raising any ghosts, only you'd been fitted with a high-pressure imagination, one of extra-driving power, an' right fra' the beginning you'd a mighty poor chance of escape. The rest of your history can be packed in little room the gods have been good t' you; they've led you by a lang trail to this bit island, an' this night they've given you something t' live for and fight for. Likewise, they've given you a better law. Self-preservation's varra poor stuff. An' that's the last word. I'm turning in, for I reckon we've a couple o' crowded days in front of us before we've got this hooker ship-shape again.'

was

Here, however, Macdonald guilty of error. Only by the labor of four strenuous days was the Nan-Ling made fit once more to face the hazard of the seas, though even then the garb of respectability was in no wise restored to her. In fact, judged by externals, all that the hand of restoration had accomplished was to make her still more disreputable, to complete her garb of desolation. By the storm she had been degraded from the shabby genteel to the guttersnipe, and now she suggested the prize-fighter carrying the scars of a terrific milling. That was how she struck the fancy of Stephen Dane in that hour of the fifth afternoon which he spent in a shady corner of the balcony with Sandy Macdonald to bear him company, Gray being still engaged on the ship. 'Looks like a blooming bruiser, eh, Macdonald,' Dane suggested. 'One who's had a tremendous slogging. All patch and plaster from stem to stern, from her water-line to the rim of her smokestack.' The chief endorsed the comparison with a chuckle, and presently Dane drifted away and Margaret took his place. In all probability if Macdonald had only foreseen what the coming of the girl

involved he would have burked the ordeal by flight, but no warning was given him, he was caught before he had time to suspect. Not even when Margaret began quietly to probe into the history of her lover and himself did he detect her drift. It seemed so innocently reasonable that she should be interested in the fate that had thrown them together, the fancy that had forged such a link of affinity and impelled them to sail for so long in company as the firmest of friends. 'I have never seen such a David and Jonathan pair,' she smilingly confessed. 'I'm told that you might have been chief of a first-class boat and yet in the name of friendship you abandon yourself to a wretched tub like the Nan-Ling.' Then, without giving him time for a word, she switched off to the present adventure. 'Is n't it queer how things work out?' she demanded, edging round until she squarely confronted him. 'About this testing of Dixon, you know. Queer how big things hang on little ones.' The chatter of a Chinaman, that was the little thing by which her sense of wonder had been caught; and the big thing for which that chatter formed a most wonderful peg was the redemption of Dixon Gray, coupled with the salvage of her own idyll. 'You see,' she pointed out, 'there would have been no test, no anything but lifelong misunderstanding, if Ah Fang had n't talked so loudly.' And then, 'What a lucky thing that you were standing by when he lifted up his voice.' She laughed softly over the thought, confessed herself immensely attracted by it; and Macdonald, bending forward, peered closely into her face, distressfully alert to the mocking curl of her lip, the roguish challenge in her eyes. 'Imph!' he snapped at last. 'I might have known. There's no keeping anything fra a woman body, especially if she

swiftly passing out of existence into the world of memory and record. Revolution has always been the secret spring of poetry; and it was so no less in our father's time than it will be in our sons'. We have to reckon with revolution wherever we encounter progress.

The Victorian era (we are told it every day) was a period of stuffy, commercial ideals; and, to be sure, it is easy enough to ridicule its smug respectability; its confidence in the judgment of crowded meetings; its belief in a parliamentary or municipal vote as a sort of passport to Paradise; even its intense anxiety about the survival of its own personality after death. These limited interests, no doubt, were the common food of the common people; and Victorianism, so far as it stopped short at these, is already dead and discounted. But the literature, and in particular the poetry, which rendered the Victorian era illustrious, was, with one or two notable exceptions, a vigorous protest against this very spirit of the time; it was as much the voice of rebellion as the youngest and the freshest voice in any new Georgian choir to-day. We need to remember this, if we are to understand Victorian poetry at all; and posterity is having the way of understanding made clear for it by the singular good fortune which has befallen many of the great Victorians in the choice of their biographers and apologists. The art of biography, it is safe to say, was never more soundly practised than it is at the present day; and no leader of our time has had richer fortune in this respect than that wayward, elusive, but thoroughly lovable genius, Algernon Charles Swinburne. His Life has been written with admirable candor and communicative sympathy by his friend, Mr. Edmund Gosse; and now under the same care, with the cooperation of one of the most discriminating of bibliophiles, his Letters are

