There is probably some foundation for the belief, often held in these days, that the production of high poetry is becoming more difficult, partly because the environment of modern civilisation lends itself less and less to artistic treatment, as mechanism supersedes human effort, and partly through the operation of other causes. It has been plausibly argued that most things worth saying have been said already; that even the words best fitted for poetic expression have been worn out, have been weakened by familiar usage or soiled by misuse, and that the resources of language for adequate presentation of ideas and feelings are running very low. Nevertheless, we all look forward hopefully to the coming of the original genius who is to strike a fresh note and inaugurate a new era, as pious Mohammedans expect another Imam. Yet his coming may not be in our time, and meanwhile the poetic lamp is burning dimly; it is just kept alight by the a.s.siduous tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of the disciples of the great men who have pa.s.sed or are pa.s.sing away, by the minor poets who strike a few musical chords that catch the ear, but who are not recalled by the audience when they have played their part and left the stage. The stars that shone in the bright constellation of Victorian poets have been setting one by one, until two only remain of those who were the pride of the generation to which they belong, for whom we may predict that they will hold a permanent place in English literature. It is now nearly sixty years since Mr. Meredith"s first poems were published. Mr. Swinburne is about ten years his junior, both in age and in authorship; one may perhaps a.s.sume that the work upon which their reputations will rest is finished for both of them. Mr. Meredith"s poetry has very recently been the subject of a very complete and sympathetic study by Mr.
George Trevelyan. In this article we shall make an attempt to delineate, briefly of necessity and therefore inadequately, the characteristic qualities of form and thought, the technical methods and intellectual temperament which distinguish the younger poet, who may be destined to be the last survivor of an ill.u.s.trious company.
If we accept the theory that art, like nature, follows the principle of continuous development, that its existing state is closely linked with its past, it is not easy to affiliate Mr. Swinburne to any direct literary predecessors. Undoubtedly we may a.s.sign to him poetical kinship with Sh.e.l.ley; he has the same love for cla.s.sical myths and allegories, for the embodiment of nature in the beautiful figures of the antique. Light and shade, a quiet landscape, a tumultuous storm, stir him with the same sensuous emotion. He has Sh.e.l.ley"s pa.s.sion for the sea; he is fond of invoking the old divinities who presided over the fears, hopes, and desires of mankind. He has also Sh.e.l.ley"s rebellious temper, the unflinching revolt against dogmatic authority and fundamental beliefs which rightly shocked our grandfathers in "Queen Mab" and a few other poems; he is even less disposed than Sh.e.l.ley to the hypocrisy which does unwilling homage to virtue. On the other hand, Mr. Swinburne"s pantheism has not Sh.e.l.ley"s metaphysical note; the conception of an indwelling spirit guiding and moulding the phenomenal world has dropped out; there is no pure idealism of this sort in Mr. Swinburne"s verse.
It may be said, truly, that some of Mr. Swinburne"s poetry shows the influence of the later French Romanticists, of the reaction toward mediaevalism which is represented in England by Scott, and which culminated in France with Victor Hugo, for whom the English poet"s admiration is unmeasured. That movement, however, had almost ceased on our side of the Channel at the time when it had reached, or was just pa.s.sing, its climax in France. And, indeed, by 1835 the style and sentiment of English poetry was undergoing a remarkable change. Its magnificent efflorescence, which the first quarter of the nineteenth century had seen in full bloom, had faded away. It had sprung up in an era of great wars and revolution, amid the struggles of nations to shake off the incubus of despotisms, to free themselves from the yoke of foreigners. The cause of political liberty inspired the n.o.blest verse of Sh.e.l.ley, Coleridge, and Byron:
Yet Freedom, yet, thy banner, torn but flying, Streams like a thunderstorm against the wind--"
But in England this ardent spirit had evaporated during the years of industrial prosperity and mechanical progress which came in with a long peace after twenty years of fighting; and during the next generation a milder tone prevailed. For an interval we had only second-rate artists in verse. The fiery enthusiasts, the despisers of respectability, were succeeded by poets who were decently emotional, pensive in thought, tame or affected in style, domestic in theme, with feeble echoes of the true romantic note in Mrs. Hemans and others.
