it. own is we doubt if Mr. Swinburne ever placed himself to greater disadvantage than in the position of critic to that thoughtful and equal-minded poet. It is not that he makes very many false criticisms on his special subject, most of them are true, and many brilliantly expressed, but that while his critical eye is often true, he never for a moment falls into the mood of true criticism, the mood in which you feel that the critic is surrendering himself, so far as he can without unfaithfulness to his inner judgment, to the overruling control of another's imagination or thought. There barely a single sentence written in this mood through the entire article. When Mr. Swinburne praises, which he often does with great force, you feel that he is trying to cap the quality he is praising by the brilliance of the language in which he describes Never for a complete sentence, seldom for half a sentence, do lose the excitable you personality of the critic. Like a hummingbird, he dashes about among the blossoms of the author whom he panegyrizes, vying with them in colour, and restlessly displaying his own wonderful activity as well. There is, too, an odious strut in his style which will seldom let you forget the vanity of his brilliant sayings in their truth and aptness. If he rises into eloquence, as he often does, he is not content till he rises out of it again into that harsh, shrill, peculiar note, like the peacock's dissonant cry, which drowns the note proper to his subject, and racks the ear with its discord. The essay abounds in happy sayings, spoiled by this dissonant and impatient treble, in which you seem to hear Mr. Swinburne's feverish desire to surpass the excellences he criticizes. This, at the best, is not criticism, for you are never for a moment left with your " eye simply on the object." Directly the critic's eye rests for an instant on his object, he sets to work to bring such a battery of fireworks to play on the point in question, that he and everybody else thinks a great deal more of the irridescent lights than of the thing illuminated. If he cannnot succeed, as he often can, in getting up a much more exciting display on the outside of the show by his description, than those who go in to look at it themselves will find, he goes out of the way to say something irrelevant in a note, the only function of which is to startle or challenge. A more successful intellectual irritant than Mr. Swinburne's criticisms we do not ever remember to have met with. When we agree with him most entirely, and admire his unwonted power of expression most deeply, we are perhaps even more chafed by his shrill falsetto climax than we are when he tauntingly drags us aside into the private audience of a note, only in order to stick a pin into us. Nothing could be finer or truer, for instance, than this on Wordsworth: His concentration, his majesty, his pathos have no parallel; some have gone higher, many lower, none have touched precisely the same point as he; some poets have had more of all these qualities, and better; none have had exactly his gift. His pathos, for instance, cannot chant, and not tender; it is an iron pathos. be matched against any other man's; it is trenTake, for example, the most passionate of his poems, the "Affliction of Margaret;" it is hard and fiery, dry and persistent as the agony of a lonely and a common soul which endures through life a suffering which runs always in one groove, without relief or shift. Because he is dull, and dry, and hard, when set by the side of a great lyrist or dramatist; because of these ble when his iron hand has hold of some chord faults and defects, he is so intense and irresistiwhich it knows how to play upen. How utterly unlike his is the pathos of Homer or Eschy. lus, Chaucer or Dante, Shakespeare or Hugo; all these greater poets feel the moisture and flame of the fever and the tears they paint; their pathos when sharpest is full of sensitive life, of subtle tenderness, of playing pulses and melting chant weight of swinging steel; he strikes like colours; his has but the downright and trenthe German headsman, one stroke of a loaded sword. Yet while we admire, we chafe at the va- lines as, but he cannot rest there. His critical | sun, and light up in it the many-coloured mood is feverish and restless till he has bow of his own more splendid genius. eclipsed the object of his vision by some of The utter incapacity of Mr. Swinburne, his own feats of language, and so he gets with all his fine aperçus, for the mood of into his "swinging steel" and "one stroke of criticism,- a mood which must be self-fora loaded sword," which are about as inex- getting, or at least self-remembering only pressive of that strange possession by the where it is jarred by a fault of judgment genius of common but ineffaceable and un- and art in its object, is shown in nothing diminishable misery, which enabled Words- mere remarkably than his pert digressions worth to write as he did, as any form of from his subject simply to strike a blow or