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THE FLESHLY SCHOOL 
 OF POETRY 
 
 yl.VI) OTIIER PJJJiXOJJJiNA OF THIi DAY 
 
 I 
 
 By ROBERT 'BUCHANAN 
 
 I'llij-.lil-..— ^I'hiiL pretty (iMU-er-. are tlicsL :' 
 
 I I rilhee let ine Miietl ! 
 Cr.oWN. SiiLL-JI. fill llinii v\ik! 
 
 I hf-s; he imt flrjH-ers fur mauls. '\'\\v siunv-wliiic tliiiio 
 A n<ri-^iarin-, (loth infect the sylvuii air, 
 
 \ 1 sicken the mseet \mW uf linmsint; kine; 
 
 f I - oilier, purple hoiiiuLstmi^ait;, wursc tlian mice 
 ] 1 siiielliiijf cleanly LhainberM 1 here, attain, 
 
 \ iioivci le.is comely, stiiikiiiir yooicfoot, i^roivs, — 
 A[i otiour Uear to do^rs ; 
 
 1 JilU-BI-. Faugh I O ho« foul ! 
 
 I I » name, ye tills, the lallesl .iiui iiiobt fair? 
 ( I. OWN. JJeatli-iiettle. lady. 1 ouch it not 1 
 I'Ha-nli. I am sick- 
 
 I s v II III -its fa;tid breathing fills the air, 
 ! ikc tlie mfist rank crtrruptiori of a corse. 
 
 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 II. i. 
 
 '' Belial came last, than whom a spirit more lewd 
 Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love 
 Vice for itself." Paradise Lost. 
 
 STRAHAN & CO. 
 56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON 
 1872 
 
h. 
 
 u S ^'i-o 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO., 
 
 CITY ROAD. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY : 
 
 I. SOCIAL PHENOMENA OF THE HOUR . 
 II. A LITERARY RETROSPECT : THE ITALIAN FALSETTO 
 SINGERS AND THEIR IMITATORS . 
 
 III. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE AND A. C. SWINBURNE . 
 
 rV. MR. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI . 
 
 V. THE " HOUSE OF LIFE," &C., RE-EXAMINED 
 
 VI. PEARLS FROM THE AMATORY POETS . 
 
 VII. PROSPECTS OF THE FINAL DEGRADATION OF VERSE, 
 AS A MEANS OF INTELLIGENT EXPRESSION . 
 
 NOTES .... 
 
 I6 
 33 
 56 
 69 
 
 82 
 92 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 with flattery to bear criticism, and too querulous and 
 humorsome to perceive the real issues of the case. 
 
 My 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 all. If it be 
 retorted that the rule of the Contemporary Review is never 
 to admit pseudonyms or unsigned articles, I answer that at 
 least three of the regular contributors to that Review have 
 habitually used pseudonyms, and that, in an early number of 
 the same publication, Dean Mansell sharply criticized Mr. 
 Mill in an unsigned article in which he spoke of himself in 
 the third person, afterwards reprinting the article, with 
 his own name, as "The Philosophy of the Conditioned." 
 
 The second count, which charges me with secret self- 
 praise, is so absurd an attempt to distract judgment that it 
 is almost unworthy of mention. In an opening paragraph 
 (now suppressed for its weakness) I drew out a sort of sketch 
 of Hamlet as "cast" by ,the contemporary poets, Mr. 
 Tennyson of course assuming the leading character; and 
 among the list of smaller parts I humorously spoke of 
 myself as playing the part of — what ? Horatio ? The 
 King? Polonius? Rosencranz? Guildenstem? Osric? 
 Of none of these, small or great, but simply that of " Cbr- 
 nelius !" I imagined then that I was writing for readers 
 who had read their Shakspere, or who had at any rate seen 
 his great tragedy murdered on the stage, and never dreamt 
 I should have to explain (as I am now forced to explain) 
 that " Cornelius" is one of those two gentlemen who appear 
 in Scene II. in the usual way of what are technically known 
 
PREFACE. VU 
 
 as " utility" people, and after uttering together this one 
 memorable line — 
 
 " In this and all things will we show our duty ! " — 
 
 exeunt in all humility. In a subsequent scene they return, 
 and Voltimand, the other gentleman, makes a speech, while 
 " Cornelius" stands in the usual "utility" attitude, with one 
 leg bent and one hand laid gracefully on his hips. This is 
 the proud character I am accused of arrogating to myself in 
 the grand list of contemporary performances I Surely, if I 
 had been ambitious of obtruding my own merits, I might at 
 least have gone in for Fortinbras or the First Gravedigger ! 
 
 The other allusion to " my own poems" will be found on 
 page 46 of this pamphlet. It simply chronicles a fact, and 
 is neither complimentary nor the reverse. 
 
 The truth is, all this hubbub about the authorship is 
 a vulgar farce, got up to distract public attention. My 
 article was altered and my name suppressed with the best 
 of all motives — that of letting the charges contained in it 
 stand on their own merits, and that of saving me from the 
 persecution of a clique of Uterary Mohawks ; but it is a pity 
 any alteration was made at all. 
 
 Be that as it may, let me entreat my readers not to let 
 their attention be distracted by any consideration of me 
 personally. Let them carefully accept and weigh the 
 evidence brought forward in these pages, and judge the 
 case on its own merits. The clatter that is being made 
 about the authorship is only meant to excite the public 
 against 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. 
 
 told. It is delightful as showing the ratio of public intelli- 
 gence. It appears that these poems of Mr. Rossetti have 
 actually become favourites with that prude of prudes, the 
 British matron ; and several gentlemen tell me that their 
 aunts and grandmothers see no harm in them ! My own 
 grandmother is not poetical, so I have not sought her 
 opinion. But here I am front to front with the amazing 
 fact that a large section of cultured people read poetry, and 
 enjoy it, without the faintest perception of what it is all 
 about — without the slightest wish to realise the images or 
 the situations — without any more intellectual effort than they 
 use when having their hair brushed ! Conceive the mental 
 state of the aunt or grandmother who could read such verses 
 as this — 
 
 " I was a child beneath her touch — a man 
 When breast to breast we clung, even I 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 pretty. It is hard to think 
 ill of one's relations ; but the mature females in question 
 must be either very obtuse, or — very, very naughty ! 
 
 The truth appears to be, that writing, however nasty, will 
 be perfectly sanctified to English readers if it be moral in 
 the legal sense ; and thus a poet who describes sensual 
 details may do so with impunity if he labels his poems — 
 "Take notice ! These sensations are stxicily nuptial ; these 
 delights have been sanctioned by English law, and registered 
 at Doctors' 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. IX 
 
 his worst poems, explains that he is speaking dramatically 
 in the character of a husiand ^AAxessmg his wife. Animalism 
 is animalism, nevertheless, whether licensed or not; and, 
 indeed, one might tolerate the language of lust more readily 
 on the lips of a lover addressing a mistress than on the 
 lips 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 ! I never read him. What 
 the devil is it all about, Pip ? 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. 
 
 '"T'HOUGH this is a generation of great poets and teachers ; 
 though Tennyson, Browning, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, 
 Emerson, and Walt Whitman are still amongst us, while 
 Dickens (essentially a poet) and Landor have not long 
 left us ; though much of our pubUc teaching (and notably 
 that of the public press) is lofty and clean, there are not 
 wanting signs that Sensualism, which from time immemorial 
 has been the cancer of all society, is shooting its ulcerous 
 roots deeper and deeper, and blotching more and more 
 the fair surface of things. Coming this winter from a 
 remote retreat in the Highlands to this great centre of 
 life which men have named London, moving from street 
 to street and from house to house, seeing all that a 
 man with eyes can see, what are the objects which 
 most impress themselves upon me ? Not the old imme- 
 morial squalor of the slums, the hideous famine of the 
 by-streets and lanes, the gaudy misery in numberless 
 human faces (that is no novelty) ; nor the fatuous imbecility 
 and superficiality of the moneyed vulgar, and the shapeless 
 
 B 
 
2 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 Ugliness of women who feed high and take no exercise (that, 
 too, is famiKar, though not perhaps on so large a scale) ; 
 nor the dark blotches of life where disease squats for ever, 
 nor the follies of the last new fashion, nor the hideousness 
 of the last new public building. All these things are passed 
 on one side, as I approach a phenomenon so strange and 
 striking that to a superstitious mind it might seem a portent, 
 and so hideous that it converts this great city of civilisation 
 into a great Sodom or Gomorrah waiting for doom. Look 
 which way I will, the horrid thing threatens and paralyzes 
 me. It lies on the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked 
 and dangerously fair. It is part of the pretty poem which 
 the belle of the season reads, and it breathes away the 
 pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of the girl in 
 Hawthorne's tale. It covers the shelves of the great 
 Oxford-Street librarian, lurking in the covers of three- 
 volume novels. It is on the French booksellers' counters, 
 authenticated by the signature of the author of the " Visite 
 de Noces." It is here, there, and everywhere, in art, litera- 
 ture, life, just as surely as it is in the " Fleurs de Mai," the 
 Marquis de Sade's " Justine," or the " Monk " of Lewis. It 
 appeals to all tastes, to all dispositions, to all ages. If the 
 querulous man of letters has his " Baudelaire," the pimpled 
 clerk has his Day's Doings, * and the dissipated artisan his 
 
 * Publications of this sort are at last being taken seriously in hand 
 by the Societyfor the Suppression of Vice. As I write, the following 
 appears in the weekly journals :— " The ' Day's Doings ' again.— 
 At Bow-street police-court on Thursday, Frederick Shove, the publisher 
 of the Day's Doings, an illustrated paper, appeared to a fresh summons, 
 granted by Sir Thomas Henry, charged with publishing indecent prints 
 and printed matter. Mr. Besley (instructed by Mr. CoUette, of the 
 Society for the Suppression of Vice) prosecuted ; Mr. Laxton, as before, 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 3 
 
 Day and Mght. The streets are full of it. Photographs 
 of nude, indecent, and hideous harlots, in every possible 
 attitude that vice can devise, flaunt from the shop- 
 windows, gloated over by the fatuous glint of the libertine 
 and the greedy open-mouthed stare of the day-labourer. 
 Never veas this Snake, which not all the naturalists of the 
 world have been able to scotch, so vital and poisonous as 
 now. It has penetrated into the very sweetshops; and 
 there, among the commoner sorts of confectionery, may be 
 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 and embroidered in 
 the female fashion ! 
 
 When things have come to such a pass as this, it is diffi- 
 cult to be quite serious in dealing with them. The foot- 
 and-mouth disease is dreadful, but the Leg-disease, though 
 generally fatal, is egregiously absurd into the bargain. 
 Now, to begin with, there is nothing indecent in the human 
 Leg itself; on the contrary, it is a most beautiful and 
 , useful member. Nor is it necessarily indecent to show the 
 
 defended. Mr. Besley said that a promise was made when the defendant 
 was last summoned at this court that all 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, 
 in his opinion, even 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 recog- 
 nizances in ^150." 
 
4 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 Leg, as some ladies do upon the stage, without in the least 
 shocking our propriety. But the Leg, an excellent thing in 
 itself, becomes insufferable if obtruded into every concern 
 of life, so that instead of humanity we see a demon re- 
 sembling the Manx coat-of-arms, cutting capers without a 
 body or a head. The Leg, as a disease, is subtle, secret, 
 diabolical. It relies not merely on its own intrinsic at- 
 tractions, but on its atrocious suggestions. It becomes a 
 spectre, a portent, a mania. Turn your eyes to the English 
 stage. Shakspere is demolished and lies buried under 
 hecatombs of Leg ! Open the last new poem. Its title 
 will possibly be this, or similar to this—" Leg is enough." 
 Walk along the streets. The shop-windows teem with Leg. 
 Enter a music-hall — Leg again, and (O tempora ! O mores !) 
 the Can-Can. Jack enjoys it down Wapping way just as 
 Jones does in the Canterbury Hall. It is only in fashion- 
 able rooms and in the stalls of the theatre that Leg is at a 
 discount ; but that is not because life there is more innocent 
 and modest, but because Leg is in the higher circles 
 altogether eclipsed by its two most formidable rivals — 
 Bosom and Back. 
 
 If popular writers are to be credited, there is running 
 rampant in English society a certain atrocious form of vice, 
 a monster with two heads — one of which is called Adultery, 
 the other Dipsomania — and these two heads, bhnd to all 
 else in the world, leer and ogle at each other. I have not 
 sufficient knowledge of English poHte society to say whether 
 or not the terrible impeachment is based on a careful study 
 of facts ; but I 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 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. J 
 
 for the very sake of the imputations they contain, the dehght 
 of vulgar d^bauchds and heartless libertines. No form of 
 animal is more common than he who, when charged, with 
 folly and immorality, retorts with a smile — " All very well, 
 but I am no worse than my neighbours ; virtue — fudge ! 
 there is no such. thing, at least in English society; every- 
 thing is bought and sold;" — and this enlightened person, 
 hearing on the best authority that love of the best sort pro- 
 curable and lust of the gaudiest sort possible are equally 
 in the market for the highest bidder, prefers purchasing his 
 indulgence as the humour seizes him to making a bargain 
 for a life-luxury of which he may get thoroughly tired. 
 Nothing, meantime,- gratifies the free lover more than to be 
 told that marriage is a farce and continence a sham, that all 
 forms of life are equally heartless, and that his betters in 
 the social scale only commit in secret the follies in which 
 he indulges openly. Is it true, then, that English society is 
 honeycombed and rotten ? More than -one form of literature 
 says so. The smart journal says so. So does the novel of 
 the period. So does the artistic Bohemian. For my own 
 part I am incUned to believe (though, as I have said, on 
 very insufficient knowledge) that true English life is infinitely 
 purer and better than our smart writers and lady novelists 
 imagine it to be ; that the pure rose of English maidenhood 
 still blows as brightly as ever ; that, in a word, the canker 
 lies on the surface and has not yet eaten down into the 
 body social. How then account for the portentous symp- 
 toms which are everywhere appalling us ? Thus. T^There 
 is on the fringe of real English society, and chiefly, if not 
 altogether, in London here, a sort of demi-monde, not com- 
 posed, like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but 
 
6 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 of men and women of indolent habits and sesthetic tastes, 
 artists, literary persons, novel writers, actors, men of genius 
 and men of talent, butterflies and gadflies of the human 
 kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to mouth. These 
 persons " \mte for the papers." They publish books, often 
 at their own expense. They, some of them, have titles. 
 They belong to clubs and they go to dinner parties. They 
 paint pictures, sometimes good ones. They compose music, 
 generally bad 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, 
 refined, interesting, able, querulous. Nothing delights them 
 more than to tear a reputation to pieces or to diagnose the 
 seeds of moral disease in the healthiest subjects. Their 
 religion is called culture, their narrow-mindedness is called 
 insight. Their portraits are sold, along with those of nude 
 harlots and lascivious courtesans, at a shilling per head in 
 the public streets. Two peculiarities distinguish this class 
 of persons to a careful eye — they are as oblivious to the 
 fact that life has a past as 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, if we carefully consider the question we are dis- 
 cussing, we shall in all possibility find that all the gross and 
 vulgar conceptions of life which are formulated into certain 
 products of art, literature, and criticism, emanate from this 
 Bohemian class. Its members do not, we believe, penetrate 
 far into life of any kind, but where they do penetrate they 
 create the vices they perceive, and reflect phenomena in 
 the distorted mirrors of their own moral consciousness. 
 Possessing no religion, they imagine that English life is 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 7 
 
 irreligious. Having no faith, they perceive no faith any- 
 where. Ingenious almost to diablerie, they will prove to 
 you by critical theory that art is simply the method of 
 getting most sweets out of one's living ' sensations — the 
 knack, to put it metaphorically, of sucking your lollipop so 
 as to extract out of it the best possible flavour. If a man 
 speaks to them earnestly, they will smile and style him 
 " didactic." If a man writes for them religiously, they will 
 inwardly congratulate themselves on having passed quite 
 beyond " that sort of thing." These men — and alas ! 
 these women — compose some of our poetry, paint some 
 of our pictures, write a good deal of our formal criti- 
 cism. Is it any wonder, therefore, that the poor bewil- 
 dered public shakes its head over the terrible accounts 
 put before it, and begins slowly but surely to share the 
 scepticism and flippancy it at first considered so shocking ? 
 Is it any wonder that Leg-literature flourishes ? Is it any 
 wonder that wise men like Mr. Ruskin rail, and philosophers 
 like Mr. Carlyle despair? There lies the seat of the 
 cancer — there, in the Bohemian fringe of society. Will 
 no courageous hand essay to cut it out ? Will no physician 
 come to put his finger in the true seat of the sore ? 
 There it is, spreading daily like all cancerous diseases, 
 foul in itself and creating foulness. If we cannot de- 
 stroy it altogether with some terrible caustic, let us at 
 least take precautions to prevent it from spreading. 
 The disease is worth the remedy, the remedy 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 
 
8 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 was at first broader, but I find it beyond my present 
 materials. To deal with the question completely, to pass 
 in review the effects of Sensualism on art, on music, on the 
 drama, and above all to trace its physiological causes and 
 consequences as expressed in all these different directions, 
 would occupy far more time than I am able to bestow on 
 the subject. Let me hope, however, that others may 
 speak, now I have spoken, adding to mine their testimony 
 and 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 history of European poetry is the history of 
 European progress, from the narrow microscopic pedantry 
 of mediaeval culture to the large telescopic sweep of modem 
 thought and science. It is no part of my present plan to 
 attempt the historical subject, except in so far as it affects 
 the phenomena of the present day ; and I need only indi- 
 cate, therefore, how 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, like the morning star, 
 To us discovered day from far." 
 
