THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18722, 19 June 1926, Page 13

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

HALF-HOURS IN A LIBRARY.

(SPHCULIT WBITTZH TOB THE PBtSS.)

By A. H. Geiklixg,

CLXX.—ON THE "FLESHLY SCHOOL" CONTROVERSY.

"For Us" writes Mr Nicholson, "the blood-stained sensuality of 'Poems and Ballads' appears to have served but littlo purpose—to have led at its best to Flecker, and at its worst to Wilde." This he qualifies by adding: "But wo must never forget that to many sensible people in 18G6 these hectic poems echoed as a bugle in the night time, that they blazed for lost wayfarers as a beacon lighted on some higher-hills. And with fitting humility we must recognise that our very misunderstanding of tho situation—our actual inability to visualise tho thick undergrowths which once encumbored our fair fielJs of case and liberty—are duo to-the completeness, the explosive rapidity with which Swinburne accomplished his task For tho value of dynamite should be tested by the weight of accumulated matter which it is able suddenly to remove." Curiously enough Mr Nicolson passes over virtually without mention the controversy known as "The Fleshly School of Poetry," and which shqds abundant ligjit upon the spirit of the time in Swinblrne's earlier period.

In this respect Mr Nicolson follows the lead of his guide' and mentor, Sir Edmund Gosso, who, in his life of Swinburne, dismisses the matter very briefly. "In the autumn and winter of 1871," writes Gosso, "Swinburne was mainly occupied on two enterprises of very various value and importance. One of these was the commencement of his solitary epic, 'Tristram of Lyon. esse,' the sumptuous prelude to which he finished at'Turnmei Bridge; and the other was his share in the controversy of the friends of D. G. Rossetti with the egregious Thomas Maitland,' who virulently attacked what be called 'The Fleshly school of Poetry" in a magazine article. The pseudonymous criticaster turned out to be Mr Robert Buchanan, who' 'in a, letter of March, 1872,' confessed to Robert Browning that he had been largely prompted 'by the instinct of recrimination.' Swinburne s prinoipal exploit in a vivaoious series of skirmishes was a long pamphlet en-;: titled 'Under the Microscope' (1872). where force and learning are somewhat thrown away upon a theme not of permanent (interest, and where the writer's prose style suffers from an inordinate use of ironical invective."

Robert Buchanan is well nigh forgotten to-day,, but I can remember when he had a name to conjure with, Well can 1 recall the thrill which accompanied a first reading of his novel, "The Shadow of the Sword," published by Bentley in 1876, and hia "God and the Man'' five years later was considered a daring piece of work. I wonder what the effect of them would be to-day; it is a.long time since I have seen a copy of either-story, and I suppose they are now out of print. For sentimental reason I still preserve some of his poems, notably "The Wandering-Jew and the "New Rome," but it is many years since I have even so. much as glanced at a page. In all probability •Robert Buchanan's only chance of immortality is the prominence given • to -bim and his writings by. Swinburne in"Under the Microscope," as for esample, when swinburhe says :

I cannot profess to h»Te *ead Tiny book el Mr Saelxuwn'a; lor »u*bt I know, they may deaerv* «H h|« praises; H U neither my buiines* nor my desire to deado. nut BunaM of" Ms contributions In verse and ii» ttrose In magazines and tbo newspapers I have looked through or glanced <£er—not, I trust, Wltboilt profit; ™*> I. without amusement. From these casual iourcfa l"hata gathered-as he who runs "nfajwrtant matter* of critical .«*•"«: «io«rapMeal Interest, with the kindliest foretttl tha most, judicious care w jWtX P He i. resolved that Ms «*«*JJ ih»ii not always have cause to complain Sul the knows of her greatest sons. m*» «L» have hidden from the eye Wo«TanW«I interest, with the Jtnowledie cave him in his aeed a advantage was taken « a , tvietiM was us that he can »«•*"«„ 0 { one Datid j,„ told wthst the vmWM »f f Gray, a poor J 1 ™"' ?* t / wno however, it breed as bis died without should i» f »^ ae ", B £u b t * re 8 distinction in the givinjt any »lf» fl 1 will be read "thSr "conJemporarles when, the wo J r "» th °* | lmbo 0 { affettuosos." "have gone into the lunoo o May , ! e collected works .hould 6t M r Buchanan • collect be furnished the use of ef students u »^ ea j ugt iy contemptuous Buchansnese .» 1 »*f 0, ;,„" u - 0 f all foreign » he . b ". of speech or style in an Engaffectatione of sp«eco « ■ f fl m ? ish s ll n a c 9 r o? analogy .. }h. its apparent deflanee perplexing on 9 L M > I hardly think H to their ip. or8 ° c ,..,,. t 0 a southern eye r£j C .— «F to the lanugo of Burns. .

