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about his face. I don't mind, either for Swinburne or for Putney. I reflect that if Putney ignored Swinburne, he ignored Putney. And I reflect that there is great stuff in Putney for a poet, and marvel that Swinburne never perceived it and used it. He must have been born English, and in the nineteenth century, by accident. He was misprized while living. That is nothing. What does annoy me is that critics who know better are pandering to the national hypocrisy after his death. In a dozen columns he has been sped into the unknown as
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! Miserable dishonesty! Nobody was ever less Victorian than Swinburne. And then when these critics have to skate over the
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Poems and Ballads episode--thin, cracking ice!--how they repeat delicately the word
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Out with it, tailorish and craven minds, and say
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! For sensual the book is. It is fine in sensuality, and no talking will ever get you away from that. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam once wrote an essay on
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Le Sadisme anglais, and supported it with a translation of a large part of
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Anactoria. And even Paris was startled. A rare trick for a supreme genius to play on the country of his birth, enshrining in the topmost heights of its literature a lovely poem that cannot be discussed!... Well, Swinburne has got the better of us there. He has simply knocked to pieces the theory that great art is inseparable from the Ten Commandments. His greatest poem was written in honour of a poet whom any English Vigilance Society would have crucified.
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Sane critics will naturally observe, in their quiet manner, that
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Anactoria and similar feats were
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Any author allowing a novel to be sold at sevenpence will find the sales of his next book at 6s. suffering a considerable decrease. Well, it is notorious that if the sevenpenny publishers are publishing one particular book just now, that book is
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Kipps. It is equally notorious that the sales of
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Tono-Bungay
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Which involves the novel maxim that a loss may be too big to be cut! Were their amazing factory ten times as large as it actually is, Messrs. Nelson would have to put it to other uses in face of a regular loss on their sevenpennies. However, there is no doubt in my mind that the enterprise is, and will be, remunerative. The Shaw and Co. report is of the same view. Did the mandarins imagine that they were going to stop the sevenpenny, that anything could stop it? I suppose they did! More agreeably comic than the attitude and arguments of the publishers are the attitude and arguments of the booksellers. But the largest firms, Smith and Son and Wymans,