given to the world in two well-equipped and annotated volumes.* The efficient performance of such a task is much more than a service to Swinburne's personal memory. It is, in effect, the preservation of the spirit of a great literary movement, the record of a potent and stimulating ideal. And it should do much to clear the atmosphere of criticism, and to explain to a hurrying generation the debt which its own happy emancipation owes to the pioneers of a period that can certainly never be justly dismissed with any glib suggestion of self-sufficiency or supineness.

We look back, then, upon the Victorian era, and we see it almost absurdly disturbed by problems of commercial and scientific progress. The political speeches of the time suggest that the good citizen's prevailing ambition was to possess an income a little more comfortable than his neighbor's; while the theological arguments of his Sunday pulpit were feverishly absorbed in buttressing the authority of the Old Testament against the disconcerting revelations of Darwinism and geology. Even poetry could not afford to let these weighty questions go by default; and nearly ten of the most active years of Tennyson's production were consumed in a noble effort to reconcile the doctrine of evolution with a belief in the immortality of the soul. But it should be noted that Tennyson was the only great Victorian poet to commit himself freely to a compromise with Victorianism. The rest were more or less openly in revolt; and none more emphatically so than Swinburne himself, that brilliant Puck of the meadow of asphodel, that 'flame of fire,' whose lively heels beat a tarantella upon the polished boards of tradition and respectability, and then danced off into the woods of imagination among the

*The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Edited by Edmund Gosse, C.B., and T. J. Wise. In two volumes. London: William Heinemann.

Having been as child and boy brought up a quasi-Catholic, of course I went in for that as passionately as for other things (e.g. well-nigh to unaffected and unashamed ecstasies of adoration when receiving the Sacrament), then when this was naturally stark dead and buried, it left nothing to me but a turbid nihilism; for a Theist I never was; I always felt by instinct and perceived by reason that no man could conceive of a personal God except by crude superstition or else by true supernatural revelation; that a natural God was the absurdest of all human figments; because no man could by other than apocalyptic means - i.e. by other means than a violation of the laws and order of nature conceive of any other sort of Divine person than man with a difference

man with some qualities intensified and some qualities suppressed man with the good in him exaggerated and the evil excised.

He saw the gods of various nations employed for shameless political purposes

one, perhaps, patriotic, another cosmopolitan; and he sought refuge in the honest acceptance of the human instincts, impelling a man to recognize his overmastering humanity. Here, at least, there seemed a natural sanction for natural self-realization.

A consistently good Christian cannot, or certainly need not, love his country. Again, the god of the Greeks and Romans is not good for the domestic (or personal in the Christian sense) virtues, but gloriously good for the patriotic. But we who worship no material incarnation of any qualities, no person, may worship the Divine humanity, the ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshiping any god, any person, any fetish at all. Therefore I might call myself, if I wished, a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Shelley), but assuredly in no sense a Theist. Perhaps you will think this is only clarified nihilism, but at least it is no longer turbid.

These absolutely sincere expressions of faith and unfaith explain, more clearly perhaps than anything in Swinburne's poetry, the pagan celebration of the flesh which proved so revolting to the earliest critics of Poems and Ballads. They explain at the same time the ex

treme, and almost Rabelaisian, plainspeaking of certain of his letters. If the dictates of the body are natural, it is at least consistent to acclaim them as honorable; and, if that is once granted, there need be no unnecessary shame over perfectly normal processes. Nevertheless, Swinburne was to learn, at the hands of popular criticism, that his contemporaries were simply bound to misunderstand his disconcerting frankness and these letters bear suggestive evidence to a maturer anxiety lest he should be misunderstood and misinterpreted. 'I have been more bewritten and belied than any man since Byron,' he writes; and he retained just enough consideration for 'the ungainly wise' to be willing to protect his own reputation. When he had quarreled with his publisher, John Camden Hotten, Swinburne recalled to memory certain earlier writings of a violent character which he did not desire given to the world; and the emphasis with which he begged his friend Howell to recover them is in itself an interesting concession to propriety.