Next, in the fulness of time, came Tennyson and Browning, to raise the level of English poetry by their deeper views of life, their elevation of thought, and their incomparably greater imaginative power. Tennyson"s composition is pellucid and exquisitely refined.
Browning is rugged and often obscure; he cares more for the force than for the form of expression. The great problems of religion and politics are seriously and cautiously handled. Browning a.n.a.lyses them with caustic irony, while Tennyson, after making vain attempts to solve them, finds consolation in the "Higher Pantheism." They are soon joined by Matthew Arnold and Clough, who represent the melancholy resignation of sensitive minds that have discarded the creeds, for whom the miraculous history of Christianity is an illusion that has faded into the common light of day. Meredith, poet and novelist, falls back upon communion with Nature; he preaches the doctrine of duty, of working while the light lasts; he is a high moralist who accepts stoically the conclusion that nothing beyond terrestrial existence is knowable.
Thus Mr. Swinburne"s elder contemporaries and precursors in poetry were all in different modes and fashions optimists; at any rate in their earlier writings. They stood outside the Churches; dogmatic beliefs they tacitly put away; they were in sympathy with the Christian ideal apart from its supernatural element; they professed a vague trust in an unseen Power, chequered here and there by intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal a.s.sault upon the central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of love, often pa.s.sionate, never erotic, no tearing aside of drapery, not a line to scare modesty. In Tennyson"s most impa.s.sioned lyrics the princ.i.p.al figure is the broken-hearted lover, jilted by Cousin Amy, or caught in the garden with Maud--with intentions strictly honourable in both cases. The treatment of love by Browning and Meredith is chiefly psychological; they are usually concerned with the tragic situations that it can involve, though the comic aspect of s.e.xual infatuation occasionally provokes cynicism. In politics all these poets are no friends to democracy or seething radicalism; they adore liberty, yet they are votaries of law and order; they have a hatred of misrule, and generally a cheerful confidence in the world"s evolution toward better things. On social ethics the poets of the mid-Victorian period wrote with philosophic sobriety; they maintained a strict moral standard. In their wildest emotional flights they abstained from irreverence or indecorum. They undoubtedly represented the prevailing cast of thought, the taste and tendencies of the society to which they belonged; the growing scepticism, the influence on established ideas of advancing science and philosophy. Literature had been showing distinct signs of sympathy with these novelties, but in the early "sixties an open revolt was generally discountenanced.
Mr. Swinburne"s first publications were two historic plays, of which something will be said hereafter. In 1864 he turned suddenly from modern history to ancient legend for his dramatic subject, when he aroused immediate attention by _Atalanta in Calydon_, which reproduced the structure and metrical arrangement of a Greek tragedy. The dialogue has the purity of tone, the clear-cut concision that belong to its h.e.l.lenic model. At the beginning we have a joyous chant full of sound and colour, gradually changing into the elegiac strain of foreboding, the dread of pitiless divinities, the lamentation for the hero"s unmerited fate. The exquisite modulations of the verse, the splendid choral antiphonies captivated all who were susceptible to the enchantment of poetry. The delicate adaptation of the English language to quant.i.tative harmonies in high resonant lyrics showed extraordinary skill in the difficult enterprise of communicating the charm and cadences of the antique masterpieces. It is a heroic drama, severe in style and character as the _Antigone_ of Sophocles. Then in 1865 came _Chastelard_, conceived and partly written, as Mr. Swinburne has told us, when he was yet at Oxford, a play in which he turns from the Greek tragedians to rejoin the historical dramatists. The turn is abrupt, for no character could have been more alien to the Greek notions of heroism than that of the love-sick knight who joyfully throws away his life for an hour in his lady"s chamber, tears up the warrant reprieving him from execution, and accepts death to save Queen Mary"s fragile reputation. But although the keynote of Mr. Swinburne"s coming poetry is struck in _Chastelard_--the overpowering enthralment of Love, a joy to live and die for--
"The mistress and mother of pleasure, The one thing as certain as death"--
yet it gave the British public no fair warning of what followed almost immediately.
