Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/240

 by dint of hard use is a need of his nature; "his soul, which is a scourge," must needs smite to know itself alive and taste its strength: too strong for satiety or collapse, while life endures his nature must bite and burn as surely as steel must or flame. What he is, good fortune has made him—"Strength, health, and pride, and lust, and length of days." What Guido Franceschini is, he has been made by ill fortune. Fed with good things from his birth, the evil nature in him might have swollen into the likeness of Cenci's; as Cenci, crossed and cramped at every turn of life, with starved energies and shrivelled lusts, might have shrunk into the shape of Guido, a pained and thwarted spirit of self-suffering evil. The one, though drawn with less detail of growth from seed to fruit, is surely not less conceivable than the other; but Cenci's is the stronger spirit, the more solid and rounded nature: he was not one to struggle or fail. Shelley has made his ruling appetite the lust of strength, of self-conscious and spiritual power: he has not added the fleshly lust of pain and subtle animal relish of the pungent infliction, which was doubtless interfused with Cenci's sensuous cruelty. But the august and horrible figure is painted as naturally as nobly; his rage and his religion, the loathing that underlies his lust, and the lust that inflames his loathing; his hungry abhorrence of his daughter's beauty of body and soul—("Beast that thou art!")—his faith in God and fury against good, his splendid exaltation of spirit into a passionate and winged rapture of ardent hatred or of fiery joy, consummate in that last outbreak as of all the fumes and flames of hell at once, are no more alien from nature or each other