century flower, the seventeenth-century fruit, or by his violence to
shake from either a drop of their dews.

At the outset I warned the judges and the pronouncers of sentences how
this poet, with other poets of quite different character, would escape
their summaries, and he has indeed refuted that maxim which I had learned
at illustrious knees, "You may not dissociate the matter and manner of
any of the greatest poets; the two are so fused by integrity of fire,
whether in tragedy or epic or in the simplest song, that the sundering is
the vainest task of criticism." But I cannot read Swinburne and not be
compelled to divide his secondhand and enfeebled and excited matter from
the successful art of his word. Of that word Francis Thompson has said
again, "It imposes a law on the sense." Therefore, he too perceived that
fatal division. Is, then, the wisdom of the maxim confounded? Or is
Swinburne's a "single and excepted case"? Excepted by a thousand degrees
of talent from any generality fitting the obviously lesser poets, but,
possibly, also excepted by an essential inferiority from this great maxim
fitting only the greatest?




CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE


The controversy here is with those who admire Charlotte Bronte throughout
her career. She altered greatly. She did, in fact, inherit a manner of
English that had been strained beyond restoration, fatigued beyond
recovery, by the "corrupt following" of Gibbon; and there was within her
a sense of propriety that caused her to conform. Straitened and serious