 Chaucer and his contemporaries were, as all readers know, 
 under deep obligations to the poets and romancists of 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 9 
 
 mediseval Italy; and it is a most significant token of 
 Chaucer's pre-eminent originality that, while Qower and the 
 rest had only been inspired to imitate what was bad in the 
 great models, he, on the contrary, merely derived inspiration 
 and solace from their music, assimilated what was noble in it, 
 and carefully prepared a breezier and healthier poetic form 
 of his own. What is grandest and best in Chaucer is Chaucer's 
 exclusively. No better proof can be had of his merit as 
 the morning star of the modern school than a careful 
 comparison of him, first with Boccaccio, then with Dante. 
 All the limpid flow of narrative, the concentration and pomp 
 of subject, all the lighter humour and sparkle, are to be 
 found in the " Decameron.'' 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, 
 dawned with the divine author of the " Canterbury Tales.'' 
 Chaucer was emphatically the poet of the bourgeoisie, just 
 as Shakspere and his brethren were the poets of the feudal 
 idea ; but with all these writers alike, with the authoi' of the 
 " Wife of Bath " as well as with the creator of Falstaff, 
 humanity was beginning 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 modem senti- 
 ment of popular rights, duties, and aifections. The great 
 dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, following in Chaucer's 
 footsteps, appear, under some awful demoniac influence (for 
 individually these men were destitute of beneficence), to have 
 prepared for modem contemplation an unequalled gallery 
 
10 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 of human faces and souls — a gallery all-embracing in its 
 range, photographing the meanest as well as the highest, 
 and revealing to us, under all the dazzle and glitter of a 
 sumptuous feudal style, the instincts which all men have in 
 common, the compensations which each owes to the other, 
 and the fair world in which each has an equal and indis- 
 putable share. Simply to picture men " in their habits as 
 they live," no matter under what motive, was the highest pos- 
 sible beneficence ; and this, in the golden dawn of our poetry, 
 was done inimitably, with a beauty of thought and a wealth 
 of resource unknown to any poet that has appeared since. 
 
 Such was the dawn of our poetry; and did ever dawn 
 bid promise of a more glorious day ? 
 
 But, alas ! to the reddening of this fair promise succeeded 
 no fulfilment. Just when light seemed fullest, time and 
 season were miraculously altered, and a period arrived, an 
 overclouding of the sun, a portentous darkness, wherein 
 few could tell whether it was night or day. This darkness 
 was of a vaporous nature, miasmic. It was a fever-cloud 
 generated first in Italy and then blown westward ; finally, 
 after sucking up all that was most unwholesome from the 
 soil of France, to 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. 
 
 Just previously to and contemporaneously with the rise 
 of Dante, there had flourished a legion of poets of greater 
 or less ability, but all more or less, characterized by affecta- 
 tion, foolishness, and moral blindness ; singers of the 
 falsetto school, with ballads to their mistress's eyebrow, 
 sonnets to their lady's lute, and general songs of a fiddle- 
 stick ; peevish men for the most part, as is the way of all 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. ii 
 
 fleshly and affected beings ; men so ignorant of human 
 subjects and materials as to be driven, in their sheer bank- 
 ruptcy of mind, to raise Hope, Love, Fear, Rage (every- 
 thing but Charity) into human entities, and to treat the 
 body and upholstery of a dollish woman as if, in itself, it 
 constituted a whole Universe. In the ways of these poor 
 devils Dante walked a little ; 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 hne of thought with a 
 fictitious and tremendous interest. The " Vita Nuova " is 
 enormously fine in its way, as the self-revelation of a man 
 in whom the world is interested, and to whom many conceits 
 may be freely pardoned. It is quaint, fine, subtle, sugges- 
 tive ; but its chief value is this, that it was composed, in a 
 tender moment, by the tremendous creature who wrote the 
 story of Roman Catholicism in unfaltering and colossal 
 cipher for the study of all forthcoming ages. 
 
 What was great and potent in Dante remained in the 
 " Divine Comedy " and bore no seed. What was absurd and 
 unnatural in Dante, mingling with foul exhalations from the 
 brains of his brother poets, formed the miasmic cloud which 
 obscured all English culture, generated madness even as far 
 north as Hawthomden and Edinburgh, obscured Chaucer 
 for centuries, darkened the way to the vast spaces of the 
 Elizabethan drama, and generally bred in the very bones and 
 marrow of English literature the veriest ague of absurdity 
 ever known to keep human creature crazy. Surrey, a 
 naturally strong man, sickened and died in the fever ; his 
 limpid English just preserving his foolish subjects from 
 total oblivion ; while Wyatt, affected in form as well as in 
 
12 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 substance, lingered through a long life of literary disease. 
 Spenser and Drayton caught the complaint early, but, being 
 men of robust genius, survived it. Shakspere had it, but 
 his mighty spirit almost beautified disease itself, till he cast 
 it off altogether, and clomb to the heaven-kissing hill where 
 he wrote his plays. Poor old John Donne had the strangest 
 possible attacks ; he made a hard fight to recover his 
 natural English health, but the reiterated relapses were too 
 much for him ; and there he lies, with his books on his 
 breast, quaint as a carven figure on a tomb — and as unreal. 
 How name over all the other victims who died literary 
 death in those days ? How call up before the reader the 
 sad shades of Davies, Carew, William Drummond, the two 
 Fletchers, Habington, and all those once famous British 
 bards ? Gliding onward through the spectral host, we pass 
 Crashaw, a Rossetti of the period, with twice the genius 
 and half the advantages ; and Suckling, immortal by virtue 
 of his one true note — the '' Ballad on a Wedding ;'' and 
 Browne, the Elizabethan Keats, with 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 
 of the sun, and came to the cruel earth with a smash so pro- 
 digious. Poor ghosts ! To think of it ! All these persons 
 were admired in their generation. Frankincense of praise and 
 myrrh of flattery had been theirs to the full. They flattered 
 each other, and they tickled the age. What pleased the 
 public mind in Shakspere was the " quaint conceits " of his 
 " wonderful " sonnets ; his plays were nowhere for the time 
 being. The Itahan disease raged and devastated art, 
 literature, and society. Now it was the simple sentimental 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 13 
 
 form, light and dainty, symptomised by such verses as " To 
 Roses in the Bosom of Castara," " Upon Cupid's Death and 
 Burial in Cynthia's Cheeke," or " On a Mole in Celia's 
 Bosom." Again it was the dull metaphysical type, deep- 
 seated and incurable, with its " Negative Love," its "Answer 
 to the Platonics," and " Love's Visibility." At one time 
 the disease was scrofulous and foul-mouthed, sending forth 
 addresses " To His Mistress's going to Bed," and " On 
 the Happiness of a Flea on Celia's Body." At another the 
 religious mania supervened, and all the language of passion 
 was applied to divine things, startling us with coquettish 
 addresses to the Magdalen, to " Mary's Tear," " On the 
 Blessed Virgin's Bashfulness," and so on. But in all these 
 cases, however extraordinary, however fatal, two results 
 could be noted. The performances 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. This 
 prodigy of success overdid his character, and it seemed 
 impossible for the lover's vein to be carried further by 
 any other ambitious Bottom. Milton corrected his system 
 with the strong tonics of the ancients ; and Dryden, 
 when he rose, fortified himself with the disinfectant of 
 Roman satire. Nevertheless the disease lingered in the 
 land, co-operating with new diseases from the corrupt court 
 of P"rance. It would be tiresome indeed to name all the 
 poor creatures, from Cowley to Spratt, who suffered and died, 
 more or less under the fatal influence. It was in positive 
 despair, to resist the epidemic, that English literature 
 hardened into the formal cleanliness of the Addisonian 
 
14 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 period. Classicism was used as an antidote, while Ambrose 
 Phillips was delighting " society " with pieces like that " On 
 the Little Lady Charlotte Pulteney drest to go to a Ball." * 
 False love, false heroics, false pastoral pictures, false life, 
 false thought, all more or less consequent on the foul 
 corruptions from Italy and France, had shaken the whole 
 fabric of English literature when Jonathan Swift composed 
 his mock-erotic verses " On a beautiful Young Nymph going 
 to Bed," and Pope & Co. their " Martinus Scriblerus on the 
 Art of Sinking in Poetry ; " but neither Pope nor Swift was 
 strong enough to inaugurate a new and nobler art. English 
 poetry was virtually dead. 
 
 A tranquil gleam of honest English light came with 
 Cowper, whose patient and gentle services have scarcely yet 
 been rated at their true worth. But the true seeds of a new 
 life had been scattered abroad when Bishop Percy published 
 his " Reliques." These seeds were slow to spring, the 
 slower because they sank so deep. At last, however, Words- 
 worth came, and English literature was saved. Then, with 
 one loud trumpet-note, Byron amazed matrons and disarmed 
 critics. Then, with a shining face, Coleridge uttered stately 
 syllables of mightiest thought. Then, too, Southey gave 
 his help, now unjustly forgotten. Then Lamb and Hazlitt 
 began to criticize, directing men's eyes back to the true 
 fount of English thought and diction — the tales of Chaucer 
 and the EHzabethan drama. Then Scott arose, simple and 
 deep as the sea — freighted with golden argosies of history 
 and lighted with the innumerable laughter of the waves. 
 
 * These verses are worth studying, ps showing how the only effect pro- 
 duced 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." 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 15 
 
 Then indeed poor England shook off her taint, and felt 
 her heart beat with a truer, freer pulse, — 
 
 " For a sweet wind from heaven had come 
 To blow her cares away." 
 
 Hope had come at last — more than a gleam, — a glorious 
 azure burst. It was sad to think how many centuries had 
 been wasted ; but the invalid-literature of this country was 
 not quite dead. 
 
 Strange to say, just at that very moment, when things 
 looked brightest, honest Gifford had to demolish the Delia 
 Cruscan school, and Canning and Frere found it necessary 
 to destroy Dr. Darwin. In both of these maniacal mani- 
 festations, but particularly in the former, society and the 
 small critics of the day delighted. The Delia Cruscan 
 poems were sung to guitars, and warbled by young ladies 
 at their embroidery frames. They had one recommendation 
 — they were harmless. They were neither demoralising nor 
 dirty. They died a very speedy death, when once Gifford 
 took the trouble to exterminate them ; but perhaps they 
 hardly needed so severe an operation. In our own day 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. All these so- 
 called Schools over-exert themselves and end in phthisis. A 
 great poet is a law to himself, and does not work in groups. 
 
 After this last futile development, the Italian disease 
 would possibly have died out altogether. That it has not 
 died, has been due to a fresh importation of the obnoxious 
 matter from France. The Scrofulous School of Literaturf; 
 
i6 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 had been distinguishing itself for many a long year in Pans, 
 but it reached its final and most tremendous development 
 in Charles Baudelaire, — a 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. 
 
 I 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, pub- 
 lished since his death. 
 
 Gautier's memoir is a miracle of cunning writing, contain- 
 ing hardly a syllable with which one disagrees, and yet 
 skilfully and secretly poisoning the mind of any unsus- 
 picious reader. The best antidote I can recommend against 
 such clever trash is the tiniest pinch of humour, the least 
 sense of the absurd ; for directly the whole thing is put in 
 the proper light, contempt yields to laughter, and laughter 
 dies away in pity for the poor " sestheticized " figures to 
 whom we are being introduced. It may also be as well, at 
 the same time, to call to mind how even the mighty genius 
 of George Sand, at first so promising and so commanding 
 (in those days when even Mazzini's pure soul did it homage), 
 slowly decomposed under the inner action of the artistic 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. i; 
 
 and self-critical instinct, until it falsified all hopes, and 
 ended in utter demoralisation. This literary finessing, this 
 intellectual fingering, 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. A little 
 Shaksperian sense of quiddity would soon show us what a 
 poor, attenuated, miserable scarecrow of humanity Baude- 
 laire was in reality, and what a mere serving-man, self- 
 deluded and self-deluding, is this poor old Gautier-Mal- 
 volio, who holds forth, " cross-garter'd," over his grave. 
 
 Gautier first met Baudelaire in " that grand salon in the 
 most pure style of Louis XIV.,'' where the hasheesh-eaters 
 of Paris were wont to hold their meetings ; and his descrip- 
 tion of the furniture of this chamber is very great, quite in 
 the spirit of a French upholsterer. Here is his vignette 
 portrait of Baudelaire as he appeared on that occasion ; — 
 
 " 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 ; les yeux, couleur de tabac d'Espagne, avaient un regard 
 spirituel, 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 sinuosit£s 
 mobiles, voluptueuses et ironiques comme les levres des figures peintes 
 par Leonard de Vinci ; le nez, fin et dfilicat, un peu arrondi, aux nariifes 
 palpitantes, semblait subodorer de vagues parfums lointains ; une 
 fossette vigoureuse accentuait le menton comme le coup de pouce final 
 du statuaire; les joues, soigneusement rashes, contrastaient, par leur 
 fleur bleu4tre que veloutait la poudre de riz, avec les nuances vermeilles 
 des pommettes ; le cou, d'une elegance et d'une blancheur fgminines, 
 apparaissait d^gage, partant d'un col de chemise rabattu et d'une 
 fitroite cravate en madras des Indes et a carreaux. Son vetement' 
 consistait en un paletot d'une 6toflFe noire lustree et brillante, un 
 pantalon noisette, des bas blancs et des escarpins vemis, le tout mfiticu- 
 leusement propre et correct, avec un cachet voulu de simplicite anglaise 
 et comme I'intention de se sSparer du genre artiste, a chapeaux de 
 
 C 
 
1 8 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 feutre mou, a vestes de velours, 4 vareuses rouges, a barbe prolixe et 4 
 criniSre echevelee. Rien de trop frais ni de trop voyant dans cette 
 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 
 pour le vrai gentleman. Plus tard meme, il rasa sa moustache, trou- 
 vant que c'etait un reste de vieux chic pittoresque qu'il etait pueril et 
 - bourgeois de conserver." — CEuvres de Baudelaire, precedees d'une 
 noti'-.e far Theofhile Gautier, Paris, 1869. 
 
 This interesting creature, with his nose sniffing " distant 
 perfumes," his carefully-shaven cheeks, and his general air 
 of man-millinery, was in earnest conversation with the 
 " model " Maryx, who, with the immobility acquired in the 
 studio, was reclining on a couch, resting her superb head 
 on a cushion, and attired " in a white robe, quaintly starred 
 with red spots resembling drops of blood ! " Hard by, at 
 the window, sat another superb female, known as " La 
 Femme au Serpent," from having sat to Clevinger when he 
 painted his picture of that name. The latter, having thrown 
 on a fauteuil " her mantle of black lace and the most deli- 
 cious, little green hood that ever covered Lucy Hocquet or 
 Madame Baudraud, shook her yellow lioness-locks, still 
 humid, for she 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 ! " In the same 
 company were Jean Fenchferes, the sculptor, and Jean 
 Boissard, the latter with " his red mouth, teeth of pearl, and 
 brilliant complexion." One scarcely knows which to admire 
 most in this description, — the writer's fine apotheosis of the 
 lupanar into an " artistic decameron," or the avidity with 
 which he seizes on personal traits and on male and female 
 milhnery. He is " up " in both under and over-clothing, as 
 worn by both sexes. He is, moreover, candour itself. He 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 19 
 
 makes no secret of Baudelaire's little weaknesses and his 
 own. " With an air quite simple, natural, and perfectly dis- 
 engaged, he advanced some axiom satanically monstrous, 
 or sustained with an icy sang-froid some theory of a mathe- 
 matical exactness ; for there was a vigorous method in the 
 development of his absurdities." In a word, it is not denied' 
 that Baudelaire was tiiat most unsympathetic of all beings, 
 a cold sensualist, and that he carried into all his pleasures 
 (until 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 taste," Baudelaire re- 
 turned to Paris, rented a httle chambre de gar(on, and 
 assumed all the privileges of a literary life in the most 
 debauched city of the world. His reading, which seems 
 to have been of a very limited nature, developed his already 
 singular disposition into true literary monstrosity, and the 
 morbid nature of his tastes may be gathered from the fact 
 that his first public effort was a translation of the American 
 Tales of Edgar Poe. To 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 as useless a hfe, 
 died as wretched a death, and left for his legacy books 
 even more worthless — • the very dregs of his unhappy 
 and sunless moral nature. Like Poe and Swinburne, he 
 affected innovations in verse, and sought out the most 
 morbid themes for poetical treatment. Encouraged by Poe, 
 he tried to surpass him on his own ground — to triumph 
 
20 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 over him in the diablerie of horror. Encouraged in his 
 turn, Mr, Swinburne has attempted to surpass Baudelaire, 
 and to excel even that frightful artist in the representation 
 of abnormal types of diseased lust and lustful disease. 
 
