s; but our
art, the critic's, mine to-day, is brought to book, and its heart is
broken, and its sincerity disgraced, by the paradoxes of the truth. Not
in the heavens nor in the sub-celestial landscape does this minor art
find its refutation, but in the puzzle between a man and his gift; and in
part the man is ignoble and leads us by distasteful paths, and compels us
to a reluctant work of literary detection. Useful is the critical
spirit, but it loses heart when (to take a very definite instance) it has
to ask what literary sincerity--what value for art and letters--lived in
Swinburne, who hailed a certain old friend, in a dedication, as "poet and
painter" when he was pleased with him, and declared him "poetaster and
dauber" when something in that dead man's posthumous autobiography
offended his own self-love; when, I say, criticism finds itself called
upon, amid its admiration, to do such scavenger work, it loses heart as
well as the clue, and would gladly go out into the free air of greater
arts, and, with them, take exterior Nature's nobler reprobation.

I have to cite this instance of a change of mind, or of terms and titles,
in Swinburne's estimate of art and letters, because it is all-important
to my argument. It is a change he makes in published print, and,
therefore, no private matter. And I cite it, not as a sign of moral
fault, with which I have no business, but as a sign of a most significant
literary insensibility--insensibility, whether to the quality of a
poetaster when he wrote "poet," or to that of a poet when he wrote
"poetaster," is of no matter.

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. A vivid
writer of English was he, and would have been one of the recurring
renewers of our often-renewed and incomparable language, had his words
not become habitual to himself, so that they quickly lost the light, the
breeze, the breath; one whose fondness for beauty deserved the serious
name of love; one whom beauty at times favoured and filled so visibly, by
such obvious visits and possessions, favours so manifest, that inevitably
we forget we are speaking fictions and allegories, and imagine her a
visiting power exterior to her poet; a man, moreover, of a less, not
more, than manly receptiveness an