Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/26

 Seen but once in full, the naked glory of the Titaness irradiates all one side of the poem with excess and superflux of splendour.

Among the fields and gardens, the mountain heights and hollows, of Victor Hugo's vast poetic kingdom, there are strange superb inmates, bird and beast of various fur and feather; but as yet there was nothing like this. Balzac, working with other means, might have given us by dint of anxious anatomy some picture of the virgin harlot. A marvellous study we should have had, one to burn into the brain and brand the memory for ever; but rather a thing to admire than desire. The magnetism of beauty, the effluence of attraction, he would not have given us, But now we have her from the hands of a poet as well as student, new-blown and actual as a gathered flower, in warm bloom of blood and breath, clothed with live colour, fair with significant flesh, passionately palpable. This we see first and feel, and after this the spirit, It is a strange beast that hides in this den of roses, Such have been however, and must be. "We are all a little mad, beginning with Venus." Her maker's definition is complete: "a possible Astarte latent in an actual Diana." She is not merely spotless in body; she in perverse, not unclean; there is nothing of foulness in the mystic rage of her desire. She is indeed "stainless and shameless;" to be unclean is common, and her "divine depravity" will touch nothing common or unclean. She has seven devils in her, and upon her not a fleck of filth. She has no more in common with the lewd low hirelings of the baser school of realism than a creature of the brothel and the street has in