words that could be invented. The "stroke interpolate an irrelevant sneer. Thus, in of swinging steel " expresses force and mo- writing on Mr. Arnold's" Empedocles" and mentum of will, not that truthfulness which his grand pagan "self-sufficience," as he comes from the singleness of a haunted and prefers to call it (on the ground that selfoverridden imagination. This figure is a sufficiency is already stamped with an acrhetorical flourish of Mr. Swinburne's sword, cent of reproach), he says:not of Wordsworth's, and instead of clinching, the thought, cleaves it in two, and makes you stare up at the brandishing hand which I take leave to forge this word, because "self-sufhad barely for a moment forgotten. ficingness" is a compound of too barbaric sound, Or, take his very fine and delicate criti-reproach. Archbishop Trench has pointed out and "self-sufficiency" has fallen into a form of cism on Mr. Arnold's style, spoiled, as usual, how and why a word which to the ancient Greek by the self-conscious and rhetorical magnil- signified a noble virtue came to signify to the oquence of the closing sentence, where Mr. modern Christian the base vice of presumption. Swinburne feels that there has been too I do not see that human language has gained by much of Mr. Arnold, and that the grander this change of meaning, or that the later mood presence of the younger poet must be assert- of mind which dictated this debasement of the ed before the period can be complete: word is at all in advance of the older, or indicative of any spiritual improvement; rather the alteration seems to me a loss and discredit, and the tone of thought which made the quality venerable more sound and wise than that which declares it vile. you The supreme charm of Mr. Arnold's work is a sense of right resulting in a spontaneous temperance which bears no mark of curb or snaffle, but obeys the hand with imperceptible submission and gracious reserve. Other and older poets are to the full as vivid, as incisive and impressive; others have a more pungent colour, a more trenchant outline; others as deep knowledge and as fervid enjoyment of natural things. But no one has in like measure that tender and final quality of touch which tempers the excessive light and suffuses the refluent shade; which as it were washes with soft air the sides of the earth, steeps with dew of quiet and dyes with colours of repose the ambient ardour of noon, the fiery affluence of evening. This is rather like a schoolboy's irreverent taste for making impertinent signs at the authorities of his home or school. It has nothing to do with the drift of the criticism, and as Mr. Swinburne has never shown the slightest sign of spiritual insight into either Christian ideas, or Christian ethics, or Christian sentiment, as there is no vestige of his of temporary sympathy with the highest ever having passed through even a phase literature of the last eighteen centuries, this childish little gesture of irrelevant pertness Down to "refluent shade" we are simply can derive not the slightest force from his delighted with so artistic a delineation of unquestionable genius. The whole article Mr. Arnold's style, but then we get to a is marred and spotted by this restless vanity, rush of adjectives which have the effect of which is always driving Mr. Swinburne entirely drowning Mr. Arnold, and making into little digressions of moral grimace. us hold our breath at the lavish wealth of What, for example, should have induced language of his gorgeous critic. "Am- him, by way of illustrating Mr. Arnold's bient ardour of noon and "fiery affluence happy executive skill as a poet, to go off of evening "seem expressly intended to ex- into the following digression on the theory tinguish the remembrance of Mr Arnold's of dumb poets and handless painters,' delicate and temperate touch. Mr. Swinburne cannot bear to rest in the cool shower of Mr. Arnold's placid truthfulness; he feels that he must blaze out upon it like the unless it be the pleasure of the sneer at an exquisite poet who died in his youth, with which it is illustrated? It is as foreign to the subject of the article as a fly to the am ber in which it is preserved, and a very of David Gray's sonnets which, with all our nasty fly in amber it seems to us: reverence for Mr. Arnold, seem to us far above any of Mr. Arnold's sonnets, except the one great sonnet on Sophocles. Many of David Gray's, for example, the one ending, will live as long as English literature. In fact, so far from being a dumb poet, David Gray's powers of sweet, clear, low music of language have rarely been equalled. Nothing shows us how Mr: Swinburne's fine critical aperçus are prevented from developing into anything like a fair, tranquil, critical insight, more than these horrid blotches, needlessly and disastrously spotted over his essay, apparently for mere caprice or pique. There is no such thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate. It is the mere impudence of weakness to arrogate the name of poet or painter