Miscellanies (Swinburne)/Preface
PREFACE.
The brief memoir of Mary Queen of Scots, and the critical monographs on Congreve, Keats, and Landor, which reappear in this volume, have already appeared in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Most of the other articles here reprinted were first published in the Nineteenth Century or the Fortnightly Review. For the miscellaneous character of such a collection the title selected as the only one appropriate must be taken as conveying whatever may be thought requisite of apology or excuse. For the opinions or the expressions of opinion thus republished on literary or other matters I have no such plea to offer in arrest of judgment from any quarter. I have had the honour to be assailed with some vehemence for the disrespect shown in my occasional reference to writers whose ability no rational man could be supposed capable of denying. All belief involves or implies a corresponding disbelief: it is impossible, if words have any meaning, for any one who understands that meaning to assert that he believes in original sin, or the infernal predestination of unregenerate or unchristened infancy, and in the same breath to proclaim his belief in the divine word which affirms that of such as unchristened and unregenerate children is the kingdom of heaven. We may believe in Christ or in Calvin, in St. John or in St. Augustine: but no man can believe in both: for one or the other must needs be a blasphemous liar. And as it is in the highest matters of faith, of hope, and of charity, so is it in matters of opinion, taste, or sympathy. We may heartily appreciate, we may cordially admire, the literary and personal energies of such writers as Byron and Carlyle: but we must recognize that the man who sees a great poet in the histrionic rhapsodist to whom all great poetry was hateful, or a great philosophic and political teacher in the passionate and distempered humourist whose religious ideal was a modified Moloch-worship, and whose political creed found practical expression in the plantations of a slave-owner and the dungeons of a Czar, does rightly or wrongly accept and respect the pretentions of writers who can be acceptable as prophets or respectable as teachers to no man who accepts the traditions of English independence or respects the inheritance of English poetry. On both these points I must confess myself an incurable conservative: I cannot echo the jeer or the lament of Byron, when the finger of his scorn was pointed at Shakespeare or at Milton, and the utterance of his regret for our barbarous violation of rules observed by such superior poets as Alfieri and Voltaire was intensified by the rage of egotism and inflamed by the virulence of envy: I cannot clap or rub my hands with Carlyle over the atrocities inflicted by William of Normandy upon Englishmen or by Nicholas of Russia upon Poles. I am so much a pedant as to prefer Hamlet to Childe Harold, and so much a reactionary as to prefer the teaching of Areopagitica to the teaching of Latterday Pamphlets and I am so narrow-minded a partisan, so short-sighted a sectarian, as to believe a choice between the one creed and the other no less necessary in matters of taste than in matters of principle. From the genius of the eminent writer who chose to make his entry into literary life under the self-selected name of Devilsdung I have derived, if no great amount of durable edification, so much intellectual or physical enjoyment and such keen emotion of sustained and admiring interest, that I am not curious to inquire why it should be considered unbecoming to prefer, in speaking of Swift's most distinguished imitator and most unabashed disciple, the surely more decent and indeed comparatively inoffensive designation of Coprostom or Cloacinus: but when I am reminded by friends or others that my estimate of Byron is far different from the opinion professed by a poet whom I should rank among the greatest of all time, I cannot but avow that my belief in Shelley is not the belief of a papist in his Pope or a bibliolater in his Bible. I may of course be wrong in thinking so lightly as I certainly do think of his critical or judicial faculty; but I cannot consent to overlook or pretend to ignore the significance of the fact that the great poet who bowed down his laurels before Byron's was also proud to acknowledge his inferiority to Moore, and exuberant in the expression of his humility before the superior genius of Leigh Hunt. There is nothing more singular in the character of Shelley than the union of self-devoted and heroic sincerity in all serious matters of action or speculation with an apparent or rather an evident excess of deference to the real or imaginary claims of courtesy or convention when addressing or mentioning an elder or a contemporary poet whose opinions were not on all points discordant or incompatible with his own. I cannot bring myself to believe that he really believed himself inferior as a poet to the authors of The Bride of Abydos, The Loves of the Angels, and The Story of Rimini: but, however this may be, I cannot understand why his opinion on any one of these authors should be held as more important, accepted as more sincere, admitted as more serious, than his opinion on the others. And if my incredulity does injustice to the scrupulosity of his truthfulness, I can only conclude that as surely as there has seldom been a poet of greater or of equal genius, so surely has there seldom been a critic of greater or of equal imbecility. For in his case we find no such explanation of the inexplicable as in the case of the distinguished living poet and critic, theologian and philosopher, whose practical definition of criticism would seem to be 'a something not ourselves, making for paradox.' The smiling academic irony of Mr. Matthew Arnold forbids us to consider too curiously the erratic and eccentric vehemence of misjudgment which seems at first sight a quality not properly belonging—not conceivable as natural or as native—to the same identity or individuality as that of an exquisite and original poet. But if the author of Thyrsis be the real Mr. Arnold, I cannot avoid the inference that the critic who places Byron above Shelley and Wordsworth above Coleridge is something not himself—something, shall we say, definable as a stream of tendency making for unrighteousness in criticism and inconsistent with righteousness in poetry? Be that as it may, the value and authority of Shelley's critical opinion may be gauged by the conclusive evidence of this damning fact—that he could trace no sign of Shakespeare's hand in the style of The Two Noble Kinsmen; a play in which the master's peculiar touch is as unmistakable by any competent reader as it is in Pericles; or, for that matter, as it is in Hamlet. The man who could venture to say, 'I do not believe Shakespeare wrote a word of it,' is simply out of court as a judge of composition or of style. To acknowledge this is no more inconsistent with appreciation of Shelley's greatness than it is inconsistent with appreciation of another great poet's pre-eminence to recognize that Coleridge was one of the most untrustworthy of verbal critics—that some of the various emendations or suggestions in his notes on the text of Shakespeare and others are on a level with the worst ever proposed by the most presumptuous futility of the most preposterous among commentators. And yet no sane or candid student will question the incomparable value of Coleridge's finest critical work. Such a student, whether of literature or of history, will do his best, by the light of such faculties as nature may have given him, to see what are and what are not the worse and the better qualities, the weakness and the strength, the unwisdom and the wisdom, the ignoble and the honourable aspects of any character or of any work which he may undertake to examine and to judge. Nor will he care overmuch whether impertinence and folly may or may not misread and misrepresent his conclusions or his words. The question, for instance, with regard to Mary Stuart, is not whether it is better or worse to commit murder and adultery than to be a coward and a fool, but whether a person brought up where adultery and murder were regarded less as mortal than as venial sins, and less as venial sins than as social distinctions, is likely to be unaffected by the atmosphere of such an education, or is as culpably responsible for its results as either a woman or a man would be for absolute and scandalous deficiency in wellnigh the only virtue which even in that society was unanimously exacted and esteemed. To confound the statement of this question with acceptance or approval of the views on ethical matters which were then and there prevalent would be the veriest lunacy of rabid error; to affect such a misconstruction, and to use it as a plea or a handle for disingenuous attack, would be the veriest dotage of drivelling inso. lence. Reserving always as unquestionable and indisputable the primal and instinctive truths of æsthetics as of ethics, of art as of character, of poetry as of conduct, we are bound under penalty of preposterous failure, of self-convicted and self-conscious injustice, to take into full and fair account the circumstances of time and accident which affected for better or for worse the subjects of our moral or critical sentence. The best and the greatest are not above or beyond the need of such consideration; and some due allowance of it, not sufficient to disturb the balance of our judgment or derange the verdict of our conscience, should possibly be extended to the meanest and the worst.