 " Art," said Baudelaire in effect, " has but one object, 
 like life — that of exciting in the reader's soul the sensation 
 of enjoyment. What poetry is to hfe, the drug hasheesh 
 is to me personally, enabling me to extract supreme enjoy- 
 ment out of the sheerly diabolical ideas of my own mind. 
 I despise humanity, and I approve the devil." Animated by 
 these noble sentiments, he killed himself by self-indulgence, 
 and virtually exclaimed to the youth of France, with his 
 dying breath, " Go ye and do likewise !" 
 
 I know well how much may be said in defpnce of a man 
 like this by a wise and beneficent criticism ; but I know, too, 
 that defence has been overwrought, till mercy for the sinner ■ 
 has enlarged into sympathy with the sin. I am well aware, 
 moreover — no man can be better aware — of the charm of 
 writers like Baudelaire, and even of a certain service they 
 may do to literature by careful attention to aesthetic form. 
 Having few ideas, they endeavour to express them neatly, 
 and with novelty. But no good can come to life or litera- 
 ture from the atrocious system of painting such figures 
 in the light voluptuous colours of art ; of exalting such 
 contemptible persons into first-rate literary positions, and 
 of evading the moral of their Hves for the sake of pointing 
 an epigram and delighting the fool. Charles Baudelaire 
 lived and died a slave to his own devil ; every line he wrote 
 was slave's work ; every picture he ever painted was in one 
 hue — the dark blood-tint of his own shame. And yet it is 
 this man, this dandy of the brothel, this Brummel of the 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 21 
 
 Stews, this fifth-rate litt'erateur, who, adopting to a certain 
 extent the self-explanatory and querulous system of the 
 Italian school of poets, and carefully avoiding the higher 
 issues of that noble school of which Hugo is the living head, 
 has been chosen (by no angel certainly) to be the god- 
 father as it were of the modem Fleshly School, and thus to 
 fill the select salon of English literature with a perfume to 
 which the smell of Mrs. Aphra Behn's books is savoury, and 
 that of Catullus' "lepidum novum libellum" absolutely 
 delicious. ^ 
 
 This is our double misfortune — to have a nuisance, and 
 to have it at second hand. We might have been more tole- 
 rant to an unclean thing, if it had been in some sense a 
 product of the soil. We have never been foolish purists, 
 here in England. We freely forgave Byron many a wicked 
 turn, because we knew he loved much, because we saw how 
 much he was the product of national forces darkly working to 
 the light. We welcomed Goethe, even when he sent the 
 " Elective Affinities " and the cerebellic autobiographies. But 
 to be overrun with the brood of an inferior French sonnet- 
 teer, whose only originality was his hideousness of subject, 
 whose only merit was in his nasal appreciation of foul odours, 
 surely that is far too much : it would have been a little too 
 much twenty years ago, when the Empire began creating its 
 viper's nest in the heart of France ; it is a hundred times 
 too much now, when the unclean place has been burnt with 
 avenging fire. 
 
 A few years before his death, Baudelaire published his 
 chief work — " Fleurs de Mai." This book was a little too 
 strong even for Paris under the Empire; so the censor 
 came down, and some of the vilest poems were ruthlessly 
 
12 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 expunged. But Baudelaire gained his end, and secured 
 a spurious notoriety. Some years later Mr. Swinburne 
 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 it like a blazing 
 cinder in the very month of publication, and only one pub- 
 lisher, who shall be nameless, had the courage to lift it up. 
 '' All that is worst in Mr. Swinburne belongs to Baudelaire. 
 The offensive choice of subject, the obtrusion of unnatural 
 passion, the blasphemy, the wretched animaHsm, are all 
 taken intact out of the " Fleurs de Mai." Pitiful ! that any 
 sane man, least of all any English poet, should think this 
 dunghill worthy of importation ! In the centre of his col- 
 lection Baudelaire placed the most horrid poem ever written 
 by man, a poem unmatched for simple hideousness even in 
 Rome during the decadence — a piece worthy to be spoken 
 by Ascyltos in Petronius Arbiter — and entitled " Femmes 
 Damnees." The interlocutors in this piece are two women, 
 who have just been guilty of the vilest act conceivable in 
 human debauchery, biit the theme and the treatment are 
 too loathsome for description. Encouraged by the hideous- 
 ness of " Femmes Damnees," Mr. Swinburne attempted 
 to beat it in "Anactoria," a poem the subject of which 
 is again that branch of crime which is generally known as 
 the Sapphic passion. It would be tedious, apart from the 
 unsavouriness of the subject, to pursue the analogy much 
 further through individual poems. Perhaps the best plan is 
 to give 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 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 23 
 
 his true character, and accuses the reader of being not a 
 whit better : — 
 
 ' ' Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frdre ! " 
 
 He purposes, he says, on his way (the way of all humanity) 
 down to absolute Hell, to pass in review a few of the 
 horrors he sees on his path. His way lies — 
 
 " Parrai 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 all these monsters the most infernal is — L'Ennui 1 
 The very next poem sweetly chronicles the birth of the 
 Poet, whose mother, affrighted and blaspheming, stretches 
 her hands to God, crying : " Cursed be that night of fleeting 
 pleasure, when my womb conceived my punishment !" In 
 the next poem the poet is compared to the albatross, 
 splendid on the wing, but almost unable to walk ; and the 
 comparison strikes me as very applicable to this poet him- 
 self, only that his whole book is a waddHng, unwieldy, and 
 unsuccessful attempt to begin a flight. In a number of 
 short lyrics he talks of poetry, music, and life, without 
 affording us much edification (save in a really powerful 
 picture called " Don Juan in Hell ") till he begins to sing, not 
 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 and cries, and the large-limbed sterile 
 creature who never conceives. She " bites," of course : — 
 
 " Pour exercer les dents S ce jeu singulier, 
 II se faut chaque jour un coeur au rStelier ! " 
 
24 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 She has " cold eyelids that shut like a jewel :" — 
 
 " Tes yeux, oft rien ne se revile 
 
 De doux ni d'amer, 
 
 Sont deux bijoux froids .'" 
 
 She is cold and " sterile : " — 
 
 " La froide majeste de la femme sterile ! " 
 She is, necessarily, like " a snake : " — 
 
 . . . "un serpent qui danse," &c., &c. 
 
 She is, in fact, Faustine, Mary Stuart, Our Lady of Pain, 
 
 Sappho, and all the rest, — quite as nasty, and to all intents 
 
 and purposes, in spite of her attraction for young poets, 
 
 seemingly as undesirable. 
 
 It is quite impossible for me, without long quotation, to 
 
 fully represent the unpleasantness of Baudelaire, with his 
 
 " vampires," his " cats," and " cat-like women," his poisons, 
 
 his fiends, his phantoms, his long menagerie of horrors, his 
 
 long catalogue of debaucheries. At one time we are in a 
 
 brothel, and the poet is lying by the side of a dreadful 
 
 Jewess with " cold eyelids : " — 
 
 " Une nuit que j'etais pr6s d'une affreuse Juive, 
 Conime au long d'un cadavre un cadavre etendu !" 
 
 At another time we hear the poet saying to a fair companion 
 
 — " Seek not my heart ; the beasts, have eaten it." Grim 
 
 and wearied as he is, our poet is not above the favourite 
 
 conceits of his school : — 
 
 " Tes hanches sont amoureuses 
 De ton dos et de ses seins, 
 Et tu ravis les coussins 
 Par tes poses langoureuses ! " 
 
 And this is quite in the symbolizing style of the Italian 
 school, of which I shall give many examples when treating 
 of Mr. Rossetti : — 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 25 
 
 " La Haine est un rvrogne au fond d'une taveme, 
 Qui sent toujours la soif naitre de la liqueur 
 Et se multiplier comme I'hydre de X-eme. 
 
 " — Mais las buveurs heureux connaissent leur vainqueur, 
 Et la Haine est vouee a ce sort lamentable 
 De ne ;pouvoir jamais s'endormir soils la table .'" 
 
 At one time we have a poem on " her hair," in the course 
 of which we learn (what indeed we should have guessed) 
 that, as other persons delight in love's " music," he (Baude- 
 laire) revels in its " perfume." He is still insatiable, and yet 
 uncomplimentary, actually comparing his attack on her " cold 
 beauty " to the attack of a swarm of worms on a corpse 
 (" comme apres un cadavre un chceur de vermisseaux ! ") 
 and yet crying 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 between this marble 
 
 person and his cat : — 
 
 " Viens, mon beau chat, sur men ccEur amoureux ; 
 Retiens griflfes de ta patte, 
 Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux 
 Meles de metal et d'agate." (Page 135.) 
 
 But it would be tedious indeed to trace all the morbid 
 sensations of such a lover as this ; at Paris or in the East, he 
 is 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 and lissom beauty of Malabar, 
 he finds himself still wretched and disgusted with human 
 nature. It is soon quite obvious that he is possessed by the 
 demon of Hasheesh. Thoughts horrible and foul surge 
 through his brain as the filth drives through a sewer. At 
 least half of all the " Fleurs de Mai " read as if they had 
 
26 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OP POETRY. 
 
 been written by a man in one of the worst stages of delirium 
 tremens. No one certainly can accuse him of making 
 crime look beautiful. To him, in his own words, 
 
 " La Debauche et la Mort sont deux aimables filles ! " 
 
 His crime is, that he sees only these two shapes on all the 
 solid earth, and avers that there is nothing left for men but 
 to sin and die. His dreams and thoughts are wretched. 
 The sun rises, and immediately he pictures it shining, not 
 into happy homes, "but into dens of crime and ghastly 
 hospitals. Night comes, but sleep comes not ; and he only 
 cries : — 
 
 " Void le soir charmant, ami du criminel; 
 II vient comme un complice, k pas de loup ; le ciel 
 Se ferme lentement comme une grande alc6ve, 
 Kt I'homme impatient se change en bete fauve." 
 
 The gas-jets of prostitution are lit, and flare on the doomed 
 faces of pale women and jaded men. Some few men sit at 
 happy hearths, but the majority " have never lived." On 
 such a night, doubtless, he composed such poems as this, 
 which I 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 et de I'incertain, 
 Je ne geindrai pas comme Ovide 
 Chassg du paradis latin. 
 
 " Cieux d^chires comme des graves 
 En vous se mire mon orgueil ! 
 VoB vastes nuages en deuil 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 27 
 
 Sont les corbiUards de mes reves, 
 , Et vos lueurs sont le reflet 
 
 De I'Enfer oft mon coeur se plait ! " 
 
 Truly enough did Edward Thierry say, in writing of this 
 poetry, that " it is sorrow which absolves and justifies it. 
 The poet does not delight in the spectacle of evil." Still, 
 Baudelaire broods over evil things with a tremendous per- 
 sistency, a morbid satisfaction, which shows a mind radically 
 diseased and a nature utterly heartless. In and out of 
 season, he invoked the spirit of Horror. Jaded with self- 
 indulgence, he had a mad 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 
 death. As a necessary pendant to his pictures of human 
 ugliness, he delighted to add a few glimpses of divine 
 malignity. Looking to the section of his book called 
 " Rdvolte,'' we find where Mr. Swinburne got his first 
 lessons in blasphemy. In " The Denial of St. Peter " we 
 have the following picture of the Deity, quite in the fleshly 
 manner : — 
 
 " Comma un tyran gorg6 de viande et de vins, 
 II s'endort au doux bruit de nos ai&eux blasphSmes ! " 
 
 And after passing in review the horrible sufferings of Christ, 
 he concludes bitterly : — 
 
 " Saint Pierre a reme Jesus. . . . II a Hen fait V 
 
 In another poem he draws a series of contrasts between 
 
 the race of Cain and the race of Abel, — in other words, 
 
 between the domestic type of humanity and the outcast type, ■ 
 
 — concluding in these memorable words : — 
 
 " Race de Cain, au ciel monte 
 Et sur la terre jette Dieu ! " 
 
28 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 — words which bear a sort of resemblance, in their foolish 
 and reckless no-meaning, to that passage in Mr. Swinburne's 
 writings wherein the Devil is described as "playing dice with 
 God" for the soul of Faustine. Next comes a piece en- 
 titled " Les Litanies de Satan," a prayer to the evil one : — 
 
 '• P6re adoptif de ceux qu'en sa noire eolere 
 Du paradis terrestre a chasses Dieu le P6re ! " 
 
 and in conclusion a few lines called " Prayer :" — 
 
 " Gloire et louange % toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs 
 Du Ciel, oft tu regnas, et dans les profondeurs 
 De I'Enfer, oft, vaincu, tu rSves en silence ! 
 Fais que mon Sme un jour, sous I'Ajrbre de Science, 
 PrSs de toi se repose, S I'heure ou sur ton front 
 Comme un Temple nouveau ses rameaux s'epandront." 
 
 It will hardly be contended that Mr. Swinburne has sur- 
 passed this, although his effusions are wilder and more 
 distorted; and we may well rejoice, meanwhile, that our 
 contemporary blasphemy, as well as so much of our 
 contemporary bestiality, is no home-product, but an im- 
 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 and 
 ennui, and touches none that he does not darken. There 
 is here, as in the " Fleurs," an occasional delicacy of touch, 
 a frequent dehcacy of perfume, which deepens the prevalent 
 horror and despair of the surrounding chapters. In one 
 piece he compares the public to a dog, which flies in horror 
 when offered some delicate scent, but greedily devours 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 29 
 
 human ordure ; and although he wishes us to infer that his 
 own wares are too fine for so coarse a monster, the reader 
 cannot help feeling that there is something in the nature of 
 excrement in his very choice of a foul metaphor to express 
 his meaning. Indeed, throughout all his writings there is a 
 parade of the olfactory faculty, which awakens the suspicion 
 that Baudelaire, like FabuUus, had one day, after smelling 
 some choice unguent, prayed God to "make him all nose" — ■ 
 
 "Quod tu cum olfacies, Deos rogabis, 
 Totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasiun ! 
 
 Cat., lib. xiii. 
 
 — and that the prayer had been actually granted. There is 
 plenty of sensitiveness to smell, to touch, even to colour ; there 
 is even a kind of perception, neither very acute nor very 
 exquisite, of the beauties of external form; but of that 
 higher sensibility which perceives the subtle nuances of 
 spiritual life and trembles to the beating of a tender 
 human heart, there is not one solitary sign. This poetry 
 is like absinthe, comparatively harmless perhaps if sipped 
 in small quantities well diluted, but fatal if taken (as 
 by Mr. Swinburne) in all its native strength and abomina- 
 tion. 
 
 Here I 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 out of tune with the world and out of 
 harmony with the life of men. They are, from another 
 point of view, the reductio ad horribikm of that intellectual 
 sensualism which Goethe (in one of a giant's weak moments) 
 
30 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 founded, and which Heine repeated with a shriller and more 
 mocking tone in his " Buch der Lieder." But Baudelaire, 
 not content with playing with wickedness occasionally, as 
 Goethe did, not strong enough to gibe and jeer at it, as 
 Heine did, and too morally weak ever to soar beyond it 
 into the clear region inhabited by both these masters in, 
 their best moments, formed the monstrous disjecta membra 
 of vice into the poetic Vampire we have been examining. 
 There are flashes of beauty in the creature's eyes at times, 
 but they scarcely charm us, and we willingly pass away from 
 the moral dungeon in which it lurks. 
 