with no other claim than a susceptible and impressible sense of outward or in- I weigh the loaded hours till life is bare, ward beauty, producing an impotent desire to O God! for one clear day, a snow drop, and paint or sing. The poets that are made by nature are not many; and whatever "vision " an aspirant may possess, he has not the "divine faculty" if he cannot use his vision to any poetic purpose. There is no cant more pernicious to such as these, more wearisome to all other men, than that which asserts the reverse. It is a drug which weakens the feeble and intoxicates the drunken; which makes those swagger who have not learnt to walk, and teach who have not been taught to learn. Such talk as this of Wordsworth's is the poison of poor souls like David Gray. Men listen, and depart with the belief that they have this faculty or this vision which alone, they are told, makes the poet; and There is another sort of digression with once imbued with that belief, soon pass or slide which Mr. Swinburne laboriously spoils what from the inarticulate to the articulate stage of has in it the materials of a very fine essay, debility and disease. Inspiration foiled and im- and that is the digression in search of indepotent is a piteous thing enough, but friends cency. To that we are so accustomed in and teachers of this sort make it ridiculous as him, that we shall only point out that his well. A man can no more win a place among elaborate pleasantries on the French Acadpoets by dreaming of it or lusting after it than he can win by dream or desire a woman's beau- Arnold is to be betrayed and shorn of his emy, as a Delilah on whose bosom Mr. ty or a king's command; and those encourage him to fill his belly with the east wind who strength, will seem to most of his readers, feign to accept the will for the deed, and treat perhaps the most unpleasant and inartistic inarticulate or inadequate pretenders as actual blotch contained in this curious mixture of associates in art. The Muses can bear children delicate insights, and gaudy, flaunting, imand Apollo can give crowns to those only who pure taste. Nothing shows more completeare able to win the crown and beget the child; Ir how little his mind is filled with his subbut in the school of theoretic sentiment it is ap-ject - Mr. Arnold - than this squeal of parently believed that this can be done by wish- vulgar merriment over his own cleverness ing. in drawing Mr. Arnold as the lover of a French literary fille de joie. We are inclined to accept (with some wonder, and a good deal of allowance for the spirit of opposition which breathes in Mr. Swinburne's panegyrics on poets of no name) our critic's positive insights, though he does overdo his ecstasies, as, for instance, concerning Miss Christina Rossetti, who, it appears, could, with any one verse or word, "absorb and consume Eugenie de Guérin," as a sunbeam of the fiery heaven, a dew drop of the dawning earth." We are disposed to think sincerely that the fault must be in ourselves, if we have read with faint interest and no admiration poems in which Mr. Swinburne can feel so much delight as he certainly does in a hymn of Miss Rossetti's. But we do not feel the slightest respect for his incidental sneers, like that at David Gray. There are several The truth is that, Mr. Swinburne, with the rarest faculty for especial critical insights, can never succeed as a critic while he continues to let the image of himself be continually flitting between bis eye and the object on which it is cast. This dancing image is constantly irritating him into affected eloquence, false digressions, meaningless impertinence, and eager indecency. There is no more irritating task than reading such an article as this. One must read it, for its occasional touches of wonderful genius, but it is like applying a sort of literary cantharides to one's mind, to read these patched and blotched and disfigured criticisms on one whose own critical nature is so perfectly tempered and refined, by a man capable of discerning this temperance and refinement, but wholly incapable of emulating them. PART X. CHAPTER XXIX. -NEWS. Ir was the beginning of September, as we have said, and the course of individual history slid aside as it were for the moment, and lost itself in the general web. Brownlows became fall of people-friends of Jack's friends of Mr. Brownlow, even friends of Sara- for ladies came of course to break the monotony of the shooting-party- and in the press of occupation personal matters had to be put aside. Mr. Brownlow himself almost forgot, except by moments when the thought came upon him with a certain thrill of excitement, that the six weeks were gliding noiselessly on, and that soon his deliverance would come. As for Sara, she did not forget the agitating little scene in which she had been only a passive actor, but which had woven a kind of subtle link between her and the man who had spoken to her in the voice of real passion. The sound of it had scared and perplexed her at first, and it had