Into the midst of a well-regulated, self-respecting modern society, much moved by Tennyson"s "Idylls," and altogether sympathetic with the misfortunes of the blameless king--justly appreciative of the domestic affection so tenderly portrayed by Coventry Patmore"s "Angel in the House"--Mr. Swinburne charged impetuously with his _Poems and Ballads_, waving the banner of revolt against conventional reticence, kicking over screens and rending drapery--a reckless votary of Astarte, chanting the "Laus Veneris" and the worship of "Dolores, Our Lady of Pain." From the calm and bright aspect of paganism he is turning toward its darker side, to the mystic rites and symbolism which cloaked the fierce primitive impulses of the natural man. The burden of these first poems is chiefly the bitter sweetness of love, the sighs and transports of those who writhe in the embrace of the dread G.o.ddess, known by many names in all lands, or the glory of man"s brief springtide, when the veins are hot, soon to be cooled and covered by frost and fallen leaves. In the clear ringing stanzas of the "Triumph of Time," who sweeps away the brief summer of lovers"
delight, bringing them to autumnal regrets "for days that are over and dreams that are done," and lastly to wintry oblivion, we have almost a surfeit of voluptuous melancholy. In this, as in other poems, the sea, changeful in mood, alternately fair and fierce, a bright smiling surface covering a thousand graves, fascinating and treacherous, is the mythical Aphrodite, the fatal woman, merciless to men. All this is set out in lyrics which amaze the reader by their exuberance of language, profusion of metaphor, and cla.s.sic allusion; in rhymes that strike on the ear like the clashing of cymbals. It is as if Atys and his wild Maenads were flying through the quiet English woodlands. The long-drawn, undulating lines, in a quieter strain, of the "Hymn to Proserpine" and of "Hesperia," with their subtle music, lay the reader under their charm; but too many of these poems are tainted by a flavour of morbidity, and the average Englishman is not easily thrown by the most potent spells into a state of amorous delirium.
It is not surprising, therefore, that this first volume of poems, saturated with intoxicating Hedonism, had, as Mr. Swinburne wrote in the Dedicatory Preface appended to the full collection of his works, "as quaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard or read of." The eruption of neo-paganism was sudden and unexpectedly violent--the rumblings of scientific and philosophic scepticism had given no warning of a volcanic explosion in this direction. The current literature of 1865 was much more prudish and less outspoken than it is at the present day; the gentlemanly licentiousness of Byron"s time had been completely suppressed; the moral tone of the middle cla.s.s was still outwardly Puritanic. English folk were by no means prepared to rebuild the altars of the primitive deities who presided over man"s unquenchable desire, or to be otherwise than somewhat aghast at the invocations of Astarte or Ashtaroth, or the cry to Our Lady of Pain, the "n.o.ble and nude and antique." The result was that the first edition of the _Poems and Ballads_ was withdrawn, though they were reissued in the same year, when Mr. Swinburne published a reply to his critics. Nevertheless, although the graver and, we may say, the higher judges of what was admissible to a nineteenth-century poet were entirely against him, it cannot be denied that the impulsive youth of that generation felt the enchantment of Mr. Swinburne"s intoxicating love-potions--were sorely tempted to dash down Tennyson on the drawing-room table, and to join the wild dance round the shrine of Aphrodite Pandemia.
In the _Poems and Ballads_ Mr. Swinburne keeps on some terms, so to speak, with theology. In the poem ent.i.tled "A Litany" the Lord G.o.d discourses with Biblical sternness to His people, who tremble before Him, and threatens them with "the inevitable h.e.l.l," while the people implore mercy--a strange excursion into the Semitic desert out of the flowery field of paganism. And another poem is a pathetic rendering of the story of St. Dorothy, a Christian martyr. It is true that he looks back with aesthetic regret to the triumph of Christianity over the picturesque polytheism, and that perhaps the finest poem in this volume is the "Hymn to Proserpine," where a votary of the ancient divinities confesses sorrowfully that a new and austere faith has triumphed, but predicts that its kingdom will not last, will decline and fall like the empire of the elder G.o.ds--
"All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pa.s.s and be past; Ye are G.o.ds, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things, Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings."
The "Hymn to Proserpine" is a fine conception of the champion of a lost cause standing unmoved among the ruins of his Pantheon. But the quiet dignity of his att.i.tude is marred by the lines in which the votary of fair forms turns with loathing from the new faith which has conquered by the blood and agony of saints and martyrs. The violent invective is like a red streak across the canvas of a picturesque and highly imaginative composition. Yet if he had been reminded that Lucretius, standing in the midst of paganism, sternly denounced the evils and cruelties of religion, Mr. Swinburne would probably have replied that the Roman poet, could he have been born again fourteen or fifteen centuries later in his native country, would have found these evils enormously increased, and that the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Aulis was as nothing to the hecatombs of the Inquisition.
