this _Reading of Life_ and take up the _Modern Love_ of
forty years ago, in which life speaks! Meredith has always been in
wholesome revolt against convention, against every deadening limitation
of art, but he sometimes carries revolt to the point of anarchy. In
finding new subjects and new forms for verse he is often throwing away
the gold and gathering up the ore. In taking for his foundation the
stone which the builders rejected he is sometimes only giving a proof of
their wisdom in rejecting it.

1901.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

I

It is forty-four years since the publication of Swinburne's first
volume, and it is scarcely to the credit of the English public that we
should have had to wait so long for a collected edition of the poems of
one of the greatest poets of this or any country. 'It is nothing to me,'
Swinburne tells us, with a delicate precision in his pride, 'that what I
write should find immediate or general acceptance.' And indeed
'immediate' it can scarcely be said to have been; 'general' it is hardly
likely ever to be. Swinburne has always been a poet writing for poets,
or for those rare lovers of poetry who ask for poetry, and nothing more
or less, in a poet. Such writers can never be really popular, any more
than gold without alloy can ever really be turned to practical uses.
Think of how extremely little the poetical merit of his poetry had to
do with the immense success of Byron; think how very much besides
poetical merit contributed to the surprising reputation of Tennyson.
There was a time when the first series of _Poems and Ballads_ was read
for what seemed startling in its subject-matter; but that time has long
since passed, and it is not probable that any reviewer of the new
edition now reprinted verbatim from the edition of 1866 will so much as
allude to the timid shrieks which went up from the reviewers of that
year, except perhaps as one of the curiosities of literature.

A poet is always interesting and instructive when he talks about
himself, and Swinburne, in his dedicatory epistle to his 'best and
dearest friend,' Mr. Watts-Dunton, who has been the finest, the surest,
and the subtlest critic of poetry now living, talks about himself, or
rather about his work, with a proud and simple frankness. It is not only
interesting, but of considerable critical significance, to know that,
among his plays, Swinburne prefers _Mary Stuart_, and, among his lyrical
poems, the ode on Athe