roused ker to a sense of the real difference, as well as the real affinities, between them; but whatever she might feel, the fact remained that there was a link between them a link which ske could no more break than the Queen could -asomething that defied all denial or contradiction. She might never see him again, but he loved her. When a girl is fancy-free, there is no greater charm; and Sara was, or had been, entirely fancy-free, and was more liable than most girls to this attraction. When the people around her were stupid or tiresome, as to be sure the best of people are sometimes, her thoughts would make a sudden gleam like lightning upon the man who had said he would never see her face again. Perhaps he might have proved tiresome too, had he gone out in the morning with his gun, and come tired to dinner; but he was absent; and there are times when the absent have the best of it, notwithstanding all proverbs. She was much occupied, and by times sufficiently well amused at home, and did not feel it in the least necessary to summon Powys to her side; but still the thought of him came in now and then, and gave an additional zest to her other luxuries. It was a supreme odour and incense offered up to her, as he had thought it would be a flower which she set her pretty foot upon, and the fragrance of which came up poignant and sweet to her delicate nostril. If anybody had said as much to Sara it would have roused her almost to fury; but still such were the facts of the Jack, for his part, was less excusable if he was negligent; and he was rather negligent just then, in the first fervour of the partridges, it must be allowed - not that he cared a straw for the ladies of the party, and their ascomplishments, and their pretty dresses, and their wiles, as poor Pamela believed in her heart. Apart from Pamela Jack was a stoic, and wasted not a thought on womankind; but when a LIVING AGE. VOL. VII. 238. a at is shooting all day, and is surrounded by party of fellows who have to be dined and entertained in the evening, and is, besides, quite confident in his mind that the little maiden who awaits him has no other seductive voice to whisper in her ear, he may be pardoned for a little carelessness or unpunctuality least Jack thought he ought to be pardoned, which comes very much to the same thing. Thus the partridges, if they did not affect the affairs of state, as do their Highland brethren the grouse, at least had an influence upon the affairs of Brownlows, and put a stop, as it were, to the undivided action of its private history for the time. It was during this interval that the carrier's cart once more deposited a passenger on the Brownlows road. She did not get down at the gate, which, she already knew, was a step calcalated to bring upon her the eyes of the population, but was set down at a little distance, and came in noiselessly, as became her mission. It was a September afternoon, close and sultry. The sky was a whitish blue, pale with the blaze that penetrated and filled it. The trees looked parched and dusty where they overhung the road. The whole landscape round Browlows beyond the line of these dusty trees was yellow with stubble, for the land was rich, and there had been a heavy crop. The fields were reaped, and the kindly fruits of earth gathered in, and there seemed no particular need for all that blaze of sunshine. But the sun blazed all the same, and the pedestrian stole slowly on, casting a long oblique shadow across the road. Everything was sleepy and still. Old Betty's door and windows were open, but the heat was so great as to quench even curiosity; or perhaps it was only that the stranger's step was very stealthy, and until it suddenly fell upon a treacherous knot of gravel, which dispersed under her weight and made a noise, had given no sign of its approach. Betty came languidly to her door when she heard this sound, but she went in again.and dropped back into her doze upon her big chair when she saw it was but the slow and toiling figure of a poor woman, no way attractive to curiosity. "Some poor body a-going to Dewsbury," she said to herself; and thus Nancy stole on unnoticed. The blind was down in the parlour window of Mrs. Swayne's neighbour, and her door closed, and Mrs. Swayne herself was out of the way for the moment, seeing to the boiling of the afternoon kettle. Nancy crept in, passing like a vision across Mrs. Preston's open window. Her step made no appreciable sound even in the sleepy stillness of the house, and the sole preface they had to her appearance in the parlour was a shadow of something black which crossed the light, and the softest visionary tap at the door. Then the old woman stood suddenly before the mother and the daughter, who were sitting together dull enough. Mrs. Preston was still poorly, and disturbed in her mind. And as for. Pamela, poor child, it was a trying moment for her. As from a watch-tower, she could see: what was going on at Brownlows, and knew that they were amusing themselves, and had all kinds of