His intense imagination summons up a bright and luxurious vision of the pre-Christian civilisation in Greece and Rome, as yet little affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts, by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well to follow the example, in this respect, of these great masters of his own art; since his early defects and excesses are mainly due to his having missed their lesson by disregarding the limitations which they scrupulously observed.
When he reissued the _Poems and Ballads_, Mr. Swinburne took occasion, as we have said, to reply, in a pamphlet, to the strictures and strong protests which they had aroused. He was at some trouble to discover the pa.s.sages or phrases "that had drawn down such sudden thunder from the serene heavens of public virtue": he was comically puzzled to comprehend why the reviewers were scandalised. He trampled with sarcasm and scorn upon canting critics, and retorted that the prurient prudery of their own minds suggested the impurities which they found in works of pure art. There is nothing, he insists, lovelier, as there is nothing more famous in later h.e.l.lenic art, than the statue of Hermaphroditus, yet his translation of a sculptured poem into written verse has given offence! One might reply that a subject which is irreproachable, on the score of purity, in cold marble, may take a very different colour when it is dilated upon in burning verse.
The controversy had its humorous side; but we have no intention of stirring up again the smoke and fire of battles fought long ago. Mr.
Swinburne held his ground defiantly, and the appearance of _Songs and Ballads_, published in 1871, showed no signs of contrition, or of concession to inveterate prejudices. In the course of the intervening five years the empire of Napoleon III. had fallen with a mighty crash; Italy had been united under one Italian dynasty; Garibaldi had become famous, and the Papal States had been absorbed into the Italian kingdom. This volume, which was dedicated to Joseph Mazzini, shows the ardent enthusiasm for the triumph of liberty, intellectual and political, which runs through all Mr. Swinburne"s poetry. The "Song of the Standard," the "Halt before Rome," the "Marching Song," the "Insurrection of Candia," are poems that reflect current events; and the "Litany of Nations" is the national anthem of peoples striving for freedom. But his verse rises to its highest pitch of exultation in the glorification of emanc.i.p.ation of Man. The final line of the "Hymn to Man" is
"Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things";
and in one stanza of "Hertha" is condensed all the wild declamation against deities and despots that pervades his poetry at this stage, with his joy in the deification of humanity:
"A creed is a rod, And a crown is of night; But this thing is G.o.d, To be man with thy might, To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life As the light."
There are no love-lyrics in this volume. He now stands forth as the uncompromising enemy of established religions, a fierce a.s.sailant of tyrannies, spiritual or temporal, an iconoclast who denounces churches and tabernacles, priests and kings, the Roman Pope and the Jewish Jehovah; one for whom the Papacy is, as it was to Hobbes, the Kingdom of Darkness, its record blotted with tears and stained with blood, the "grey spouse of Satan," as he styled her in a later poem, sitting by a fire that is fed with the bones of her victims. From this time forward he declares open war upon theology, and even upon Theism; he is the mortal foe of bigots and tyrants; his praise is for Giordano Bruno, for Pelagius the British monk, born by the northern sea; for Voltaire, for all who have fought and suffered in the cause of intellectual emanc.i.p.ation. The prevailing religious beliefs seem to him relics of mediaeval superst.i.tion, sophistry, and metaphysic--he contrasts them with the bright and free nature worship of the old world; he is a bitter enemy of the lofty spiritualism, the mighty world-religion, before which the fair humanities of the _juventus mundi_ had faded away. His delight is in the virile qualities of the earlier civilisations, the patriotism, the heroic temper, the ardour for civic liberties, the h.e.l.lenic delight in n.o.ble form and in physical beauty. He is fretted by the restraint which Christian authority imposes upon the unruly affections of sinful men; he scorns the terrors of judgment to come, the prostration of the mult.i.tude before the threat of eternal punishment, and the promise of celestial recompense for terrestrial misery. Death is the "sleep eternal in an eternal night"; and the one thing as certain as death is pleasure. He is the prophet of Hedonism; he is for giving the pa.s.sions a loose rein, for drinking the wine of rapture to the lees before we lie
"Deep in dim death, beneath the gra.s.s Where no thought stings."
