PREFACE
whose slight claims as poet were set forth and disallowed by Mr. Swinburne in 1867.[1] Either this or an unwise desire to pose as literary censor, mixed with and marred by immedicable envy of the men he singled out for reprobation, seems to us the secret source of irritation lying back of the entire controversy.[2]
Under the Microscope was written in the plenitude of Swinburne's poetic powers: unequalled for bitterness, save by some of Swift's murderous pamphlets, it is never uncritical nor, provocation considered, unjust. Its justification should be sought—if sought at all—in the effect Buchanan's mendacious essay produced upon Rossetti. It is certain that this arraignment of his motives embittered the great poet's life and was the direct cause of the suppression of one imperishable sonnet and the re-writing of several others in The House of Life. No greater
- ↑ See Matthew Arnold's New Poems by A. C. Swinburne in the Fortnightly Review for October, 1867, since re-issued in his Essays and Studies (1875).
- ↑ The animus against his brother, according to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, should be regarded as a vicarious expression of resentment at the following remark which opened his review entitled Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, a Criticism (1866): "The advent of a new great poet is sure to cause a commotion of one kind or another; and it would be hard were this otherwise in times like ours, when the advent of even so poor and pretentious a poetaster as a Robert Buchanan stirs storms in teapots." (Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir by W. M. Rossetti. London, 1895. Vol. I, p. 294.)
Buchanan from the beginning appears to have indulged a penchant for ridiculing his fellow poets. See Appendix I.
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