Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/99

 of the "Christian Year!" One would swear, to hear these Cupids of the new Fleshly Epoch, that English literature had been veritably getting blue-mouldy with too much virtue, and that the Spirit of Imagination had lived in a nunnery, fed on pulse and cold water, since Chaucer's time, instead of rioting in a lupanar, fed on hot meat and spiced wine, for hundreds upon hundreds of years!

Perhaps, if the truth were told, we have had a little too much of the Body. Perhaps, if we push the matter home, it is no more rational to rave of the "just delights of the flesh" than it would be to talk of the "glorious liberty" of "sweating" and the "sane celebration" of the right to "spit." Perhaps, after all, since so many centuries of Sexuality have done so little for poetry, it might be advantageous to give Spirituality a trial, and to see if her efforts to create a literature are equally unsuccessful.

In answer to all this, it may be retorted—in the easiest form of retort known to mankind— that I am a Philistine, that I would emasculate our poets altogether, and that I would substitute for passion the merest humanitarian and other "sentiment." Well, although I fear that I am a Puritan in a certain sense, I trust I am not a purist in the worst sense. My favourite ancient poet is the author of "Atys." I prefer Shakspere to Milton, and I would not obliterate a line, however coarse, of Chaucer. I love Rabelais, and hold (with Coleridge) that he is deep and pure as the sea. I know no pleasanter reading for an idle hour than La Fontaine, no richer reading for a thoughtful hour than certain (by no means unimpeachable) novels of Balzac. I see the strangest erotic forces in the loves of Wilhelm Meister, but I admit their beauty and their worth.