Nevertheless, as the years go on, the note of regret and despair quiets down, the restless spirit of the poet is subdued to the calmer influences of nature; the charm of scenery, the a.s.sociation of places with memories more frequently bring softer inspirations. In his earlier poems his imaginative power found full scope in rendering the impressions of natural beauty, the glory of elemental strife; as in the "Songs of the Four Seasons," where the approach of a storm from the sea is likened to a descent of the Norse pirates on to the peaceful coast, and the metaphor produces a spirited picture:
"As men"s cheeks faded On sh.o.r.es invaded When sh.o.r.ewards waded The lords of fight; When churl and craven Saw hard on haven The wide-winged raven At mainmast height; When monks affrighted To windward sighted The birds full-flighted Of swift sea-kings; So earth turns paler When Storm the sailor Steers in with a roar in the race of his wings."
But more frequently the outlook on sea and land induces reverie, vague yearnings, retrospective sadness, and, like all true artists, he transposes into the landscape his own personal emotions, what he sees, feels, and remembers. In the poem of "Hesperia" the view of the sunset over the sea stirs tender memories; the "deep-tide wind blowing in with the water" seems to be wafting his absent love back to him, and his heart floats out toward her "as the refluent seaweed moves in the languid exuberant stream." In such pieces the fierce amorous obsession has been shaken off; he is no longer vexed by Shakespeare"s[32]
hyperbolic fiend, his mood is comparatively gentle and pathetic, as in the beautiful verses of "A Forsaken Garden," where his consummate faculty of metrical expression, wherein sense and sound are matched and inseparable, reaches, perhaps, its highest watermark:
"Over the meadows that blossom and wither Rings but the note of a sea-bird"s song; Only the sun and the rain come hither All year long."
In the series of landscape sketches grouped under the t.i.tle of _A Midsummer Holiday_, published nearly twenty years after the _Poems and Ballads_, the treatment of his subject has become more impersonal. The impression or idea is still coloured by transmission through the spectator"s mind. Mr. Swinburne has himself observed, very truly, that
"mere descriptive poetry of the prepense and formal kind is exceptionally liable to incur and to deserve the charge of dulness: it is unnecessary to emphasise or obtrude the personal note, the presence or emotion of a spectator, but it is necessary to make it felt and keep it perceptible if the poem is to have life in it or even a right to live."[33]
This is the right doctrine, and we may add that it is applicable as a criticism to some of his earlier descriptive pieces, where the intense personal feeling is somewhat too intense and disproportionate; so that a reader gifted with less keenness of sensibility is disconcerted by insistence on effusive moods with which he cannot be expected to be in full sympathy. Mr. Swinburne might reply that for such dullards he does not write; but the finest wines are too heady for a morning"s draught. In his more mature poems he appears to have deliberately held back what may be termed the subjective emotion; the landscapes are no longer peopled by figures or memories of the past; the thoughts which they suggest are such as find response in all minds that are in accord with the deeper and more subtle relations of human life to its environment. He himself has indeed told us[34] that to many of his studies of English land and sea no intimacy of years and no a.s.sociation with the past has given any colour of emotion, that only so much of the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the sterile sh.o.r.e, or the raging of the sea. The _Midsummer Holiday_ group has two pictures of sweet homeliness--"The Mill Garden" and "On a Country Road"--the harvest of a quiet eye (in Wordsworth"s phrase), such as a rambling artist might jot down in his travelling sketch book, of value the more remarkable because they are not in Mr.
Swinburne"s usual manner. They give relief to the breadth and grandeur of the other descriptions of the ocean, the crags, and the storms. For to Swinburne, as to all the romantic English poets, the ocean stream which encircles their island is an inexhaustible source of delight and pride; it is our ever present defence in time of trouble; the fountain of our country"s wealth and honour; it is our traditional battlefield; the winds and the waves are the breath and the force of our national being. And through Mr. Swinburne"s poetry runs a vein of undiluted love for his native land. In his poem "On the South Coast" he looks out from "the green, smooth-swelling downs" over the broad blue water, and his thought is expressed in its final stanza:
Fair and dear is the land"s face here, and fair man"s work as a man"s may be: Dear and fair as the sunbright air is here the record that speaks him free; Free by birth of a sacred earth, and regent ever of all the sea."