 A few years ago Baudelaire died. Mr. Swinburne imme- 
 diately commemorated his death in some verses quite 
 worthy of the deceased himself Since that period, I am 
 happy to say, Mr. Swinburne seems to have partly shaken 
 off the horrible influence of the " Fleurs de Mai." Although, 
 in his pohtical effusions, the same sterile woman of the 
 amours is seen sitting (as 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 is repeated tenfold in a series 
 of aimless attacks on 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 
 writer's 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 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 31 
 
 nobler inspiration than the smile of harlotry and the shriek 
 of atheism — and there will be hope for him. Thus far, he 
 has given us nothing but borrowed rubbish, but even in his 
 manner of giving there has been something of genius. His 
 own voice may be worth hearing, when he chooses, once 
 and for ever, to abandon the 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 I have said little of 
 Mr. Morris, because he has done some noble work quite 
 outside his ordinary performances as a tale-telling poet. I 
 have chosen rather to confine my attention to the gentleman 
 who is formally recognised as the head of the school, wh» 
 avows his poems to be perfectly "mature," and who has 
 taken many years, of reflection before formally appealing tO' 
 public judgment. Far too self-possessed to indulge in the 
 riotous folhes of the author of " Chastelard," and infinitely 
 too self-conscious to. busy himself with the dainty tale-telling 
 of the author of the " Earthly Paradise," the writer whose 
 works I am about to examine has carefully elaborated a 
 series of lyrical and semi-dramatic poems in the mediseval 
 manner, with certain quaUties superadded which I shall 
 have to criticize severely, and with the faults and in- 
 sincerities so cunningly disguised that they seldom lurk 
 on the surface in such a way as to awaken immediate 
 suspicion. 
 
 Before turning to the writer in question, let me add a few 
 words on the Fleshly School in general. What a great 
 master has touched at one point of his poetic genius, has 
 been expanded by the erotic school into a whole system of 
 poetry in itself. 
 
32 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 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 charac- 
 teristic of the writers at present under consideration ; and if 
 in " Vivien " he has indicated for them the bounds of sen- 
 sualism in art, he has in " Maud," in the dramatic person of 
 the hero, afforded distinct precedent for the hysteric tone 
 and overloaded style which is now so familiar to readers of 
 Mr. Swinburne. The fleshliness of " Vivien " may indeed 
 be described as the distinct quality held in common by all 
 the members of the last sub-Tennysonian school,* and it is 
 a quality which becomes unwholesome when there is no 
 moral or intellectual quality to temper and control it. Fully 
 conscious of this themselves, the fleshly gentlemen have 
 bound themselves by solemn league and covenant to extol 
 fleshliness as the distinct and supreme end of poetic and 
 pictorial art ; to 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 ; and that the 
 poet, properly to develop his poetic faculty, must be an 
 intellectual hermaphrodite, to whom the very facts of day 
 and night are lost in a whirl of aesthetic terminology. After 
 Mr. Tennyson has probed the depths of modern speculation 
 in a series of commanding moods, all right and interesting 
 in him as the reigning personage, the " walking gentlemen," 
 
 • I say sub-Tennysonian because these gentlemen, with all their 
 affinities to 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 ^oorfinthe Pre-Raphaelite style comes 
 from the laureate ; ^vhat is bad in it comes from Italy and France. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 33 
 
 knowing that something of the sort is expected from all 
 leading performers, bare their bosoms and aver that they are 
 creedless; the only possible question here being, if any 
 disinterested person cares whether they are creedless 
 or not — their self-revelation on that score being so per- 
 fectly uncalled for. It is time, nevertheless, to ascertain 
 whether any of these gentlemen has actually in himself 
 the making of a leading performer. It would be scarcely 
 worth while to inquire into their pretensions on merely 
 literary grounds, because sooner or later all literature finds 
 its own level, whatever criticism may say or do in the 
 matter; but it 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 broadcast wherever they are read and 
 understood. Their complaint too is catching, and carries 
 off many young persons. What the complaint is, and how 
 it works, may now be seen on a very slight examination of 
 the works of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 
 
 IV. 
 Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 
 
 " Who put bayes into blind Cupid's fist, 
 That he should crown what laureates him list ?" 
 
 « Bishop Hall. 
 
 Mr- Rossetti has been known for many years as a painter 
 of exceptional powers, who, for reasons satisfactory to him- 
 self, has shrunk from publicly exhibiting his pictures, and 
 
 D 
 
3+ THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OE POETRY. 
 
 from allowing anything like a popular estimate to be formed 
 of their qualities. He belongs, or is said to belong, to the 
 so-called Pre-Raphaelite school, a school which is generally 
 considered to exhibit much genius for colour, and great 
 indifference to perspective. It would be 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 is an artist who conceives 
 unpleasantly, and draws ill. Like Mr. Simeon Solomon, 
 however, with whom he seems to have many points in com- 
 mon, he is distinctively a colourist, and of his capabilities 
 in colour I cannot speak, though I should guess that they are 
 good ; for if there is any quality by which his poems are spe- 
 cially marked, it is a great sensitiveness to hues and tints as 
 conveyed in poetic epithet. On the other hand, those qualities 
 which impress the casual spectator of the photographs from 
 his pictures are to be found abundantly among his verses. 
 There is the same thinness and transparence of design, the 
 same combination of the simple and the grotesque, the same 
 morbid deviation from healthy forms of life, the same sense 
 of weary, wasting, yet exquisite sensuality ; nothing virile, 
 nothing tender, nothing completely sane ; a superfluity of 
 extreme sensibility, of delight in affected forms, hues, and 
 tints, and a deep-seated indifference to all agitating forces 
 and agencies, all tumultuous griefs and sorrows, all the 
 thunderous stress of life, and all the straining storm of 
 speculation. Mr. Morris is often pure, fresh, and whole- 
 some as his o\vn great model ; Mr. Swinburne startles us 
 more than once by some fine flash of insight ; but the mind 
 of Mr. Rossetti is like a glassy mere, broken only by the 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 35 
 
 dive of some water-bird or the motion of floating insects, and 
 brooded over by an atmosphere of insufferable closeness, 
 with a light blue sky above it, sultry depths mirrored within 
 it, and a surface so thickly sown with water-Ulies that it 
 retains its glassy smoothness even in the strongest wind. 
 Judged relatively to his poetic associates, Mr. Rossetti must 
 be pronounced inferior to either. He cannot tell a pleasant 
 story like Mr. Morris, nor forge alliterative thunderbolts 
 like Mr, Swinburne. It must be conceded, nevertheless, 
 that he is neither so glibly imitative as the one, nor so 
 transcendently superficial as the other. ^- 
 
 Although he has been known for many years as a poet as 
 well as a painter — as a painter and poet idolized by his own 
 family and personal associates — and although he has often 
 appeared in print as a contributor to magazines, Mr. Rossetti 
 did not formally appeal to the public until rather more than 
 a year ago, when he pubhshed a copious volume of poems, 
 with the announcement that the book, although it contained 
 pieces composed at intervals during a period of many years, 
 " included nothing which the author believed to be in'- 
 mature.'' This work was inscribed to his brother, Ml'. 
 William Rossetti, who, having written much both in poetry 
 and criticism, will perhaps be known to bibliographers as 
 the editor of the worst edition of Shelley which has ever seen 
 the light. No sooner had the work appeared than the 
 chorus of eulogy began. "The book is satisfactory from 
 end to end," wrote Mr. Morris in the Academy; " I think 
 these lyrics, with all their other merits, the most complete of 
 their time ; nor do I know what lyrics of any time are to be 
 called great, if we are to deny the title to these," On the 
 
36 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 same subject Mr. Swinburne went into a hysteria of admira- 
 tion : " golden affluence," "jewel-coloured words," "chastity 
 of form," "harmonious nakedness," "consummate fleshly 
 sculpture ; '' and so on in Mr. Swinburne's well-known manner 
 when reviewing his friends. Other critics, with a singular 
 similarity of phrase, followed suit. Strange to say, more- 
 over, no one accused Mr. Rossetti of naughtiness. What 
 had been heinous in Mr. Swinburne was majestic exquisite- 
 ness in Mr. Rossetti. Yet I question if there is anything 
 in the unfortunate " Poems and Ballads " more questionable 
 on the score of thorough nastiness than many pieces in Mr. 
 Rossetti's collection. Mr. Swinburne was wilder, more out- 
 rageous, more blasphemous, and his subjects were more 
 atrocious in themselves ; yet the hysterical tone slew the 
 animalism, the furiousness of epithet lowered the sensation ; 
 and the first feeling of disgust at such themes as " Laus 
 Veneris " and " Anactoria " faded away into comic amaze- 
 ment. It was only a little mad boy letting off squibs ; not 
 a great strong man, who might be really dangerous to 
 society. "I W// be naughty ! " screamed the little boy; 
 but, after all, what did it matter? 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, first proclaiming in a loud voice 
 his literary maturity, and consequent responsibihty, shame- 
 lessly prints and publishes such a piece of writing as this 
 sonnet on " Nuptial Sleep : " — 
 
 "At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart : 
 And as the last slow sudden drops are shed 
 From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled. 
 So singly flagged the pulses of each heart. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start 
 Of married fiowers to either side Outspread 
 From the knit stem ; yet still their mouths, burnt red. 
 
 Fawned on each other where they lay apart. 
 
 ' 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, is " the golden affluence of words, the firm out- 
 line, the justice and chastity of form." /Here is a full-grown 
 man, presumably intelligent and cultivated, putting on 
 record, for other full-grown men to read, the most secret 
 mysteries of sexual connection, and that with so sickening a 
 desire to reproduce the sensual mood, so careful a choice of 
 epithet to convey mere animal sensations, that we merely 
 shudder at the shameless nakedness. I am no purist in 
 such matters. I hold the sensual part of our nature to 
 be as holy as the spiritual or intellectual part, and I 
 believe that such things must find their equivalent in art ; 
 but it is neither poetic, nor manly, nor even human, to 
 obtrude such things as the themes of whole poems. It 
 is simply nasty. Nasty as it is, we are very mistaken if 
 many readers do not think it nice. What says the author 
 of "A 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 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 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 " Love 
 dying by the breath of Lust." There is not much 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 — like the lovely 
 devils that danced round St. Anthony. Mr. Rossetti 
 owes his so-called success with our " aunts " and " grand- 
 mothers " to the same causes. In poems like " Nuptial 
 Sleep," the man who is too sensitive to exhibit his pictures, 
 and so modest that it takes him years to make up his mind 
 to publish his poems, parades his private sensations before 
 a coaTse public, and is gratified by their idiotic applause. 
 
 It must not be supposed that all Mr. Rossetti's poems are 
 made up of trash like this. They contain some fine pictures 
 of nature, occasional passages of real meaning, much clever 
 phraseology, lines of peculiar sweetness, and epithets chosen 
 with true literary cunning. But the fleshly feeling is every- 
 where. Sometimes, as in " The Stream's Secret," it adds 
 greatly to our emotion of pleasure at perusing a finely 
 wrought poem ; at other times, as in the " Last Confession," 
 it is somewhat held in check by the exigencies of a powerful 
 situation and the strength of a dramatic speaker ; but it is 
 generally in the foreground, fiu'shing the whole poem with 
 unhealthy rose-colour, stifling the senses with overpowering 
 sickliness, as of too much civet. Mr. Rossetti is never 
 dramatic, never impersonal — always attitudinising, postur- 
 ing, and describing his own exquisite emotions. He is the 
 " Blessed Damozel," leaning over the " gold bar of heaven," 
 and seeing 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 39 
 
 " Time like a pulse shake fierce 
 Thro' all the worlds ; " 
 
 he is "heaven-horn Helen, Sparta's queen," whose "each 
 twin breast is an apple sweet ; " he is Lilith, the first wife of 
 Adam ; he is the rosy Virgin of the poem called " Ave," 
 and the Queen in the " Staff and Scrip ; " he is " Sister 
 Helen " melting her waxen man ; he is all these, just as 
 surely as he is Mr. Rossetti soliloquising over Jenny in her 
 London lodging, or the very nuptial person writing erotic 
 sonnets to his wife. In petticoats or pantaloons, in modern 
 times or in the middle ages, he is just Mr. Rossetti, a fleshly 
 person, with nothing particular to tell us or teach us, with ex- 
 treme self-control, a strong sense of colour, and a most affected 
 choice of Latin diction. Amid all his " affluence of jewel- 
 coloured words," he has not given us one rounded and note- 
 worthy piece of art, though his verses are all art ; not one poem 
 which is memorable for its own sake, and quite separable 
 from the displeasing identity of the composer. The nearest 
 approach to a perfect whole is the " Blessed Damozel," a 
 peculiar poem, placed first in the book, perhaps by acci- 
 dent, perhaps because it is a key to the poems which follow. 
 This poem appeared in a 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 all such publications. In spite 
 of its affected title, and of numberless affectations through- 
 out the text, the " Blessed Damozel " has merits of its 
 own, and a few lines of real genius. I have heard it 
 described as the record of actual grief and love, or, in 
 simple words, the apotheosis of one actually lost by the 
 writer ; but, without having any private knowledge of the 
 
40 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 circumstance of its composition, I feel that such an 
 account of the poem is inadmissible. It does not contain 
 one single note of sorrow. It is a " composition,'' and a 
 clever one. Read the opening stanzas :— 
 
 "The blessed damozel leaned out 
 From the gold bar of Heaven ; 
 Her eyes were deeper than the depth 
 
 Of water stilled at even ; 
 She had three lilies in her hand, 
 And the stars in her hair were seven. 
 
 " Her 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 yellow like ripe corn." 
 
 This is a careful sketch for a picture, *hich, worked into 
 actual colour by a master, might have been worth seeing. 
 The steadiness of hand lessens as the poem proceeds, and 
 although there are several passages of considerable power, 
 — such as that where, far down the void, 
 
 " this earth 
 Spins like a fretful midge," 
 
 or that other, describing how 
 
 " the curled moon 
 Was like a little feather 
 Fluttering far down the gulf," — 
 
 the general effect is that of a queer old painting on a missal, 
 very affected and very odd. What moved the British 
 criticaster to ecstasy in this poem seems to me very sad 
 nonsense indeed, or, if not sad nonsense, very meretricious 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 41 
 
 affectation. Thus, I have seen the following verses quoted 
 with enthusiasm, as italicised — 
 
 " And still she bowed herself and stooped 
 Out of the circling charm ; 
 Until her bosom must have made 
 
 The bar she leaned on warm. 
 And the lilies lay as if asleep 
 Along her bended arm. 
 
 ' ' From the fixed place of Heaven she saw 
 Tim.e like a pulse shahe fierce 
 Thro' all the -worlds. Her gaze still strove 
 
 Within the gulf to pierce 
 Its path ; and now she spoke as when 
 ■The stars sang in their spheres." 
 
 It seems to me that all these lines are very bad, with the 
 exception of the two admirable lines ending the first verse, 
 and that the italicised portions are quite without merit, and 
 almost without meaning. On the whole, one feels dis- 
 heartened and amazed at the poet who, in the nine- 
 teenth century, talks about " damozels,'' " citherns," and 
 " citoles,'' and addresses the mother of Christ as the " Lady 
 Mary," — 
 
 " With her five handmaidens, whose names 
 Are five sweet symphonies, 
 Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, 
 Margaret, and Rosalys." 
 
 A suspicion is awakened that the writer is laughing at us. 
 We hover uncertainly between picturesqueness and namby- 
 pamby, and the effect, as Artemus Ward would express it, 
 is "weakening to the intellect." The thing would have 
 been almost too much in the shape of a picture, though the 
 workmanship might have made amends. The truth is, that 
 
42 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 literature, and more particularly poetry, is in a very bad 
 way when one art gets hold of another, and imposes upon 
 it its conditions and limitations. In the first few verses of 
 the " Damozel " we have the subject, or part of the subject, 
 of a picture, and the inventor should either have painted it 
 or left it alone altogether ; and, had he done the latter, the 
 world would have lost nothing. Poetry is something more 
 than painting ; and an idea will not become a poem because 
 it is too 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. The writer sug- 
 gests that " it may probably be the expression of genuine 
 moods of mind 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 Thomas Sheri- 
 dan, Mr. Rossetti is affected, naturally affected, but it must 
 have taken him a great deal of trouble to become what we 
 now see him — such an excess of affectation is not in nature.* 
 There is very little writing in the volume spontaneous in 
 the sense that some of Swinburne's verses are spontaneous ; 
 the poems all look as if they had taken a great deal of 
 trouble. The grotesque medisevalism of " Stratton Water " 
 and " Sister Helen," the mediaeval classicism of " Troy 
 Town," the false and shallow mysticism of " Eden Bower," 
 are one and all essentially imitative, and must have caused 
 
 * "Why, sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull ; but it must have taken 
 him a. great deal of trouble to hecoine what we now see him — such an 
 excess of stupidity Ls not in nature." — Soswell's Life. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 43 
 
 the writer much pains. It is time, indeed, to point out 
 that Mr. RoBsetti is a poet possessing great powers o^ 
 assimilation and some faculty for concealing the nutriment 
 on which he feeds. Setting aside the "Vita'Nuova" and 
 the early Italian poems, which are familiar to many readers 
 by his own excellent translations, Mr. Rossetti may be 
 described as a writer who has yielded, to an unusual extent, 
 to the complex influences of the literature surrounding him 
 at the present moment. He has the painter's imitative 
 power developed in proportion to his lack of the poet's 
 conceiving imagination. He reproduces to a nicety the 
 manner of an old ballad, a trick in which Mr. Swinburne is 
 also an adept. Cultivated readers, moreover, will recognise 
 in every one of these poems the tone of Mr. Tennyson 
 broken up by the style of Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and 
 disguised here and there by the eccentricities of the Pre- 
 Raphaelites. The " Burden of Nineveh " is a philosophical 
 edition of " Recollections of the Arabian Nights ; " "A Last 
 Confession " and " Dante at Verona " are, in the minutest 
 trick and form of thought, suggestive of Mr. Browning ; and 
 that the sonnets have been largely moulded and inspired 
 by Mrs. Browning, especially in points of phraseology, can 
 be ascertained by any critic who will compare them with 
 the " Sonnets from the Portuguese." Much remains, never- 
 theless, that is Mr. Rossetti's own. I at once recognise 
 as his own property such passages as this : — 
 
 "I looked up 
 And saw where 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 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 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 kisses at my mouth.' 
 
