Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/84

 truly representative of its class than the grosser verse of Mr. Swinburne, or the more careless and fluent verse of Mr. Morris. The main charge I bring against poetry of this kind is its sickliness and effeminacy; but if there be any truth in my own Theory of Literary Morality, as enunciated some years ago in the Fortnightly Review, the charge of indecency need not be pressed at all, as it is settled by the fact of artistic and poetic incompetence. The morality of any book is determinable by its value as literature—immoral writing proceeding primarily from insincerity of vision, and therefore being betokened by all those signs which enable us to ascertain the value of art as art. In the present case the matter is ludicrously simple; for we perceive that the silliness and the insincerity come, not by nature, but at second hand; Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne being the merest echoes—strikingly original in this—that they merely echo what is vile, while other imitators reproduce what is admirable. I am loath in this connection to incriminate Mr. Morris. That gentleman is so prolific, so fertile in resources, and is generally so innocent (despite the ever-present undertone of fleshliness), that he may fairly be left to his laurels. He is open to the same literary criticism as the others, but, while often ingenuous, is never altogether unclean.

It may be interesting for the reader to compare, in a brief glance, the various poets of the Italian-English school with each other. To do so thoroughly would involve the serious task of perusing three-fourths of the forgotten English poets; for, since weeds ever grew quicker than flowers, the bulk of the poetic trash left behind by successive generations of verse-writers, from Surrey to Spratt, far outweighs the little