pleasant parties, in which Jack, who was hers and no other woman's, took the chief part; and that amid all these diversions he had no time to come to see her though she had the only right to him, and that other girls were by, better born, better mannered, better dressed, and more charming than her simple self. Would it be his fault if he were fickle? How could he help being fickle with attractions so much greater around him? This was how Pamela was thinking as she sat by the sofa on which her mother lay. It was not weather for much exertion, and in the peculiar position of affairs, it was painful for these two to run the risk of meeting anybody from Brownlows; therefore they did not go cut except furtively now and then at night, and sat all day in the house, and brooded, and were not very cheerful.! Every laugh she heard sounding down the avenue, every carriage that drove out of or into the gates, every stray bit of gossip about the doings at the great house, and the luncheon parties at the cover-side, and the new arrivals, sounded to poor little Pamela like an injury. She had meant to be so happy, and she was not happy. Only the sound of the guns was a little comfort to her. To be sure when he was shooting he was still amusing himself away from her; but at the same time he was not near the fatal beauties whom every evening Pamela felt in her heart he must be talking to, and smiling upon, and growing bewitched by. Such was the tenor of her thoughts as she sat by the sofa working, when old Nancy came in so suddenly at the door. Pamela sprang up from her seat. Her nerves were out of order, and even her temper, poor child! and all her delicate organization set on edge. It is her again! and oh, what do you want?" said Pamela, with a little shriek. As for Mrs. Preston, she too sat bolt upright on the sofa, and started, not without a certain fright, at the sudden apparition. Nancy Christian! she said, clasping her hands together Nancy Christian! Is this you ? 66 " "Yes, it's me," said Nancy; "I said I would come, and here I am, and I've a deal to say. If you don't mind, I'll take a chair, for it's a long way walking in this heat, all the way from Masterton." This she said without a blush, though she had been set down not fifty yards off from the carrier's cart. "Sit down," said Mrs. Preston, anxiously, herself rising from the sofa. "It is not often I lie down," (though this was almost as much a fiction as Nancy's), "but the heat gets the better of one. I remember your name as long as. I remember anything; I always hoped you would come back. Pamela, if there is anything that Nancy would like after her long walk" "A cup of tea is all as I care for," said Nancy. It's a many years since we've met, and you've changed, ma'am," she added, with a cordiality that was warmer than her sinceri- Nancy made no direct answer to this appeal, but she looked at Pamela, and then at her mother, with a significant gesture. The two old women had their world to go back into of which the young creature kney nothing, and where there were many things which might not bear her inspection; while she, on the other hand, was absorbed in her own new world, and scarcely heard or noticed what they were saying. She stood between them in her youth, unaware of the look they exchanged, unaware that she was in the way of their confidences. thinking, in fact, nothing of much importance in the world except what might be going on in the great house over the way. Pamela," said Mrs. Preston, "go and see about the tea, and run out to the garden, dear, and get a breath of air; for I have a deal to ask, and Nancy has a deal to tell me; and there will be no one passing at this time of the day." If they were all passing it would not matter to me," said Pamela, and she sighed, and put down her languid work, and went away to make the tea. But she did not go out to the garden; though she said it did not matter, it did matter mightily. She went upstairs to the window and sat down behind the curtain, and fixed her hungry eyes upon the gate and the avenue beyond; and then she made little pictures to herself of the ladies at Brownlows, and of how Jack must be enjoying himself, and gathered some big bitter tears in her eyes, and felt herself forsaken. It was worse than the Peri at the gate of Eden. So long as Jack had come to the cottage, it mattered little to Pamela who was at the great house. In those days she could think, They are finer than I am, and better off, and even prettier, but he likes me best; but now this was all changed-the poor little Peri saw the blessed walking in pairs and pleasant companies, and her own young archangel, who was the centre of the Paradise, surrounded and taken possession of by celestial syrens - if such things can be. To be sure Jack Brownlow was not much like an archangel, but that mattered little. What a change it was! and all to come about in a week or two. She, too, was like the flower upon which the conqueror sets his foot; and Pamela was not passive, but resisted and strug |