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In fact I think hostile criticism, fiercely hostile, gave Whitman nearly as much comfort as any other. Did it not attest reality? Men do not brace themselves against shadows. Swinburne's polysyllabic rage showed the force of the current he was trying to stem. As for Swinburne's hydrocephalic muse, I do not think Whitman took any interest in it from the first.
He was at present full of hope. The Poetry of Revolt coloured his imagination to such a degree that he saw himself standing alone and triumphant amid the wreck of the world he had overthrown. He was always protesting that Swinburne's finest line was in the Hymn to Proserpine: "I neither kneel nor adore them, but standing look to the end."
"Shame!" was cried out by one or two of the officers, and I recognised Swinburne's voice as one. "More likely if they put on yours," cried I, in a loud indignant tone. Everybody started, and turned round; Captain Hawkins staggered to a carronade: "I beg to report myself as having rejoined my ship, sir," continued I. "Hurrah, my lads! three cheers for Mr Simple," said Swinburne.
Again, for verse, contrast Paracelsus with The Princess poems written about the same time by friends and colleagues. Compare a poem of William Morris with one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne's Songs and Sonnets with Matthew Arnold's Obermann; Rudyard Kipling's Ballads with The Light of Asia. Have they any common standard of form, any type of metre?
"Stop, me cure him;" and he snatched the stick out of Swinburne's hand, and running up to the man, who continued to roll on the beach, commenced belabouring him without mercy. "Eh, Sambo!" cried he at last, quite out of breath, "you no better yet try again." He recommenced, until at last the man got up and ran away as fast as he could.
But I confess I find it a too long sermon. Swinburne's philosophy and religion were as vague as his vision of the world about him. Mr. Gosse has written Swinburne's life with distinction and understanding; but it was so eventless a life that the biographer's is not an easy task. The book contains plenty of entertainment, however.
Rather than justify the things I have ventured to affirm as to Swinburne's little intellect, and paltry degree of sincerity, and rachitic passion, and tumid fancy judgement-confounding things to predicate of a poet I turn to the happier task of praise.
Literature that draws its sustenance mainly never entirely from the lower level, say a play of Shakespeare's, is translatable without too great a loss of character. If it moves in the upper rather than in the lower level a fair example is a lyric of Swinburne's it is as good as untranslatable. Both types of literary expression may be great or mediocre.
It might be affirmed of many a verse-writer of not unusual talent and insignificance, whose affluence of words was inselective and merely abundant, and whose poverty of thought was something less than a national disaster. Swinburne's failure of intellect was, in the fullest and most serious sense, a national disaster, and his instinct for words was a national surprise.
Carlyle's merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles Lamb, and Swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. Emerson never forgot that he was dealing with human beings.
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