 Or this :- 
 
 Or this :— 
 
 ' Have seen your lifted silken skirt 
 Advertise dainties through the dirt ! " 
 
 " What more prize than love to impel thee, 
 Grip and lip my limbs as I tell thee ! " * 
 
 Passages hke these are the common stock of the walk- 
 ing gentlemen of the Fleshly School. I cannot forbear ex- 
 pressing my wonder, by the way, at the kind of women 
 whom it seems the unhappy lot of these gentlemen to 
 encounter. I have lived nearly as long in the world as they 
 have, but never yet came 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 
 counteract their otherwise most offensive mode of conduct- 
 ing themselves. It appears, however, on examination, that 
 their poet-lovers conduct themselves in a similar manner. 
 They, too, bite, scratch, scream, bubble, munch, sweat, 
 
 * Mr. Rossetti accuses me of garbling these four extracts, and alleges 
 that they have a totally different effect when read with their context. 
 In reply to this, let me observe that the four poems which supply these 
 four extracts are full of coarseness from the first line to the last, and 
 that no extract can fitly convey their unwholesomeness and indecency. 
 See apres, p. 64. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 45 
 
 writhe, twist, wriggle, foam, and slaver, in a style frightful 
 to hear of. At times, in reading such books as this, one 
 cannot help wishing that things had remained for ever in 
 the asexual state described in Mr. Darwin's great chapter 
 on Palingenesis. We get very, weary of this protracted 
 hankering after a person of the other sex ; it seems meat, 
 drink, thought, sinew, religion, for the Fleshly School^^There 
 is no limit to the fleshliness, and Mr. Rossetti finds in it 
 its own religious justification much in the same way as 
 Holy Willie :— 
 
 " 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 it." 
 
 Whether he is writing of the holy Damozel, or of the Virgin 
 herself, or of Lilith, or of Helen, or of Dante, or of Jenny 
 the street-walker, he is fleshly all over, from the roots of his 
 hair to the tip of his toes ; never a true lover merging 
 his identity into that of the beloved one ; never spiritual, 
 never tender ; always self-conscious and aesthetic. " No- 
 thing in human life," says a modern writer, " is so utterly 
 remorseless — not love, not hate, not ambition, not vanity — 
 as the artistic or aesthetic instinct morbidly developed to 
 the suppression of conscience and feeling;" and at no time 
 do we feel more fully impressed with this truth than after 
 the perusal of " Jenny," in some respects the cleverest poem 
 in the volume, and in all respects the 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 my 
 own quasi-lyrical poems, which it copies in the style of title. 
 
46 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 and particularly by "Artist and Model;"* but certamly 
 Mr. Rossetti cannot be accused, as I have been accused, of 
 maudlin sentiment and affected tenderness. The " first two 
 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 has been 
 spending the evening in dancing at a casino — over his 
 partner, whom he has accompanied home to the usual style 
 of lodgings occupied by such ladies, and who has fallen 
 asleep with her head upon his knee, while he wonders, in a 
 wretched pun — 
 
 " Whose person or whose purse may be 
 The lodestar of your reverie ?" 
 
 The soliloquy is long, and in some parts beautiful, despite 
 a very constant suspicion that we are listening to an emas- 
 culated Mr. Browning, whose whole tone and gesture, so to 
 speak, is occasionally introduced with startling fidelity ; and 
 there are here and there glimpses of actual thought and 
 insight, over and above the picturesque touches which be- 
 long to the writer 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 poem is not the subject, which 
 
 * Commenting on this remark, Mr. Rossetti avers that he has 
 "never read" my pcems, and that, moreover, "Jenny" was written 
 thirteen years ago. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 4? 
 
 any writer may be fairly left to 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 heartless. There is not a drop of piteousness in Mr. 
 Rossetti. He is just to the outcast, even generous ; severe 
 to the seducer ; sad even at the spectacle of lust in dimity 
 and fine ribbons. Notwithstanding all this, and a certain 
 delicacy and refinement of treatment unusual with this poet, 
 the poem is repelling, and one likes Mr. Rossetti least 
 after its perusal. The " Blessed Damozel " is puzzling, 
 the " Song of the Bower " is amusing, the love-sonnet is 
 depressing and sickening, but "Jenny," though distinguished 
 by less special viciousness of thought and style than any of 
 these, fairly makes the reader lose patience. Its fleshliness 
 is apparent at a glance ; one perceives that the scene was 
 fascinating less through its human tenderness than because 
 it, like all the others, possessed an inherent quality of Ani- 
 malism. " The whole workj," (" Jenny,") writes Mr. Swin- 
 burne, " is worthy to fill its place for ever as one of the most 
 perfect poems of an age or generation. There is just the 
 same life-blood and breadth of poetic interest in this episode 
 of a London street and lodging as In the song of ' Troy 
 Town ' and the song of 'Eden Bower;' just as much, and 
 no jot more," — to which last statement I cordially assent ; 
 for there is bad blood in all, and breadth of poetic interest 
 in none. "Vengeance of Jenny's case," indeed ! — when 
 such a poet as this comes fawning over her, with tender 
 compassion in one eye and aesthetic enjoyment in the 
 other ! 
 
 It is time that I permitted Mr. Rossetti to speak for 
 
48 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 himself, which I will do by quoting a fairly representative 
 poem entire : — 
 
 " LOVE-LILY. 
 
 "Between the hands, between the brows, 
 
 Between the lips of Love-Lily, 
 A 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 touch my colour flies, 
 
 And whom my life grows faint to hear. 
 
 " Within the voice, within the heart, 
 
 Within the mind of Love-Lily, 
 A spirit is bom who lifts apart 
 
 His tremulous wings and looks at me ; 
 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 her. 
 
 " Brows, hands, and lips, heart, mind, and voice. 
 
 Kisses and words of Love-Lily, — 
 Oh ! bid me with your joy rejoice 
 
 Till riotous longing rest in me I 
 Ah ! let not hope be still distraught, 
 
 But find in her its gracicius goal, 
 Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought. 
 
 Nor Love her body from her soul." 
 
 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 they may even appear beautiful. 
 Without pausing to criticize a thing so trifling — as well 
 might we dissect a cobweb or anatomize a medusa — let 
 me ask the reader's attention to a peculiarity to which all 
 the students of the Fleshly School must sooner or later give 
 their attention — I mean the habit of accenting the last syl- 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 49 
 
 lable in words which in ordinary speech are accented on 
 
 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. Still 
 better as an illustration are the lines : — 
 
 " Saturday night is market night 
 Everywhere, be it dry or wet, 
 And market night in the Haymar-*«i .'" 
 
 which the reader may advantageously compare with Mr. 
 
 Morris's 
 
 " Then said the king, 
 Thanked be thou ; 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 
 in the "empty" season to make up for their dulness by 
 fearfully original " new readings," distinguish their attempt at 
 leading business by affecting the construction of their grand- 
 fathers and great-grandfathers, and the accentuation of the 
 poets of the court of James I. It is in all respects a sign of 
 remarkable genius, from this point of view, to rhyme 
 " was " with " grass," " death " with " lieth," " gain " with 
 " fountain," " love " with " of," " once " with " suns," and 
 so on ad nauseam. I am far from disputing the value of 
 
 E 
 
so THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 bad rhymes used occasionally to break up the monotony of 
 verse, but the case is hard when such blunders become the 
 rule and not the exception, when writers deliberately lay 
 themselves out to be as archaic and affected as possible. 
 Poetry is perfect human speech, and these archaisms are 
 the mere fiddlededeeing of empty heads and hollow hearts. 
 Bad as they are, they are the true indication of falser tricks 
 and affectations which lie far deeper. They are trifles light 
 as air, showing how the wind blows. The soul's speech 
 and the heart's speech are clear, simple, natural, and beau- 
 tiful, and reject the meretricious tricks to which we have 
 drawn 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 
 great poets are always to be known, because their manner is 
 immediately reproduced by small poets, and that a poet 
 who finds few imitators is probably of inferior rank— by 
 which they mean to infer that they themselves are very 
 great poets indeed. It is quite true that they are imitated. 
 On 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 really most droll and puzzling in the matter 
 is, that these imitators seem to have no difficulty whatever 
 in writing nearly, if not quite, as- well as their masters. It 
 is not bad imitation they offer us, but poems which read 
 just like the originals; the fact being that it is easy to 
 reproduce sound when it has no strict connection with 
 sense, and simple enough to cull phraseology not hope- 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 51 
 
 lessly interwoven with thought and spirit. The fact that 
 these gentlemen are so easily imitated is the most damning 
 proof of their inferiority. What merits they have lie with 
 their faults on the surface, and can be caught by any young 
 gentleman as easily as the measles, only they are rather 
 more difficult to get rid of. All young gentlemen have 
 animal faculties, though few have brains; and if animal 
 faculties without brains will make poems, nothing is easier 
 in the world. A great and good poet, however, is great and 
 good irrespective of manner, and often in spite of manner ; 
 he is great because he brings great ideas and new light, 
 because his thought is a revelation ; and, although it is true 
 that a great manner generally accompanies great matter, the 
 manner of great matter is almost inimitable. The great 
 poet is not Cowley, imitated and idolized and reproduced 
 by every scribbler of his time ; nor Pope, whose trick of 
 style was so easily copied that to this day we cannot trace 
 his own hand with any certainty in the Iliad ; nor Donne, 
 nor Sylvester, nor the Delia Cruscans. Shakspere's blank 
 verse is the most difficult and Jonson's the most easy to 
 imitate of all the Elizabethan stock j and Shakspere's verse 
 is the best verse, because it combines the great qualities of 
 all contemporary verse, with no individual affectations : and 
 so perfectly does this verse, with all its splendour, intersect 
 with the style of contemporaries at their best, that we would 
 undertake to select passage after passage which would puzzle 
 a good judge to tell which of the Elizabethans was the 
 author — Marlowe, Beaumont, Dekker, Marston, Webster, or 
 Shakspere himself. The great poet is Dante, full of the 
 thunder of a great Idea ; and Milton, unapproachable in 
 the serene white light of thought and sumptuous wealth of 
 
52 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 style ; and Shakspere, all poets by turns, and all men in 
 succession ; and Goethe, always innovating, and ever indif- 
 ferent to innovation for its own sake; and Wordsworth, 
 clear as crystal and deep as the sea ; and Tennyson, with 
 his vivid range, far-piercing sight, and perfect speech ; and 
 Browning, great, not by virtue of his eccentricities, but 
 because of his close intellectual grasp. Tell " Paradise 
 Lost," the " Divine Comedy," in naked prose ; do the same 
 by Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear ; read Mr. Hayward's trans- 
 lation of " Faust ;" take up the " Excursion," a great poem, 
 though its speech is nearly prose already ; turn the " Guine- 
 vere" into a mere story; reproduce Pompilia's last dying 
 speech without a line of rhythm. Reduced to bald English, 
 all these poems, and all great poems, lose much ; but how 
 much do they not retain ? They are poems to the very roots 
 and depths of being, poems bom in and delivered from 
 the soul, and treat them as cruelly as you may, poems they 
 will remain. So it is with all good and thorough creations, 
 however low in their rank ; so it is with the " Ballad on a 
 Wedding " and " Clever Tom 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 Hood's " Last Man." A poem is a poem, 
 first as to the soul, next as to the form. The fleshly persons 
 who wish to create form for its own sake are merely pro- 
 nouncing their own doom. But such form ! If the Pre- 
 Raphaelite fervour gains ground, we shall soon have popular 
 songs like this : — 
 
 "When winds do roar, and rains do pour, 
 Hard is the life of the sailor ; 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 53 
 
 He scarcely as he reels can tell 
 The side-lights from the binnac^s ; 
 He looketh on the wild water," Sec. ; 
 
 and so on, till the English speech seems the speech of 
 
 raving madmen. Of a piece with other affectations is the 
 
 device of a burden, of which the fleshly persons are very 
 
 fond for its own sake, quite apart from its relevancy. Thus 
 
 Mr. Rossetti sings : — 
 
 " Why did you melt your waxen man, , , 
 
 Sister Helen .' 
 To-day 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 is repeated, with little or no alteration, through 
 
 thirty-four verses. About as 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 critics of the day, and 
 are copied by young gentlemen with animal faculties mor- 
 bidly developed by too much tobacco and too little exercise. 
 Such indulgence, however, would ruin the strongest poetical 
 constitution ; and it unfortunately happens that neither 
 masters nor pupils were naturally very healthy. In such a 
 poein as " Eden Bower " there is not one scrap of imagina- 
 tion, properly so called. It is 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 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 into a poem the absurd tradition about Lilith ; Goethe was 
 content to glance at it merely, with a grim smile, in the 
 great scene in the Brocken. I 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 work with this affected rubbish about " Eden 
 Bower " and " Sister Helen," although his influence in their 
 composition is unmistakable. Still more unmistakable is 
 the influence of that unwholesome poet, Beddoes, who, witli 
 all his great powers (unmistakably superior to those of any 
 of the present Fleshly School), treated his subjects in a 
 thoroughly insincere manner, and is now justly forgotten. 
 
 The great strong current of English poetry rolls on, ever 
 mirroring in its bosom new prospects of fair and wholesome 
 thought. Morbid deviations are endless and inevitable; 
 there must be marsh and stagnant mere as well as mountain 
 and wood. Glancing backward into the shady places of 
 the obscure, we have seen the once prosperous nonsense- 
 writers each now consigned to his own little limbo — Skelton 
 and Gower still playing fantastic tricks with the mother- 
 tongue ; Gascoigne outlasting the applause of all, and living 
 to see his own works buried before him ;* Sylvester doomed 
 to oblivion by his own fame as a translator; Carew the idol 
 of courts, and Donne the beloved of schoolmen, both 
 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. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 55 
 
 the wonder of collegians, and fading out through sheer 
 poetic impotence; Cowley shaking all England with his 
 pindarics, and perishing with them ; Waller, the famous, 
 saved from oblivion by the natural note of one single song * 
 — and so on, through league after league of a flat and 
 desolate country which once was prosperous, till we come 
 again to these fantastic figures of the Fleshly School, with 
 their droll mediseval garments, their funny archaic speech, 
 and the fatal marks of literary consumption on every pale 
 and deUcate visage. My judgment on Mr. Rossetti, to 
 whom I in the meantime confine my judgment, is sub- 
 stantially that of the North American Reviewer, who believes 
 that " we have in him another poetical man, and a man 
 markedly poetical, and of a kind apparently, though not 
 radically, different from any of our secondary writers of 
 poetry, but that we have not in him a new poet of any 
 weight;" and that he is "so affected, sentimental, and 
 painfully self-conscious, that the best to be done in his case 
 is to hope that this book of his, having unpacked his bosom 
 of so much that is unhealthy, may have done him more 
 good than it has given others pleasure." t Such, I say, is 
 my opinion, which might very well be wrong, and have to 
 undergo modification, if Mr. Rossetti were younger and less 
 self-possessed. His " maturity " is fatal. 
 
 • " 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 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 V. 
 
 "The House of Life," &c., Re-examined. 
 