I should, of course, not like any scrap signed with my name, which, in the dirty hands of a Grub Street libeler, might be turned to ridicule, or to any calumnious or vexatious purpose, to fall into such hands if such an accident could be avoided. Neither Hotten nor for that matter any man alive, has in his possession anything from my hand for which I need feel shame or serious regret or apprehension, even should it be exposed to public view; but without any such cause for fear or shame, we may all agree that we shrink, and that reasonably, from the notion that all our private papers, thrown off in moments of chaff or Rabelaisian exchange of burlesque correspondence between friends who understand the fun, and have the watchword, as it were, under which a jest passes and circulates in the right quarter, should ever be liable to the inspection of common or unfriendly

eyes.

This, after all, is a perfectly reasonable apprehension; for the rest, the Swin

all, it displays him as a fervent and convinced reactionary.

The divine discontent with present surroundings, which has commonly proved the hall-mark of genius, must obviously take one of two directions: it must issue either in revolution or in reaction. And with Swinburne, as with the Pre-Raphaelite friends whom Oxford made for him, reaction was the dominant rule of life. They found themselves hemmed in upon every side by smug pretense and materialism unashamed; and they turned back to the freedom of the past, in quest of a healing inspiration for the future. Their pictures reflected the simple piety of the Flemings; their poetry was haunted by visions of a dimly romantic mediavalism. And the first ambition of their art and poetry alike was to be honest about the primary springs of emotion; to return to nature for a method and a creed; and to realize the value of individual character, instead of concentrating upon the preservation of a type. The inevitable outcome was that the pedants and the prudes were shocked; and there lurked, perhaps, an underlying, malicious pleasure in the process of shocking them. The very earliest of Swinburne's published letters revels in the entertainment.

One evening when the Union was just finished Jones and I had a great talk. (Spencer) Stanhope and Swan attacked, and we defended, our idea of Heaven viz. a rose-garden full of stunners. Atrocities of an appalling nature were uttered on the other side. We became so fierce that two respectable members of the University -entering to see the pictures stood mute and looked at us. We spoke just then of kisses in Paradise, and expounded our ideas on the celestial development of that necessity of life; and after listening five minutes to our language, they literally fled from the room! Conceive our mutual ecstasy of delight.

From a rose-garden full of stunners'

to the free celebration of natural passion was a short step, after all; and the honest recognition of animal impulse was one of the first bombs to be thrown into the camp of Victorian self-deception. Swinburne and his friends recognized that the majority of the people among whom they moved accepted for the sake of respectability a religious tradition which they had never had the courage to test; and the earliest advance upon the road of honesty was a frank return to a natural paganism, sanctioned by emotions common to the whole human race.

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou shalt not take: The laurel, the palm, and the paean, the breast of the nymphs in the brake.

To Ruskin's prudent apprehension that the youthful Swinburne is plunging into a stream of religious anarchy, the poet makes an absolutely sincere and unaffected reply:

You speak of not being able to hope enough for me. Don't you think we had better leave hope and faith to infants, adult or ungrown? You and I and all men will probably do and endure what we are destined for, as well as we can. I for one am quite content to know this, without any ulterior belief or conjecture. I don't want more praise and success than I deserve, more suffering and failure than I can avoid; but I take what comes as well and as quietly as I can; and this seems to me a man's real business and only duty. You compare my work to a temple where the lizards have supplanted the gods; I prefer an indubitable and living lizard to a dead or doubtful god.

By 'dead or doubtful god' Swinburne implied, as his letter to Stedman reveals, any sort of personal deity such as contemporary interpretation of the Bible set before its congregations. Like so many thinkers both before and after him, he had passed into a kind of theistic nihilism through the gate of precocious devoutness.