158 SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 



be a poet, no doubt ; but to be a new poet is to feel and to utter 

 that immanent life of things without which the utmost perfection 

 of mere form is at best only wax or marble. He who can do 

 both is the great poet. 



Over * Chastelard, a Tragedy, we need not spend much time. 

 It is at best but the school exercise of a young poet learning to 

 write, and who reproduces in his copy-book, more or less traves 

 tied, the copy that has been set for him at the page s head by 

 the authors he most admires. Grace and even force of expres 

 sion are not wanting, but there is the obscurity which springs 

 from want of definite intention; the characters are vaguely out 

 lined from memory, not drawn firmly from the living and the 

 nude in actual experience of life; the working of passion is an 

 a priori abstraction from a scheme in the author s mind; and 

 there is no thought, but only a vehement grasping after thought. 

 The hand is the hand of Swinburne, but the voice is the voice 

 of Browning. With here and there a pure strain of sentiment, 

 a genuine touch of nature, the effect of the whole is unpleasant 

 with the faults of the worst school of modern poetry the 

 physically intense school, as we should be inclined to call it, of 

 which Mrs. Browning s Aurora Leigh is the worst example, 

 whose muse is a fast young woman with the lavish ornament 

 and somewhat overpowering perfume of the demi-monde, and 

 which pushes expression to the last gasp of sensuous exhaustion. 

 They forget that convulsion is not energy, and that words, to 

 hold fire, must first catch it from vehement heat of thought, 

 while no artificial fervours of phrase can make the charm work 

 backward to kindle the mind of writer or reader. An over 

 mastering passion no longer entangles the spiritual being of its 

 victim in the burning toils of a retribution fore-doomed in its 

 own nature, purifying us with the terror and pity of a soul in its 

 extremity, as the great masters were wont to set it before us; 

 no, it must be fleshly, corporeal, must bite with small white 

 teeth and draw blood, to satisfy the craving of our modern in 

 quisitors, who torture language instead of wooing it to confess 

 the secret of its witchcraft. That books written on this theory 

 should be popular, is one of the worst signs of the times ; that 

 they should be praised by the censors of literature shows how 

 seldom criticism goes back to first principles, or is even aware 

 of them how utterly it has forgotten its most earnest function of 

 demolishing the high places where the unclean rites of Baal and 

 Ashtaroth usurp on the worship of the one only True and Pure. 



Atalanta in Calydon is in every respect better than its 



