But you came, O you procuratores
And ran us all in!

that moment was the crown of Swinburne’s career as a popular author.  With its incomparable finger on the public pulse the Daily Mail, on the day when it announced Swinburne’s death, devoted one of its placards to the performances of a lady and a dog on a wrecked liner, and another to the antics of a lunatic with a revolver.  The Daily Mail knew what it was about.  Do not imagine that I am trying to be sardonic about the English race and its organs.  Not at all.  The English race is all right, though ageing now.  The English race has committed no crime in demanding from its poets something that Swinburne could not give.  I am merely trying to make clear the exceeding strangeness of the apparition of a poet like Swinburne in a place like England.

Last year I was walking down Putney Hill, and I saw Swinburne for the first and last time.  I could see nothing but his face and head.  I did not notice those ridiculously short trousers that Putney people invariably mention when mentioning Swinburne.  Never have I seen a man’s life more clearly written in his eyes and mouth and forehead.  The face of a man who had lived with fine, austere, passionate thoughts of his own!  By the heavens, it was a noble sight.  I have not seen a nobler.  Now, I knew by hearsay every crease in his trousers, but nobody had told me that his face was a vision that would never fade from my memory.  And nobody, I found afterwards by inquiry, had “noticed anything particular” about his face.  I don’t mind, either for Swinburne or for Putney.  I reflect that if Putney ignored Swinburne, he ignored Putney.  And I reflect that there is great stuff in Putney for a poet, and marvel that Swinburne never perceived it and used it.  He must have been born English, and in the nineteenth century, by accident.  He was misprized while living.  That is nothing.  What does annoy me is that critics who know better are pandering to the national hypocrisy after his death.  In a dozen columns he has been sped into the unknown as “a great Victorian”!  Miserable dishonesty!  Nobody was ever less Victorian than Swinburne.  And then when these critics have to skate over the “Poems and Ballads” episode—­thin, cracking ice!—­how they repeat delicately the word “sensuous,” “sensuous.”  Out with it, tailorish and craven minds, and say “sensual”!  For sensual the book is.  It is fine in sensuality, and no talking will ever get you away from that.  Villiers de l’Isle-Adam once wrote an essay on “Le Sadisme anglais,” and supported it with a translation of a large part of “Anactoria.”  And even Paris was startled.  A rare trick for a supreme genius to play on the country of his birth, enshrining in the topmost heights of its literature a lovely poem that cannot be discussed!...  Well, Swinburne has got the better of us there.  He has simply knocked to pieces the theory that great art is inseparable from the Ten Commandments.  His greatest poem was written in honour of a poet whom any English Vigilance Society would have crucified.  “Sane” critics will naturally observe, in their quiet manner, that “Anactoria” and similar feats were “so unnecessary.”  Would it were true!