 I HAD written thus far of Mr. Rossetti's poems, just after 
 reading them for the first time when cruising among the 
 Western Isles of Scotland in the summer of 1871, and I had 
 published my criticism in the Contemporary Review for 
 October (under circumstances explained in my preface), 
 when Mr. Rossetti, goaded into a sense of grievance by the 
 ill-advised sympathy of his friend the editor of the Athenautn, 
 " replied " to the audacious critic who, not being honoured 
 by his personal acquaintance, dared to accuse him of poetic 
 incompetence and literary immorality. Mr. Rossetti's letter, 
 forming a whole page and a quarter of his favourite weekly 
 print, now lies before me ; and I am bound in honour to 
 consider it in some detail. 
 
 After a preamble somewhat personal to myself,* Mr. 
 Rossetti arrives at his first point, which amounts to this — 
 that he is going to write a long article of self-defence to 
 show he is indifferent. He then formally opens his case, 
 and (that he may not hereafter accuse me of "garbling" 
 
 * ' ' Here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open 
 signature, would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice, however, 
 not by enunciation,) that if the anonymous in criticism was — as itself 
 originally inculcated — but an early caterpillar stage, the nominate too 
 is found to be no better than a homely transitional chrysalis, and that 
 the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who likes to sport in sunlight 
 and yet to elude the grasp, is after all the pseudonymous." Surely 
 human ingenuity never so tortured itself to clothe a simple meaning in 
 cumbrous and affected words ! The only parallel is the author's poetry, 
 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 ! " 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 57 
 
 his letter) I will quote his very words, only italicising them 
 in certain places : — 
 
 " 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,' describ- 
 ing ' merely animal sensations.' It is no more a whole poem in reality, 
 than is any sin^e stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, 
 written chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is 
 entitled ' The House of Life ; ' and even in my first published instal- 
 ment of the whole work (as contained in the volume under notice) 
 ample evidence is included that no such passing phase of description as 
 the one headed ' 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 love- 
 sonnets 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 mouth's culled sweetness by thy kisses shed 
 On cheeks and neck and eyelids, and so led 
 
 Back to her mouth which answers there for all : — 
 
 What sweeter than these things, except the thing 
 In lacking which all these would lose their sweet : — 
 The confident heart's stUl fervour ; the swift beat 
 
 And soft subsidence of the spirit's wing. 
 
 Then when it feels, in cloud-girt wayfaring. 
 The breath of kindred plumes agaiiist its feet ! 
 
58 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 '• Any reader may bring any artistic charge he pleases against the 
 above sonnet; but one charge it 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 en- 
 nobled hy the concurrence of the soul at all tim£S. (!)* 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 
 slander that their author was not impressed, Bke all other thinking 
 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 it is not here) to the exclusion of those 
 other highest things of which it is the harmonious concomitant." f 
 
 Thus far Mr. Rossetti ; and although it is rather hard to 
 have to refer again to poems so unsavoury, I have no option 
 but to accept the challenge, and judge Mr. Rossetti by " The 
 House of Life" as an uncompleted whole. A reference 
 to this poem, so far from changing my opinion, makes me 
 wonder at the writer's misconception of its true character. 
 It is flooded with sensualism from the first line to the last ; 
 it is a very hotbed of nasty phrases ; but its nastiness — or 
 its unwholesomeness — goes far deeper than any phraseology 
 It opens with a sonnet entitled " Bridal Love," wherein we 
 are told that " Love," 
 
 " Bom with her life, creature of poignant thirst 
 And exquisite hunger," 
 
 • My complaint precisely is, that Mr. Rossetti's " soul " concurs a 
 vast deal too easily. 
 
 f The italics are mine. — R. B. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 59 
 
 is preparing "with his warm hands our couch;" and so 
 intense grows the poet's enthusiasm at this information 
 that he exclaims, wildly addressing his lady in Sonnet II., — 
 
 " O thou who at Love's hour ecstatically 
 Unto my lips dost evermore present 
 The body and Hood of Lave in Sacrament /" 
 
 — which is a pretty good beginning, quite apart from the 
 blasphemy, for a writer in whose eyes a "beauty of natural 
 universal function " is merely a " harmonious concomitant " 
 of higher things. Sonnet III., entitled "Love's Light," 
 describes harmlessly enough how, 
 
 " — in the dark hours (we two alone) 
 Close kissed and eloquent of still replies 
 Thy 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 "), and — " somewhat figuratively, it is 
 true, but unmistakably " — proceeds, as a mother suckles a 
 baby, to afford him full fruition : — 
 
 " I was a child beneath her touch (!), — a man 
 
 When breast to breast we 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." 
 
 O malignant critic, who has dared to attaint the author of 
 these sweet lines of " fleshliness !" Let the reader examine 
 this passage phrase by phrase and word by word, dwelling par- 
 ticularly on the descriptive animahsm of the last three lines. 
 Why, much the same charge might be brought against that 
 delicious effort of Thomas Carew, entitled " The Rapture," 
 
6o THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 wherein (quite after the modern fleshly style) the whole busi- 
 ness of love is chronicled in sublime and daring metaphor :■ — 
 
 " Then will I visit with a wandering kiss 
 The bower of roses and 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," tells us how — 
 
 " To all the spirits of love that wander by. 
 Along the love-sown fallow field of sleep 
 My lady lies apparent ; and the deep 
 Calls to the deep ; and no one sees hut /." 
 
 There is also this dainty touch about her hand ; — 
 
 " First touched, the hand now warm around my neck 
 Taught memory long to mock desire." 
 
 Sonnet VII., " Love's Lovers," is meaningless, but in the 
 best manner of Carew and Dr. Donne ; and the same may be 
 said of Sonnet VIII., " Passion and Worship." Sonnet IX., 
 " The Portrait," is a good sonnet and good poetry, despite 
 the epithets of " mouth's mould " and " long lithe throat." 
 Sonnet X., the " Love Letter," is fleshly and affected, but 
 stops short of nastiness. Sonnet XL is also innocuous. 
 Sonnets XII. to XX. are one profuse sweat of animahsm, 
 containing, amongst other gems, this euphuistic description 
 of a kissing match : — 
 
 " Her moHth's culled sweetness by thy kisses shed 
 On cheeks, and neck, and eyelids, and so led 
 Back to her mouth which answers there for all ;" 
 
 * For a production quite in our modem maimer, the reader had 
 better refer to this extraordinary poem. I dare not quote another 
 word. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 6i 
 
 and scores of the author's pet phrases, the veriest pimples 
 on the surface of style, like " wanton flowers," " murmuring 
 sighs memorial," "sweet confederate music favourable," 
 " hours eventual," " Love's philtred euphrasy," " culminant 
 changes " — all familiar enough to us from the Delia Cms- 
 cans ; 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 
 "sunset's desolate disarray." Sonnets XXII. and XXIII. 
 are too vague for description, but Landor would have stared 
 to see his famous sea-shell image (which he accused Words- 
 worth of stealing) turned by the euphuistic-fleshly person 
 into 
 
 " The speech-bound sea-shell's low importunate strain." 
 
 The next four sonnets, called by the affected title of 
 " Willow-wood," contain, besides the gem about " bubbling 
 of brimming kisses," some fresh variations of a kiss : — 
 
 " Fast together, alive from the abyss, 
 Clung the soul-wrung implacable close kiss." 
 
 An "implacable " kiss ! Also : — 
 
 " So when the song died did the kiss unclose, 
 And her face fell back drown' d." 
 
 The supreme 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- 
 less suggest to Mr. Rossetti's admirers other similar themes, 
 and we shall speedily have poetry on " Love's Cross-birth " 
 and "Love's Anaesthetics." Sonnets XXIX., XXX., and 
 XXXI., Mr. Rossetti particularly challenges me to impeach ; 
 and I may at once admit that they are not nasty, though 
 very, very 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 to Sonnet XXXIX., one of those which 
 Mr. Rossetti calls immaculate. Here, not content with 
 picturing " Vain Virtues " as Virgins writhing in Hell, he 
 describes the Fire as the Bridegroom, and pursues the 
 metaphor 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 I quote from 
 them ? Surely I have quoted already ad nauseam. After the 
 sonnets comes " Love-Lily," which I have already given in 
 full; then "First Love Remembered;" then " Plighted Pro- 
 mise,'' a lyric which I am bound to copy, as it has never 
 been equalled since the famous 
 
 " Fluttering fold thy feeble pinions "- 
 
 of the " Rejected Addresses :"— 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 63 
 
 "PLIGHTED PROMISE. 
 
 " In a soft-complexioned sky 
 
 Fleeting rose and kindling grey, 
 Have you seen Aurora fly 
 At the break of day ? 
 So my maiden, so my plighted may 
 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 my side'' 
 
 A " soft-complexioned sky ! " the " heart-beat of the grove ' " 
 "Aurora, Cupid, Dian!" I rub my eyes, wondering if 
 this can be the nineteenth century, till the last lines, with 
 their " bright breast-jewel," recall me to my subject. But 
 really quotations of this sort become the merest iteration. 
 " The House of Life " contains eight songs more. Four of 
 them, though sensuous in the extreme, have no direct 
 reference to nasty subjects. The other four are sickly love- 
 poems,' swarming, with affectations. My extracts, how- 
 ever',, must, close with this verse from the "Song of the 
 Bower"' (Mr. Rossetti is great in " bowers ") : — 
 
 " What were my prize, could I enter thy bower, 
 Thia day, to-morrow, a{ eve or at mom .' 
 
64 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 Large lovely arms and a neck like a tower,* 
 Bosom then heaving that now 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 is stealing wholesale from Mr. Swiij- 
 bume, or Mr. Swinburne has been all his life 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- 
 less, but is probably the identical one where the writer found 
 " Jenny." Once more, I should like to quote Mr. Rossetti, 
 in the further passages of his high argument ; but he is so very 
 abusive that I am bound to condense his statement. After 
 vindicating " The House 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, if read wisely, would be 
 found perfectly beautiful and artistic. Turn, then, to the 
 four poems in question. The first is " A Last Confession," 
 which describes, in Mr. Browning's favourite manner, how 
 an Italian, maddened by jealousy, murdered his mistress. 
 This Italian, it may be remarked, is very like our author, 
 for, besides being disagreeably affected, he had a morbid 
 habit of brooding over unclean ideas and suspicions j inso- 
 
 * Compare Greene's " Menaphon's Eclogue : " — 
 
 " Her Heck like to an ivory shining tower," &c. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. b5 
 
 much that, as Mr. Rossetti truly observes, he is driven to 
 frenzy by the real or fancied resemblance between the 
 laugh of the harlot and that of his mistress. " Observe 
 also," continues the bard, " that these are but seven lines in 
 a poem of five hundred, not one other of which could be 
 classed with them.'' Observe, I say in turn, that the whole 
 poem is morbid and unwholesome, and must be drunk in 
 as a whole to leave its full bad flavour. It positively reeks 
 of murder, madness, and morbid lust, and whatever merit it 
 possesses lies in the intensity of its ugly thoughts, from the 
 first moment when the Italian began his courtship in this 
 extraordinary fashion — 
 
 " What I knew I told 
 Of Venus and of Cupid, — strange old tales ! " 
 
 — till, bhnded with lustful rage, he confesses having mur- 
 dered her, and tells his dreams : — 
 
 " She VFrung her hair out in my dream 
 To-night, till all the darkness reeked of it. 
 I heard the blood between her fingers hiss .'" 
 
 In justice we should observe that a madman is speaking ; 
 but this madman has Mr. Rossetti's gift, for here is the sort 
 of conceit with which he delights the priest : — 
 
 " She had a mouth 
 Made to bring death to hfe, — the underlip 
 Sucked in^ as if it strode to kiss itself.''^ 
 
 With the Delia Cruscan, the attempt to seem subtle and 
 striking becomes a positive mania. What would be said of 
 a poet who wrote thus ? — 
 
 Her nose inclined to heaven. 
 As if it tried to turn up at itself ! 
 
 F 
 
66 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 Yet the one metaphor is every whit as sensible and brilliant 
 
 as the other. 
 
 The second of the four poems is the "bubble'' poem 
 
 from "The House of Life." The third is from "Eden 
 
 Bower," a production which I would gladly quote entire. 
 
 "Here again," it is observed, "no reference is given, and 
 
 naturally the reader would suppose that a human embrace 
 
 is described. The embrace, on the contrary, is that of a 
 
 fabled snake-woman and a snake." Exactly ; but will Mr. 
 
 Rossetti describe a single passage in his poems where a 
 
 human embrace is described ? The lovers of the Fleshly 
 
 School are invariably snake-like in their eternal wriggling, 
 
 lipping, munching, slavering, and biting ; and indeed, on 
 
 reflection, " Eden Bower " may be fairly considered as a 
 
 complete epitome of the art of love as practised by the 
 
 coterie poets. Since Mr. Rossetti is dissatisfied, let us try 
 
 again. His book is a lottery-bag — we draw blindfold — but 
 
 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 bliss of Adam and Lilith : — 
 
 " What great joys had Adam and Lilith ! 
 Sweet close rings of the serpent's twining, 
 As heart in heart lay sighing and pining." * 
 
 The result (next verse) : — - 
 
 " What bright babes had Lilith and Adam .'' 
 
 Shapes that coiled in the woods and waters," &c. 
 
 All this is savoury, and the whole poem is still more so ; so 
 
 * Compare Carew : — 
 
 " Now in more subtle wreaths I will ent-vyine 
 
 My sturdy limbs, ray legs and thighs, with thine ! " 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 67 
 
 that the reader feels a horrible sense of sliminess, as if he 
 were handling a yellow serpent or a conger eel. Let me try 
 blindfold once more for another " draw." This time my 
 prize is from " Troy Town ;" but, before I quote, let me 
 once more premise that the poem as a whole is fleshlier and 
 sillier than any extract. Helen's breasts, described by 
 herself : — 
 
 " Each twin breast is an apple sweet ! 
 
 * » • • 
 
 Mine are apples grown to the south 
 
 [O Troy Town !) 
 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 Paris, poor fellow, has a fair prospect of being 
 suckled by Helen, and is likely, after " tasting " her " apples" 
 or " breasts meet for his mouth," to " waste " them (what- 
 ever that means) " to his heart's desire." 
 
 But already I hear the amazed reader cry, with Macbeth, 
 " Hold, enough ! " I have thus piled example upon example, 
 all out of one small volume of verse ; and I might readily 
 go on quoting for pages more. I reject altogether the in- 
 sinuation that my criticism was based on private grounds. 
 I do not know Mr. Rossetti, have no grievance against him, 
 and I can quite believe that in private life he is a most 
 exemplary person ; but in his poetry — to go no further 
 at present than that very small phase of a portentous 
 phenomenon — there is 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 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 all the inordinate coarseness of the fleshly vocabulary, but 
 on the persistent choice of subjects repulsive in themselves, 
 and capable of fleshly treatment, such as the lyric abeut 
 Jenny the street-walker, who " advertises dainties through 
 the dirt,'" and is serenaded by the poet in a brothel ; the 
 poem about Lilith the Snake, and her gripping and lipping, 
 and general arts of fornication ; and the nuptial sonnet 
 which Mr. Rossetti studiously refrains from quoting, knowing 
 that it would condemn him fatally in all decent eyes. I 
 said, and I say, that the very choice of these subjects is 
 deplorable, and that their treatment is offensive ; and I 
 said, and say, that the morbid habit penetrates into the 
 writer's treatment even when, as very seldom happens, he 
 chooses a subject by no means morbid in itself: all this 
 without going beyond Mr. Rossetti ; but if I go a little 
 further, and look at that phenomenon of which he is a 
 phase, I find decency outraged, history falsified, purity 
 sacrificed, art prostituted, language perverted, religion 
 outraged, in one gibbering attempt to apotheosize vice and 
 demolish art with the implements of blasphemy and passion ; 
 I find that Mary of Scotland is a biting and scratching 
 harlot, Sappho a lustful wild beast, Christ and Christianity 
 scandals and abortions ; and pursuing further my inquiry 
 into this phenomenon, finding religion distorted into lust, 
 and lust raving in the very language of religion, I take 
 occasion to say — on public grounds only, with no grudge, 
 with no personal animosity whatever — that a number of 
 men of real though very limited ability are, blinded by 
 their own little knowledge, the praise of vile minds, and 
 the applause of a heartless clique, rushing headlong to 
 literary ruin, and dragging many of the young generation 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 6g 
 
 with them. What Mr. Rossetti says in explanation is only 
 to the point in so far as it is deplorably convincing that he 
 himself is utterly unconscious of his own offences ; does not, 
 in fact, discriminate between passion and sensuality ; and 
 endeavours, writhing under what he thinks an unmerited 
 imputation, to save himself on the plea of personal purity 
 and dramatic motive. No one can rejoice more than I do 
 to hear that Mr. Rossetti attaches a certain importance to 
 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 for a 
 young woman's person, face, heart, and mind, as in itself 
 quite a spiritual sentiment. In the poem entitled " Love- 
 Lily " he expressly observes that Love cannot tell Lily's 
 " body from her soul " — they are so inextricably blended. 
 It is precisely this confusion of the two which, filling Mr. 
 Rossetti as it eternally does with what he calls "riotous 
 longing," becomes so intolerable to 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 
 Vice for itself." Paradise Lost. 
 