Swinburne makes grea . j er that Buchanan, writing mtian i," pseudonym ot *« lau a and Sols not hentote *o;app alt Buchanan and to decry B "'says Swinburnef."that the crrettea, t f** B . „ o ifj. r iticisni shotilQ nev lf b «v ftle! how many paltry much .P 6 *^/provocations, what eadffrangles and provoca he less 5» r HtUe been preventedpigmies a remedyP Uow 4 l h °wo«d P {he a ap%ding ££ valuable »»«' t poets on their ments of o*f to us for all time. " wn WO J k f, of rStry must regret that Mr B . A°d q like all tn* prosaic e this one looks so |reat discojeries- » Sjsy now we have w reserved Sot but wonder thrt » we cannot Mr Bn^Jja.? that Mr Tennyson but feel it B ? n K thought at to call should never have £ t o nr attention "i H" Brown , n g should if «Maod»; tb rt ß lfirward 'motley on bid us remar ß *" M Arnold should ing his •■mv

last-named poet might otherwise have held his own, even against the imputation of writing 'mere prose,' which he now shares with Milton-, so sharp is t,he critical judgment, so high the critical standard of the author of 'The Hook of Orm.' "

__ In his recent book on Cobbett, Mr G. K. Chesterton laments the decay in the use of strong language and in much the same spirit as that in which Oscar Wilde lamented 'The Decay of Lying.' Both laments receive reiniorcement in Swinburne's "Under the Microscope," to wbicu 1 turn when in want of a strong epithet or a flow of irony. It may not be a good specimen ot iswinburno's style, but there is refreshment m its swutly flowing sentences. J>-y copy is a "Mosher" reprint, replete in band-made paper and wide margin, of an edition limited to 450 copies. Swinburne was correct in his prediction that there would 1m ample material for a life of Buchanan; I have before me a book entitled "Robert Buchanai.: Some Account of His Life His Life's. Work juid His Literary Friendships" by Hariet Jay, and in whioh there is a chapter on "The Fleshly School of Poetry," the titlo of the pamphlet published by Buchanan in 1872, and included bv Mr Nicolson in his list of "Useful Authorities" on Swinburne. Miss Jay begins the chapter by saying:—"lt was in the summer of 1870, when he was still living at Oban, that Mr Buchanan read the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which had been received with much praise by the entire newspaper Press, to the accompaniment of rapturous salvoes from the writer's friends and personal admirers. In aU the ocean of eau sucree which surrounded the new poet, there had been not one drop of gall; and the cliques were ringing with tho pretensions of the whole school to which the poet painter belonged. By temperament, instinct, and literary education, Robert Buchanan was opposed to that school, and the voice of calumny whispered that insults bad been "heaped upon his own friends and sympathisers. He remembered, too, things which still rankled in his mind. . . . Unfortunately for himself he yielded partly to tho desire to express his opinion of the poems which criticism was praising, he thought, too vehemently, and partly to the temptation to be smart and funny at the Expense of a clique whose antics were, to his thinking at least, highly absurd. The result was an article published in tho 'Contemporary Review' signed 'Thomas Maitland' and entitled 'The Fleshly School of Poetry."

