Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/61

 Mr. Austin objects to the ethical tendency of Mr. Tennyson's poetry. His complaint against all those of his countrymen who spend their time in writing verse is that their verse is devoted to the worship of "woman, woman, woman, woman."

He "hardly likes to own sex with" a man who devotes his life to the love of a woman, and is ready to lay down his life and to sacrifice his soul for the chance of preserving her reputation. It is probable that the reluctance would be cordially reciprocated. A writer about as much beneath Mr. Austin as Mr. Austin is beneath the main objects of his attack has charged certain poetry of the present day with constant and distasteful recurrence of devotion to "some person of the other sex." It is at least significant that this person should have come forward, for once under his own name, to vindicate the moral worth of Petronius Arbiter; a writer, I believe, whose especial weakness (as exhibited in the characters of his book) was not a "hankering" after persons "of the other sex." It is as well to remember where we may be when we find ourselves in the company of these anti-sexual moralists.

Effeminate therefore I suppose the modern poetry of England must be content to remain; but there is a poet alive of now acknowledged eminence, not hitherto assailed on this hand, about whom the masked or barefaced critics of the minute are not by any means of one mind—if mind we are to call the organ which forms and