 I HAVE thus carefully gone through Mr. Rossetti's poetry, 
 not because it is by any means the best or worst verse of its 
 kind, but because, being avowedly "mature," and having 
 had the benefit of many years' revision, it is perhaps more 
 
70 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 truly representative of its class than the grosser verse of Mr. 
 Swinburne, or the more careless and fluent verse of Mr. 
 Morris. The main charge I bring against poetry of this 
 kind is its sickliness and effeminacy; but if there be any 
 truth in my own Theory of Literary Morality, as enunciated 
 some years ago in the Fortnightly Review, the charge of 
 indecency need not be pressed at all, as it is settled by the 
 fact of artistic and poetic incompetence. The morality of 
 any book is determinable by its value as literature — im- 
 moral writing proceeding primarily from insincerity of vision, , 
 and therefore being betokened by all those signs which 
 enable us to ascertain the value of art as art. In the pre- 
 sent case the matter is ludicrously simple ; for we perceive 
 that the silHness and the insincerity come, not by nature, 
 but at second hand ; Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne being 
 the merest echoes — strikingly original in this — that they 
 merely echo what is vile, while other imitators reproduce 
 what is admirable. I am loath in this connection to 
 incriminate Mr. Morris. That gentleman is so prolific, so 
 fertile in resources, and is generally so innocent (despite the 
 ever-present undertone of fleshliness), that he may fairly be 
 left to his laurels. He is open to the same literary criticism 
 as the others, but, while often ingenuous, is 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 flowers, the bulk of 
 the poetic trash left behind by successive generations of 
 verse-writers, from Surrey to Spratt, far outweighs the little 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 71 
 
 collection of true poetry which may justly be esteemed 
 classic and unimpeachable. But it may be observed here 
 that all the poets of this school, though their name be 
 legion, write very much alike. They are generally affected, 
 and often nasty. " All that regards design, form, fable 
 (which is the soul of poetry), all that concerns exactness or 
 consent of parts (which is the body), will probably be want- 
 ing : only pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering 
 expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse (which 
 are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry), 
 may be found in their verses. Their colouring entertains 
 the sight, but the lines and life are not to be inspected too 
 narrowly." Such is 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 it is the case 
 now. The poems and plays of the egregious Cartwright, 
 published in 1651, are preceded by panegyrics from all the 
 wits of the time, no less than fifty in number, quite in the 
 style of the Fleshly School and its Critics. Donne was the 
 pride of collegians. Cowley was actually considered the glory 
 and the wonder of his generation. Nowadays the anony- 
 mous press is a tremendous check on this sort of humbug, 
 but there still linger old-fashioned journals with strings in 
 the hands of a clique.* It is the interest of educated per- 
 sons and schoolmen to exalt all artificial products, for they 
 themselves -can fairly hope to rival the stuff they praise and 
 to get some sort of a position. If hothouse plants are in 
 * See Notes. 
 
72 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 favour, any clever young fellow from a university can force 
 them. And it thus happens that the Fleshly School, with- 
 out ever reaching the general public, is in favour with the 
 literary amateurs who yearly swarm from college, and ruin 
 the profession of literature by writing anywhere and every- 
 where free of charge. 
 
 From time immemorial, poets of the Artificial School have 
 written in the same way, and been admired for the same 
 tricks ; and indeed our modern poets can stand no com- 
 parison, even in subtle grossness, with their progenitors. 
 Here are Cowley's lines on a paper written in juice of 
 lemon, and read by the fire : — 
 
 " 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 advantageously compare with Mr. 
 
 Rossetti's description of a love-letter in p. 198 of his 
 
 volume. The master above quoted, in his " Davideis," has 
 
 the following awful passage : — 
 
 " The sun himself started with sudden fright, 
 To see his beams return so dismal light ! " 
 
 This is performing a miracle certainly, but Mr. Rossetti 
 performs a greater — ^he makes the " Silence " speak : — 
 
 " 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, that my mouth, for Muses' milk, were fed 
 On the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds had bled ! 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 73 
 
 That with my tongue I felt them and could taste 
 The faint flakes from thy bosom to the waist \ 
 That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat 
 Thy breasts like honey." 
 
 Dr. Donne, however, had anticipated him in the same 
 
 vein : — 
 
 •■ As the sweet sweat of roses in a still, 
 As that, which from chaf'd muskats' pores doth trill, 
 As 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." 
 
 These poets ever dehght in the strangest and most far- 
 fetched comparisons. Cleveland has a magnificent com- 
 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 
 spirit, Rossetti compares the Soul to a town, and (bent to 
 hunt the simile to death) tells us that there are by-streets 
 there, and that Hopes go about hunting for adventures at 
 the public-houses ! — 
 
 " So through that soul in restless brotherhood. 
 They roam together now, and wind among 
 
 It's bye-streets, knocking at the (tf-sty inns'. " (Page 231.) 
 
 Dr. John Donne is great on Tears : they are at one time 
 " globes, nay worlds," containing their " Europe, Asia, and 
 Africa ;" and at another they are " wine," bottled " in crystal 
 vials" for the tipple of lovers. Mr. Rossetti, in a semi- 
 military spirit, thus describes a Moan :— 
 
 " A moan, the sighing wind's auxiliary! " 
 
74 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 Quite in the spirit of Mr. Rossetti's fleshlier and 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, as might 
 Desires in dying saints excite ! " 
 
 This is the way Dr. John Donne writes in the beginning of 
 the seventeenth century : — 
 
 " Are not thy kisses, then, as filthy, and more, 
 As a worm sucking an envenom'd sore ? 
 Doth not thy fearful hand in feeling quake. 
 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 pas- 
 sages : — 
 
 THE TROJAN HORSE. 
 
 " A mother, I was without tnother bom, 
 In end, all arra'd, ray father I brought forth ! " — Drtjmmond. 
 
 " That horse, within whose populous womb 
 The birth was death." — ^RosSETTl (p. 229). 
 
 Again, Mr. Rossetti, in Sonnet XXIX., compares Life to 
 "a Lady" with whom he wandered from the "haunts of 
 men," finding " all bowers amiss" (!) till he came to a place 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 75 
 
 " where only woods and waves could hear our kiss," and 
 who, as an awful result, bare him three children, Love, Song — 
 
 "Whose hair 
 Blew like a flame and blossomed liice a wreath, 
 And Art, whose eyes were worlds by God found fair,^^ * 
 
 Nearly as absurd, but less subtle and harassing, is the 
 
 passage in Drummond's "'Hymn to the Fairest Fair," wherein 
 
 we have 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 it be hastily concluded that Mr. Rossetti's '' apples 
 meet for the mouth" simile is quite original. Drummond 
 in one passage calls his mistresses' hearts 
 
 " Fruits of Paradise, 
 Celestial cherries that so sweetly smeU ; " 
 
 and in another — the following sonnet — comes tremendously 
 close upon the best modem manner, minus the " lipping'' 
 and the " munching : " — 
 
 " Who hath not seen into her saflfron bed 
 The morning's goddess mildly her repose, 
 Or her of whose pure blood first sprang the rose 
 LuU'd in 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. 
 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. 
 
76 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY-. 
 
 The sighing rubies of those heavenly 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 this poem entire, because it is quite in the 
 modern spirit, and would certainly, if printed in either Mr. 
 Swinburne's or Mr. Rossetti's poems, have been considered 
 beautiful; and partly because I should like the reader to 
 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 made to hite ! 
 Too wan for blushing and too warm for white, 
 
 But perfect coloured without white or red ; 
 
 And her lips opened amorously, and said — 
 I wist not what, saving one word — 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, p. 316. 
 
 The reader whom this fascinates had better turn to Dr. 
 Donne's eighteenth elegy, every line of which might have 
 been written in our generation, wherein the nude female is 
 compared to 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 fill even Mr. 
 Rossetti with envy and despair. It is, unfortunately, rather 
 too strong to quote, though not a grain more filthy than the 
 above sonnet. Let me turn, by way of disinfectant, to a 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 77 
 
 conceit in the true Delia Cruscan style, from Mr. Rossetti's 
 works. A very shadowy Entity is speaking, in a poem 
 affectedly called "A Superscription:" — 
 
 " Look in my face : my name is Might-have-heen ; 
 I am also called No-more^ Too-late, Farewell ; 
 Unto thine ear I hold the dead sea-shell," &c. (Page 234.) 
 
 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 Un- 
 
 cleanness," for we find Baudelaire making use of very 
 
 similar language : — 
 
 " Trois mUle six cents fois par heure, la Seconde 
 Chuchote : Souviens-toi ! Rapide avec sa voix 
 D'lnsecte, Maintenant dit : Je suis Autrefois ! " 
 
 Fleurs de Mai, p. 245. 
 
 Truly, this sort of reading is wearing to the brain ! 
 
 I 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 ; and then proceeds with the following 
 
 jargon : — 
 
 ' ' 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 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 last fibre, — quite, in fact, in the spirit of Richard Crashaw's 
 poem on " The Weeper : " — 
 
 " What bright soft thing is this ? 
 Sweet Mary, thy fair eyes' expence ? 
 A moist spark it is, 
 A watery diamond ; from whence 
 
 The very term, I thinlc, was found, 
 
 The water of a diamond. 
 
 " O 'tis not a tear, 
 
 'Tis a star about to drop 
 From thine eye its sphert ; 
 
 The sun will stoop and take it up. 
 Proud will his sister be to wear 
 This thine eye's jewel in her ear. 
 
 " O 'tis a tear, 
 
 Too true a tear ! for no sad eyne, 
 How sad so e'er. 
 
 Rain so true a tear as thine ; 
 Each drop leaving a place so dear 
 Weeps for itself, is its own tear. 
 
 " Such a pearl as this is 
 
 (Slipt from Aurora's dewy breast) 
 The rose-bud's sweet lip kisses, 
 
 And such the rose itself when vext 
 With ungentle flames, does shed, 
 Sweating in too wann a bed." 
 
 This is meant reverently, but what shall we say of Mr. 
 Rossetti's " Love's Redemption" in which the act of sexual 
 connection is outrageously and vilely compared to the 
 administering of the sacramental bread and wine ? — 
 " O thou, who at Love's hour ecstatically," &c.* 
 
 Compare, also, with Mr. Rossetti's pseudo-religious poems 
 generally, those passages of Crashaw in which all the 
 language of passion and lust is used to describe purely 
 spiritual and religious sensations : — 
 * See ante, p. 59. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 79 
 
 " Amorous languishments, luminous trances, 
 
 Sights which are not seen with eyes, 
 Spiritual and soul-piercing glances ; 
 
 Whose pure and subtle lightning flies 
 Home to the heart, and sets the house on fire ; 
 And melts it down in sweet desire : 
 
 Yet doth not stay 
 To ask the windows leave 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 sent to Mrs. M. R. 
 
 This might have been pardonable in a Roman Catholic of 
 Selden's time, but the echo of it in a " mature " person of 
 the nineteenth century is positively dreadful.* 
 
 I close this book of the " mature " person. I close Mr. 
 Swinburne's volumes. I try to gather some definite im- 
 pression, some thought, some light, from what I have been 
 reading. I find my mind jaded, my whole body sick and 
 distressed, a dull pain lurking in the region of the medulla 
 oblongata. I try to picture up Mr. Rossetti's poetry, and I 
 am dazzled by conceits in sixteenth-century costume, — " rosy 
 
 * Hall, in the ninth satire of Book I., 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 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 hours,'' " Loves ''with "gonfalons," damsels with "citherns," 
 " soft-complexioned " skies; flowers, fruits, jewels, vases, 
 apple-blossoms, lutes : I see no gleam of nature, not a sign 
 of humanity ; I hear only the heated ravings of an affected 
 lover, indecent for the most part, and often blasphemous. 
 I attempt to describe Mr. Swinburne ; and lo ! the Bac- 
 chanal screams, the sterile Dolores sweats, serpents dance, 
 men and women wrench, wriggle, and foam in an endless 
 alliteration (quite in Gascoigne's manner) of heated and 
 meaningless words, the veriest 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, and is that not a certain merit?" Some- 
 thing on this head has been said already. Let it be further 
 said that no unsound soul is clad in a sound form ; and 
 that what holds trufe of matter and thought holds equally 
 true of manner and style : both may seem rapid and strong, 
 but neither will bear five minutes' criticism. Imagine an 
 English writer pluming himself on his careful choice of 
 diction, and publishing such a verse as the following : — 
 
 " Nothing is better, I -well think, 
 
 Than love ; the hidden •mell-vis.ter 
 Is not so delicate to drink : 
 
 This was well seen of rae and her." 
 
 Swinburne's Poems and Ballads. 
 
 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 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 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 and laboriously limp ? I have no time 
 to pile example on example ; I leave that task to the reader, 
 who will not have to hunt far or long for some of the worst 
 writing in our language. Of a piece are such expressions 
 as, "O their glance is loftiest dole I" "in grove the facile 
 Spring trembles ; " " her soft body, dainty thin ; " " hand- 
 some Jenny mine ; " " smouldering senses ; " " the rustling 
 covert of my soul ; " "a little spray of tears ; " " culminant 
 changes ;" " wasteful warmth of tears ;" " the sunset's deso- 
 late disarray ; " " watered my heart's drouth ; " " the wind's 
 wellaway ; " " a shaken shadow intolerable j " " that swallow's 
 soar '' (a swallow, by the way, does not soar) ; " my eyes, 
 wide open, had the run of some ten weeds to rest upon ; " and 
 a thousand others, as bad or worse, all to be found in Mr. 
 Rossetti's small volume ; besides the thousands upon thou- 
 sands to 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 
 detail, frivolous, absurd, and reckless. The affectation of 
 carefulness in composition is in proportion to the affectation 
 of subtlety of theme ; and the result is a lamentable amount, 
 not of valuable poetic form, but of sound and fury, signify- 
 
 G 
 
82 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRV. 
 
 ing absolutely next to nothing, and as shapeless and un- 
 digested as chaos itself. 
 
 VII. 
 
 " Away with love verses, sugared in rhyme — 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? Is this the year 1872? That peep of 
 blue up yonder resembles the sky, and these figures that 
 pass seem men and women. What evil dream, then, what 
 malignant influence is upon me? Weary of surve)ang the 
 poetry of the past, and listening to ' the amatory wails of 
 generations, I walk down the streets, and lo ! again harlots 
 stare from the shop-windows, and the great Alhambra 
 posters cover the dead-walls. I go to the theatre which is 
 crowded nightly, and I listen in absolute amaze to the 
 bestialities of Genevihje de Brabant. I walk in the broad 
 day, and a dozen hands offer me indecent prints. I step into 
 a bookseller's shop, and behold ! I am recommended to pur- 
 chase a reprint of the plays and novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn. 
 I buy a cheap republican newspaper, thinking that there, at 
 least, I shall find some reUef, if only in the wildest stump 
 oratory, and I am saluted instead in these words : — 
 
 "Fanny Hill. Genuine edition, illustrated. Two volumes, 2J. 6ii. 
 each. Lovers' Festival, plates, 3J. 6<i. .Adventures of a Lady's Maid, 
 IS. dd. Intrigues of a Ballet Girl, 2s. (>d. Aristotle, illustrated, 2s. 
 French Transparent Cards, is. the set. Cartes de Visite from life, is. 
 
 List two stamps. London: H. D , 15, St. M R d, 
 
 C 11. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCIfOOL OF POETRY. 83 
 
 "Fanny Hill, coloured plates, 2 vols. 4^. ; Aristotle's Master- 
 piece, plates, 2s. (id. ; Life of the celebrated Moll Flanders, c,s. bd. ; 
 Mysteries of a Convent, is. List sent on receipt of two stamps. 
 E. B , 9, R n S 1, B S , E. 
 
 "The Bachelor's Scarf Pin, 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 , 4, K 's S 
 
 Avenue, B ." 
 
 Step where I may, the snake Sensualism spits its venom 
 upon me. The deeper I probe the pubHc sore, the more 
 terrible I find its nature. I ask my physician for his ex- 
 perience ; he only shakes his head, and dares not utter all 
 he knows. I consult the police ; they give me such details 
 of unapproachable crime as fill my soul with horror. Return- 
 ing home, I meet a friend, who tells me 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.* O for a scourge to whip 
 these money-changers of Vice for ever out of the Temple ! 
 
