Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/73

 that art which "itself is nature;" he is not more for Brutus than for Antony, for Portia or Volumnia than for Cleopatra. This supreme office, it is evident, can scarcely be fulfilled by a poet of whom it is possible for his most loving disciple and the son of his adoption to say, as Auguste Vacquerie has said of Victor Hugo, that all his works are acts of public virtue and charity, that his books are consecrated to the study and the relief of all sufferings, that his plays are dedicated to all the outcast and disinherited of the world. It is the general presence and predominance of this predeterminate and prepense design which has exposed his marvellous work to the charge of too deliberate and mechanical preparation, too studious premeditation of effect, too careful preoccupation of result. This in fact is the sum and sense of those imputations of calculated extravagance or preconcerted pathos and puppetry of passion done to order, outer heat of artificial fire with inner frost of spiritual cold, cast upon him by the only two famous men, among many infamous and obscure, who have attempted to impugn his greatness. But the most devout believer in Goethe's or in Heine's judgment, if not blind as well as devout, must allow that the edge of their criticism is somewhat blunted by the fact that in the same breath they decry with loud and acrid violence of accent the man generally acknowledged as chief poet of his age and country, and extol in his place the names of such other Frenchmen as no countryman of their own outside their private social set or literary party could hear cited as his rivals without a smile. If fault be found in our hearing by any critic of general note and repute with some alleged shortcoming in the genius or defect in the workmanship of