Woro a similar controversy to that which raged in IS6U to break forth in 1026 it would assuredly bo entitled "Tho Fleshy School of. Fiction," and it would envisago tho works of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Jamos Branch Cabell, and others of that ilk and their imitators, not forgetting tho Now Zealand authoress, Mrs Joan Dovanny, and "The Butcher's Shop." And what Swinburne said sixty years ago of poetry in the closing paragraphs of his "Notes on Poems and Reviews," is applicablo }n largo part to much of tho Action of to-day. This controversy concerning "The Fleshly School" still rages.- i"For mysolf," wrote Swinburne, "I begrudge ho man bis taste or his miccoss; lean enjoy and applaud all good work, and would nlways when poasible have tho workmen paid in full. There is much excellent and some admirable verse among the poems of the day; to none has it given more pleasuro than to me, and from none, had I been a man of letters to whom tho ways were open, would it have won heartier applause. I havo never been able to see what should attract men to the profession of criticism but the noble pleasure of pleasing. But I havo no right to claim a place in the silver flock of idyllic swans. I havo never worked, for praiso or pay, but simply by impulse, and to ploase myself. I must, therefore, it is to bo feared, remain' where I am, shut out from the communion of these. At all events, I shall not be hounded into emulation of other men's work by tho baying of -unleashed beagles."

Swinburno further declared that He neod not be overcareful to justify his ways in other men's eyes; it was enough for him that they also work after their kind. He characterised the idyllic form as best for domestic and pastoral poetry, which is naturally on a lower love! than that of tragic or lyric verse. "Its gentle ana maidonly lips are eomowhat narrow for the stream and somowhat cold for the firo of song. It is very fit for the sole diet of girls; not very fit for the sole . sustenance of mon." Which is very much like the contention of the advanced novelist in the Twentieth Century, only that the writers and readers of the "daring" stories ar> in large number women. Swinburne's peroration carries a fino moral:—

"When England has again such a school of poetry, bo headed and so followed an she had at lea3t twice before, as Franoe ha* now; whon all higher forms of the various arts are included within the larger limits of a etronger race, then if eucii a, day should over rise or return upon us, it will bo once more remembered that the office of adult art is neither puerile nor feminine, but virile; that its purity is not that of the a'oister or the harem, that all good things are good in its sight out 6f which F°°d work may be produced: Then the press will be aa impotent a« the pulpit to dictate the laws and remove the landmarks of art; and those will be laughed at who demand from one thing the qualities of another—who seek for eormons in sonnets and morality in music. Then all accepted work will be noble and cbMte in the wider masculine aenac, not truncated and curtailed, but outspoken and full-grown; art will be pure by instinct and fruitful by nature, not a clipped and forced growth of unhealthy heat and unnatural air; all bafenesa and triviality will fall from it and be forgotten; and no one then will need to assert in defence of work done for the work's sake, the simnle laws of his art which no one will "then be permitted to impugn.

la conclusion of the whole matter I am inclined to quote from what is perhaps the most incisive sketch of Swinburne that has yet been published, Mr Max Beerbohm's "No. 2 The Pines," included in the book of essays, "And Even Now." , Mr Max Beerbohm was a young man when Swinburne flourished and he starts with tho thesis of the marvel of Swinburne's survival; the contrast between the young Swinburne of tho "Poems and Ballads," and the middle-aged Swinburne of the Pinos Putney, under the jurisdiction of Watts Dunton, is very vivid. The opening passage of this essay is a fine one:— If there was one -man belonging less than any other to Mid-Victorian- days, Swinburne was that man. But by the calendar it was in those days that he had Hazed—blazed forth with so unexampled a suddenness of splendour; and in the light of that conflagration all that he had since done, much and magnificent though this was paled. Tho essential Swinburne was eWI the earliest. He was and would always be the flammiferoue boy of the dhn pastr-a legendary creature sole kin to the phoemx. It had been impossib!e that he should ever surpass himself in the artistry that was from the outset his; impcesible that he should bring forth rhythms lovelier and •greater than those early rhythms, or exercise over them a mastery more than absolute. Also it had been impossible that the finrt wild ardour of spirit should abide unsinkingly in him. Youth goes. And there was not in Swinburne that b«s:s, on which it man may in his maturity so build as to make good in soma degree the loss of what is gone. Ho was not a thinker; his mind rose erer away from reason'to rhapsody, neither was he human. He was a king crowned but not throned. He was a singing bird that oculd bui!d no neat. H© was a youth that could not afford to age. Had he dded young, literature would have lost many clones; but none so great as the glories ue had already given, nor any such as we .should fondly imagine ourselves bereft of by his early death.