lies behind its
epigrams. It is not long since the general guess-work assigned
melancholy, without authority, to a poet lately deceased. Real poets, it
was said, are unhappy, and this was one exceptionally real. How unhappy
must he, then, certainly have been! And the blessed Blake himself was
incidentally cited as one of the company of depression and despair! It
is, perhaps, a liking for symmetry that prompts these futile syllogisms;
perhaps, also, it is the fear of human mystery. The biographer used to
see "the finger of God" pat in the history of a man; he insists now that
he shall at any rate see the finger of a law, or rather of a rule, a
custom, a generality. Law I will not call it; there is no intelligible
law that, for example, a true poet should be an unhappy man; but the
observer thinks he has noticed a custom or habit to that effect, and
Blake, who lived and died in bliss, is named at ignorant random, rather
than that an example of the custom should be lost.

But it is not only such a platitude of observation, such a cheap
generality, that is silenced in the presence of the poet whose name is at
the head of these pages. For if ever Nature showed us a poet in whom our
phrases, and the judgements they record, should be denied, defeated, and
confused, Swinburne is he. We predicate of a poet a great sincerity, a
great imagination, a great passion, a great intellect; these are the
master qualities, and yet we are compelled to see here--if we would not
wilfully be blind or blindfold--a poet, yes, a true poet, with a
perfervid fancy rather than an imagination, a poet with puny passions, a
poet with no more than the momentary and impulsive sincerity of an infirm
soul, a poet with small intellect--and thrice a poet.

And, assuredly, if the creative arts are duly humbled in the universal
contemplation of Nature, if they are accused, if they are weighed, if
they are found wanting; if they are excused by nothing but our intimate
human sympathy with dear and interesting imperfection; if poetry stands
outdone by the passion and experience of an inarticulate soul, and
painting by the splendour of the day, and building by the forest and the
cloud, there is another art also that has to be humiliated, and this is
the art and science of criticism, confounded by its contemplation of such
a poet. Poor little art of examination and formula! The miracle of day
and night and immortality are needed to rebuke the nobler art