The "Autumn Vision" is an ode to the south-west wind, which has so often filled the sails of the English warships:
"Wind beloved of earth and sky and sea beyond all winds that blow, Wind whose might in fight was England"s on her mightiest warrior day, South-west wind, whose breath for her was life, and fire to scourge her foe, Steel to smite and death to drive him down an unreturning way, Well-beloved and welcome, sounding all the clarions of the sky, Rolling all the marshalled waters toward the charge that storms the sh.o.r.e."
Charles Kingsley, like a hardy Norseman, preferred the north-east gale. To him the south-west wind is
"The ladies" breeze, Bringing back their lovers Out of all the seas,"
while Mr. Swinburne hears in the rushing south-western gale
"the sound of wings gigantic, Wings whose measure is the measure of the measureless Atlantic,"
and, after the storm,
"The grim sea swell, grey, sleepless and sad as a soul estranged."
"A Swimmer"s Dream" gives us the poetry of floating on the slow roll of the waves, some cloudy November morning.
"Dawn is dim on the dark soft water, Soft and pa.s.sionate, dark and sweet."
"Loch Torridon" preserves the charm of what might be a landlocked lake, if it were not that the rippling tide flows in by an almost invisible inlet from the sea. From his earliest to his latest poems the magic of nature"s changing aspects fascinates him; they inspire him with a kind of ecstasy that finds utterance in the variety of his verse, which reflects all the lights and shades of earth, sea, and atmosphere. One may remark, by the way, that in proportion as his poetic strength matures, the pagan G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, who disported themselves so freely in his juvenile verse, visit him much more rarely; his imagery draws much less profusely upon the cla.s.sic mythology for symbols and figures of divinities whose diaphanous robes are ill suited to our northern climate and Puritanic traditions, in the wolds and forests once sacred to Thor and Woden.
It will be admitted by Mr. Swinburne"s least indulgent critics that his poetry displays throughout a marvellous power of execution. He runs over all the lyrical and elegiac chords with unabated facility; his metrical variations and musical phrasing bring out and extend the capacity and fertility of our language as a poetic instrument; he is master of his materials. No doubt there is some repet.i.tion, some iteration, which becomes slightly wearisome, of his favourite rhymes, indicating, what has been observed independently of reference to this particular writer, that the resources of the English language for terminal a.s.sonance, under the stringent conditions required by the modern rules of versification, are inevitably limited and show signs of exhaustion.
In a Note on Poetry appended to his latest volume of verses,[35] Mr.
John Davidson has cla.s.sed rhyme as a kind of disease of poetry. Rhyme, he says, is probably more than seven hundred years old--in Europe, he must mean, for it is far older in Asia, whence it originally came--and since the days of the troubadours and Minnesingers it has corrupted, in his opinion, the ear of the world. At best it is, he thinks, a decadent mode, imposing shackles on free poetic expression; and though in these fetters great poets have done magnificent work, in their finest rhymed verse he finds a feeling of effort. They have always been obliged to throw in something that need not have been said, some words inserted under compulsion, to bring the rhyme about.
Mr. Davidson declares that the true glory of free untrammelled poetry shines out in the rhythmic periods of blank verse. That there may be some truth, or at least some convenience, in this theory of the poetic art, the modern poet may not be concerned to deny; for, as we have already said, rhymes will not withstand incessant and familiar usage; they become commonplaces, and the rhymer wanders away from the natural direction of his thought in search of fresh ones. The most devout admirers of Browning must admit that his verse is often distorted in this way--so that a fine stanza sometimes finishes with a jolt and ends with a tag--and it must be allowed that this necessity of making both ends meet is bad for the poetic conscience, a temptation to indefensible laxities. Even Mr. Swinburne, the inventor of exquisite harmonies, whose work is indisputably sincere, can be occasionally observed to be diverging from the straight line of his impetuous flight, hovering and making circuits that lead up skilfully to the indispensable rhyme. More frequently, perhaps, there is a tendency to interpose some metaphor, or rather far-fetched allusion, for the sake of the clear, full, recurrent intonation of echoing words that can only be marshalled into their places by artistic ingenuity.