 Now, God forbid that I should charge any living English 
 poet with desiring to encourage debauchery and to de- 
 morahse the public. I believe that both Mr. Swinburne 
 and Mr. Rossetti are honest men, pure according to their 
 lights, loving what is beautiful, conscientiously following 
 what inspiration lies within them. They do not quite 
 realise that they are merely supplementing the literature of 
 
 * An interdiction which, says the Athenaum, " is the most wanton 
 violation of liberty, and the most unwarrantable interference with 
 Art, that modem times' have witnessed ! " It is to be hoped, however, 
 that the Lord Chamberlain 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 
 himself in his notions of political propriety. 
 
84 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 Holywell Street, and writing books well worthy of being 
 sold under "sealed covers." Much of Mr. Swinburne's 
 grossness has come of the mad aggressiveness of youth, 
 fostered by reading the worst French poets. Nearly all Mr. 
 Rossetti's effeminacy comes of eternal self-contemplation, 
 of trashy models, of want of response to the needs and the 
 duties of his time. What stuff is this they are putting for- 
 ward, or suffering their coterie to put forward for them ? . It 
 is 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 is just, they reiterate, that Passion should have 
 its poetry and the Flesh its vindication.* As if the " simple 
 and natural delights of the body " had not been occupying 
 our poetry ever since the days of the " Confessio Amantis ! " 
 As if sane (and for that matter, insane) pleasures of sense 
 had not been the stock-in-trade of nine-tenths of all our 
 poets and poetasters, from Wyatt to Swinburne ! As if 
 Passion had been silent until this year of the Lord 1872, 
 and as if, till the advent of a Rossetti, the world had entirely 
 lost sight of the Flesh ! The Flesh and the Body have been , 
 sung till the Muses are hoarse again. Two-thirds of our 
 poetry 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 
 the period, and never before traced as having any influence 
 on the human race. One would fancy, from some of our 
 modem criticisms, that the only English poets up to this 
 period had been Milton, holy Mr. Herbert, and the author 
 
 * See, for example, "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman," 
 addressed by an English Lady to W. M. Rossetti (1870).- 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 85 
 
 of the " Christian Year ! " One would swear, to hear these 
 Cupids of the new Fleshly Epoch, that English literature had 
 been veritably getting blue-mouldy with too much virtue, 
 and that the Spirit of Imagination had lived in a nunnery, 
 fed on pulse and cold 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, if the truth were told, we have had a little too 
 much of the Body. Perhaps, if we push the matter home, it 
 is no more rational to rave of the "just delights of the flesh" 
 than it would be to talk of the "glorious liberty" of " sweat- 
 ing' and the "sane celebration" of the right to "spit." 
 Perhaps, after all, since so many centuries of Sexuality have 
 done so little for poetry, it might be advantageous to give 
 Spirituality a trial, and to see if her efforts to create a litera- 
 ture are equally unsuccessful. 
 
 In answer to all this, it may be retorted — in the easiest 
 form of retort known to mankind — that / am a Philistine, 
 that I would emasculate our poets altogether, and that I 
 would substitute for passion the merest humanitarian and 
 other "sentiment." Well, although I fear that I am a 
 Puritan in a certain sense, I trust I am not a purist in the 
 worst sense. My favourite ancient poet is the author of 
 " Atys." I prefer Shakspere to Milton, and I would not 
 obliterate a line, however coarse, of Chaucer. I love 
 Rabelais, and hold (with Coleridge) that he is deep and 
 pure as the sea. I know no 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 I admit their beauty and their worth. 
 
86 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 I welcome Heine, and could listen to his mad laughter for 
 a summer day. I love Byron better than Tupper, and of 
 all Byron's books I best love " Don Juan." I reverence 
 Hugo, and I see nothing in him that is shocking, save, 
 perhaps, certain abominable eccentricities in "L'Homme 
 qui Rit." I still beguile many an hour, when snug at 
 anchor in some lovely Highland loch, with the inimit- 
 able, yet questionable, pictures of Parisian life left by 
 Paul de Kock ; and I know no sweeter poet in some 
 respects than the egregious Alfred de Musset. To my 
 thinking, there is no grander passage in literature than 
 that tremendous scene between Ottilia and her paramour, 
 in " Pippa Passes :" no one accuses the author of that, 
 and of the " Ring and the Book," of neglecting love or 
 overlooking the body ; and yet I do daily homage to 
 the genius of Robert Browning. I deem "Vivien" an essen- 
 tial pendant to that wonderful apotheosis of Masculine 
 Chastity, which is the heart of that Arthurian epic on which 
 the laureate has poured all his orient poetic wealth. I 
 have praised Whitman, and hope to praise him over and over 
 again. I know no fresher, finer work of this generation than 
 certain novels by Mr. Charles Reade, who is not generally 
 considered an ascetic author. In one word, I have no earthly 
 objection to the Body and the Flesh in their rightful time 
 and place, as part of great work and noble art ; I do not see 
 any great wickedness in the old-fashioned use of the gaudriole; 
 and I am ready (as any sane man must be ready) to regard 
 with kindness, and even sympathy, all work of a really good 
 and honest author, even if it here and there, as I may think, 
 exceeds the just limits of reserve, and becomes indecent, as 
 sometimes happens, by sheer force of power. But Flesh, 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 87 
 
 merely as the Flesh, is too much for me. I find it foolish, 
 querulous, affected, uninteresting. I do not admire its 
 absurd manner of considering itself the Soul. I grudge it 
 none of its just delights, even in the way of " lipping'' and 
 " munching ;" only, let it enjoy them without making such a 
 coil about them. The world never tires of real passion ; 
 it will hsten to Burns's love-songs for ever ; but fleshhness 
 is not necessarily passion, and may abound in natures 
 utterly passionless. There are many other functions of the 
 flesh which it is not the custom to perform in pubHc, but 
 which are quite as interesting to third parties as what Shak- 
 spere calls " the deed." Really, if we set no limit to the 
 flesh, it is certain to disgrace us in the long-run. It has 
 already created a literature in Holywell Street. Shall we 
 suffer it to found a poetry in St. John's Wood ? 
 
 English Verse-poetry has been, up to the present moment, 
 almost exclusively the property of querulous persons, 
 engaged in contemplating their own images — 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 
 chosen to use rhymed and metrical speech — our very greatest, 
 indeed, have spoken in this way ; but many of our noblest 
 — such as Bacon, Bunyan, and Thomas Carlyle — have 
 chosen to use simple prose as their means of expression ; 
 and the last of these prose-poets has very recently, in a 
 remarkable letter to a gentleman who had sent him some 
 verses, protested energetically that he would infinitely have 
 preferred a good bit of solid simple prose — that, in fact. 
 Verse is an artificial sort of thing, by no means to be en- 
 couraged at this time of day. Rough and sweeping as this 
 condemnation of Verse appears to be, there is a certain 
 
88 THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 homely truth about it. It has been the unfortunate habit 
 of most of our poets, and especially of those we have been 
 specially criticizing in this article, to 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 
 without the aid of rhythmical props. Ideas too bald for 
 prose, too trivial to stand unadorned, appear unique enough 
 when subjected to the euphuistic process, and robed in all 
 the wordy glitter of rhyme. If any English author, in good 
 round prose, were to call Death " a seizure of malign vicis- 
 situde," and compare Life to a Lady with whom he ranged 
 the world till he found a fit " bower " for nuptial perform- 
 ances ; or if any author were to narrate for us, still in 
 good round prose, such a savoury narrative as that of " The 
 Leper" in Mr. Swinburne's poems, surely he would very 
 soon receive his just deserts. Yet simply because such 
 ideas and such stories are told in lines cut into certain 
 lengths and jingling at the ends; solely because, by one-half 
 the public, verse is recognised as an unnatural and alto- 
 gether artificial form of speech, the trash of windy men is 
 christened Art, and writers without one ray of imagination 
 are accredited with the genius of song. It thus happens 
 that, in the opinion of many people, the word " poet " is 
 synonymous with "madman;" and we are told again and 
 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 inferior men giving 
 themselves the airs of great men merely because they can 
 write meretricious verses. 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 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 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 — is to be anything else than an 
 impediment to progress, if it is to become something 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 ; it must be weeded of the hideous 
 phraseology of the schools, and sown with the fresh and 
 beautiful idioms of daily speech ; and it must deal with 
 great issues in which all men are interested, not with the 
 " damnable face-making " of Narcissus in a mirror. Else- 
 where, notably in Germany, such experiments are 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 is ridiculed and 
 • disliked, unless it be a retrograde experiment, trebling the 
 limitations and quadrupling the affectations of ancient 
 rhyme. Mr. Swinburne's eternal jingle, and Mr. Rosseti's 
 affected harpsichord-melody, are admired, though they 
 throw us back hundreds of years ; but not one grain of 
 sympathy has been shown for the metrical importations, 
 often exquisite, of Mr. Matthew Arnold, the never-ending 
 experiments of the late Arthur Hugh Clough (a giant who 
 died young, and alas ! has left no one who fills his place in 
 the van of thought), and the wonderful poetic prose, or 
 prose-poetry, of Walt Whitman. The public appears to be 
 willing that verse-poetry should remain the property of men 
 of talent, anxious to increase its already almost insuperable 
 limitations ; and it thus happens that our men and women 
 of genius — such as Carlyle, Hugo, Reade, Emerson, Haw- 
 
go THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. 
 
 tliome — have written some of the best poetry of this gene- 
 ration in simple prose.* 
 
 The name of Poet was once a title of honour ; it bids 
 fair soon to be a title of ridicule. The form of Verse was 
 at one period held to be the noblest possible kind of 
 human utterance ; but that form, remaining as it does in the 
 swaddling-clothes of infant speech, will possibly be more or 
 less abandoned as time rolls on by the thinkers and dreamers 
 of the world. The word poetry may one day be identical 
 with absurdity; and no one will jingle the cap and bells of 
 rhyme but a fool. Is there no hope ? Yes, a gleam. All 
 the blundering and all the time-wasting in our literature have 
 been caused by eternal posturing before the mirror. Each 
 feeble talent has been so fascinated by his own image as to 
 dwindle into an intellectual daisy or pine into a poetical 
 primrose. Our literary shame has sprung from want of 
 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, if 
 there be such a person (and if not, we might do worse than 
 elect the functionary), issue forth an edict ordering the 
 destruction of all looking-glasses, and the immediate silencing 
 of all persons who introduce the subject of their own 
 emotions. This would at least have the effect of driving our 
 poets, if they must see themselves, to see themselves in 
 flowing Rivers or the mighty Sea, and to wail aloud, if wail 
 they must, to the four Winds of Heaven ; and thus they might 
 come in time to find how little 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. 
 
THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. gt 
 
 in the great scheme of nature, and how much is to be done 
 on earth besides making night and day hideous with sensual 
 shadows and dreams. Yet, after all, I fear there would be 
 evasion even then ; for ten to one you would 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 45. — Mr. Rossetti's "Jenny." 
 
 Since the above was written, the Quarterly Review has spoken in 
 very similar language to my own ; and I agree with its strictures in 
 every passage, save those which are levelled against Mr. Tennyson. 
 The poet laureate is open to judgment, and is strong enough to bear 
 it ; but I hold it to be in all respects lamentable that he has been 
 censured in the same breath as the men who owe to him what little 
 in their writings is good and worthy. The Review speaks thus of 
 " Jenny: " — 
 
 " We purpose to close our remarks on Mr. Rossetti's verse with some 
 reflections on a poem which, we think, reveals characteristically the 
 incapacity of the literary poet to deal with contemporary themes in an 
 effective and straightforward manner. ' Jenny ' is a poem on the 
 subject of unfortunate women. A man is 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 octo- 
 syllabic verse. The thought throughout is pretentious but common- 
 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. We are thus imperceptibly edged on into 
 the author's favourite regions of abstraction : — 
 
 ' Yet, Jenny, looking long at you 
 The woman almost fades from view. 
 
NOTES. 93 
 
 A cipher of man's changeless sum 
 Of lust past, present, and to come 
 Is left. A riddle that one shrinks 
 To challenge from the scornful sphinx.' 
 
 Exactly. So this profound philosopher, whose somewhat particular 
 reflections on the charms of the sleeper have brought him at last face 
 to face with the mystery of evil, cooUy remarks : — 
 
 ' 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 repul- 
 sively realistic are mixed up with imagery like that in Solomon's Song ; 
 the most familiar objects are described by the most unusual para- 
 phrases ; a London schoolboy, for instance, being called ' a wise un- 
 childish elf,' while the similes are painfully far-fetched. The heart of 
 the woman is said to 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.' 
 
 Affectation and obscurity make the application of this difficult enough. 
 It will not, however, escape notice that the simile is radically false, for 
 whereas the point is that the woman's heart is alive in the midst of 
 corruption, the rose in the book, to which the heart is compared, is 
 dried and dead." 
 
94 NOTES. 
 
 Page 71. — Coterie Glory. 
 
 That the system by which the school of verse-writers under criticism 
 has made itself notorious is at last defeating itself, is evident 
 from a recent article, entitled " 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 
 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. 
 
 " A little circle of mutual admiration contrived, by ingenious devices 
 of criticism, to create in the outer world what for awhile looked like 
 real fame. Afterwards we had the ' mystic ' school, to wliich the 
 authors of Pestus, the Roman, and other kindred spirits, chronicled in 
 full by Mr. GilfiUan, belonged." 
 
 After glancing at the kind of poetry produced by the Fleshly School, 
 the writer continues : — 
 
 " It is clear that poetry of this order can appeal only to a limited 
 class. It claims to be tried by a special jury of cultivated persons. This, 
 however, is a very dangerous position for the jurors. They who have 
 been at the pains of mastering such special qualifications, by a natural 
 law, soon regard them as the only canons of taste ; nothing which does 
 not conform to them has the true ring. Having conquered caviare, 
 they find all that pleases ' the general ' tasteless. PhiUstinism itself is 
 not more adverse to discrimination than this Pharisaic isolation. Once 
 in this frame of mind, men rapidly unlearn judging in favour of 
 believing ; 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 
 without, as proceeding from men not specially qualified ; they tend to 
 pass from faith into fanaticism. Hence also, the general attitude of 
 criticism being of the tolerant or sceptical order already described, the 
 ielievers at first write all the reviews, and fnan every bastion of what 
 Goethe somewhere calls the ' critical Zion.' That it has been so in the 
 case of our later ' Pre-Raffaelites ' is denied nowhere. Cfrowns thus 
 decreed may certainly and uninvidiously be described as ' Coterie 
 Glory.' 
 
 " A curious sign, lastly, confirms the position which we have here 
 advanced. It is the very essence of faith to be uncritical ; to regard 
 
NOTES. 95 
 
 the day for criticism as passed. It seems to be simply impossible for 
 the artist and liis circle of believers to regard a criticism on his art as 
 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 of fame 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 
 characteristic that the followers should be under the same impression. 
 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 theo- 
 logicum.' 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 venture to say what, who denies it. The gist of the 
 whole is, tUst every criticism made against the book is^ in fact levelled 
 against the author. What reads like a remark that a rhyme is weak is 
 really an ungentlemanly libel on the rhymester. It is obvious that this 
 is the canon, not of criticism, but of f^atic faith ; nay, that it im- 
 plicitly treats criticism as sin. 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 
 intention to injure Mr. Rossetti. He is only what some writer calls 
 'that worst of enemies, your worshipper.'" — Saturday Review, Yeh. 
 24th, 1872. 
 
96 NOTES. 
 
 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, or to prote.st against the popular 
 misconceptions concerning him ; but it just happens that I have been 
 asked, honestly enough, how it is that I despise so 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 
 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 
 a poet of this complexion, if his poetry be shot through and through 
 with animalism as certain stuffs are shot through and through with 
 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 
 utters is symbolic : he is a colossal mystic ; but in s.Vl his great 
 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 
 the highest degree— silly as some of Shakspere's dirt is silly — silly in 
 the way of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Victor Hugo^from sheer excess 
 of aggressive life. Fifty lines, observe, out of a book nearly as big as 
 the Bible ; lines utterly stupid, and unpardonable in themsejves ; but 
 to 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 
 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 
 
 effect. Judging from the internal evidence of these passages, I should 
 say that 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 
 events, here Whitman is tallring nonsense, as is the way of all wise 
 men at some unfortunate moment or other. Elsewhere, he is perhaps 
 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 recom- 
 mendation. 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 
 greatest contribution to knowledge. It is not impossible to foresee a 
 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 
 speech. 
 
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