Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/192

 himself a poet by writing passable verse at all; this is a madness of mistake explicable and excusable only as the error of a foreign and provincial judgment. Any stanza of "Thyrsis," any fragment of "Callicles," would outweigh in point of "natural magic" all Guérin's work, even were his thoughts clothed in the beauty of verse instead of the prettiness of prose; to weigh against it the entire work of Keats, or any such single poem as the "Ode to Psyche" or that "on a Grecian Urn"—poems which for, perfect apprehension and execution of all attainable in their own sphere would weigh down all the world poetry—is inexpressibly impossible.

Sweeping aside all this accumulated panegyric, we may discern the modest attraction of Guérin's little plot of ground with its borders of crocus and snowdrop; though the gardeners have done their best to kill them with hothouse fumes and water-pipes and bell-glasses. As to his first posthumous patroness—he belongs to the breed of those suckling poets who live on patronage premature even when posthumous—I must say with another critic, "Madame Sand n'est vraiment pas heureuse en poëtes;" great and excellent as she is, their contact is not good for her. Assuredly the one aspiration of Guérin, his one desire that "a stronger soul would bow down to his weaker spirit," has since his death been somewhat too much fulfilled. A niche in the Sainte-Beuve collection is his due; but not the homage of George Sand and Matthew Arnold. His sister and he had in effect a certain distinction, they had graceful tastes and tunable minds: without distinction there cannot be genius, but there cannot be genius with nothing else; a man cannot live on air