Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/166

 or Jephthah of our days, the man who has taught our hands to war and our fingers to fight against the Philistines, must as a poet have sat long and reverently at the feet of their Gamaliel. And as when there is a high and pure genius on either side a man cannot but get good from the man he admires, and as it was so in this case if ever in any, he must have got good from that source over and above the certain and common good which the sense of reverence does to us all. The joy of worship, the delight of admiration, is in itself so excellent and noble a thing that even error cannot make it unvenerable or unprofitable; no one need repent of reverence, though he find flaws or cavities in his idol; it has done him good to worship, though there were no godhead behind the shrine. To shut his eyes upon disproof and affirm the presence of a god found absent, this indeed is evil; but this is not an act of reverence or of worship; this is the brute fatuity of cowardice, the violent impotence of fear; wanting alike what is good and fruitful in belief and what is heroic and helpful in disbelief; witness (for the most part) the religious and political, moral and æsthetic scriptures of our own time, the huge canonical roll of the Philistine. Nothing can be more unlike such ignoble and sluggard idolatry than the reverence now expressed and now implied by Mr. Arnold for the doctrine and example of Wordsworth. His memorial verses at once praise and judge the great poet then newly dead better than any words of other men; they have the still clear note, the fresh breath as of the first fields and birds of spring awakened in a serene dawn, which is in Wordsworth's own verse. With wider eyes