no general grief on Saturday.
Swinburne had written for fifty years, and never once moved the nation,
save inimically, when "Poems and Ballads" came near to being burnt
publicly by the hangman. (By "the nation," I mean newspaper readers. The
real nation, busy with the problem of eating, dying, and being born all in
one room, has never heard of either Tennyson or Swinburne or George R.
Sims.) There are poems of Tennyson, of Wordsworth, even of the speciously
recondite Browning, that have entered into the general consciousness. But
nothing of Swinburne's! Swinburne had no moral ideas to impart. Swinburne
never publicly yearned to meet his Pilot face to face. He never galloped
on one of Lord George Sanger's horses from Aix to Ghent. He was interested
only in ideal manifestations of beauty and force. Except when he grieved
the judicious by the expression of political crudities, he never connected
art with any form of morals that the British public could understand. He
sang. He sang supremely. And it wasn't enough for the British public. The
consequence was that his fame spread out as far as under-graduates, and
the tiny mob of under-graduates was the largest mob that ever worried
itself about Swinburne. Their shouts showed the high-water mark of his
popularity. When one of them wrote in a facetious ecstasy over "Dolores,"

_But you came, O you procuratores_
_And ran us all in!_

that moment was the crown of Swinburne's career as a popular author. With
its incomparable finger on the public pulse the _Daily Mail_, on the day
when it announced Swinburne's death, devoted one of its placards to the
performances of a lady and a dog on a wrecked liner, and another to the
antics of a lunatic with a revolver. The _Daily Mail_ knew what it was
about. Do not imagine that I am trying to be sardonic about the English
race and its organs. Not at all. The English race is all right, though
ageing now. The English race has committed no crime in demanding from its
poets something that Swinburne could not give. I am merely trying to make
clear the exceeding strangeness of the apparition of a poet like Swinburne
in a place like England.

Last year I was walking down Putney Hill, and I saw Swinburne for the
first and last time. I could see nothing but his face and head. I did not
notice those ridiculously short trousers that Putney people invariably
mention when mentioning Swinburne. Never have I seen a man's life more
clearly wr