under of that wild fowl had been her support of
an autocratic adventurer: "calling a crowned man royal, that was no more
than a king." But it is not fair, even in this important connection, to
judge Swinburne by _Songs Before Sunrise_. They were songs before a
sunrise that has never turned up. Their dogmatic assertions have for a
long time past stared starkly at us as nonsense. As, for instance, the
phrase "Glory to Man in the Highest, for man is the master of things";
after which there is evidently nothing to be said, except that it is
not true. But even where Swinburne had his greater grip, as in that
grave and partly just poem _Before a Crucifix_, Swinburne, the most
Latin, the most learned, the most largely travelled of the Victorians,
still knows far less of the facts than even Mrs. Browning. The whole of
the poem, _Before a Crucifix_, breaks down by one mere mistake. It
imagines that the French or Italian peasants who fell on their knees
before the Crucifix did so because they were slaves. They fell on their
knees because they were free men, probably owning their own farms.
Swinburne could have found round about Putney plenty of slaves who had
no crucifixes: but only crucifixions.

When we come to ethics and philosophy, doubtless we find Swinburne in
full revolt, not only against the temperate idealism of Tennyson, but
against the genuine piety and moral enthusiasm of people like Mrs.
Browning. But here again Swinburne is very English, nay, he is very
Victorian, for his revolt is illogical. For the purposes of intelligent
insurrection against priests and kings, Swinburne ought to have
described the natural life of man, free and beautiful, and proved from
this both the noxiousness and the needlessness of such chains.
Unfortunately Swinburne rebelled against Nature first and then tried to
rebel against religion for doing exactly the same thing that he had
done. His songs of joy are not really immoral; but his songs of sorrow
are. But when he merely hurls at the priest the assertion that flesh is
grass and life is sorrow, he really lays himself open to the restrained
answer, "So I have ventured, on various occasions, to remark." When he
went forth, as it were, as the champion of pagan change and pleasure, he
heard uplifted the grand choruses of his own _Atalanta_, in his rear,
refusing hope.

The splendid diction that blazes through the whole of that drama, that
still dances exquisitely in the more lyrical _Poems an