, in the wide world
unsurpassed; our literature noble and renowned, ever most glorious when
most manly and daring.