JOHN LUCASthe human feelings, which in Swinburne's case do not exist" (149). Eliot, in
my view, is working his way toward deciding what will make for a poetry
of erotic morbid human feelings - the feelings of, say, Tiresias's words, or
those of the city director's wife, or those of the typist and the clerk in The
Waste Land.
And then we have to notice that The Waste Land, that definitive city
poem as it has seemed to some critics, is very much absorbed with a subject
whose roots are at least partly to be located in the night soil of the fin de
siecle. And what nourishes that soil? The answer is Swinburne's poetry. As
Fletcher observes: "The Victorian world in Swinburne's eyes was unable to
resolve the antinomies that haunted it: the public world of bourgeois
culture and repressive Christianity... The contradiction is only to be
addressed in the closed world of pornography (to which Swinburne made
his own contribution) or the counter-culture of free thinking and action"
(xl). No wonder Eliot should wish to cover over Swinburne's readiness to
expose such instabilities - instabilities that The Waste Land testifies to and
yet by which it is betrayed. More to the point of the present chapter, it is no
wonder that Swinburne could not be made Poet Laureate. For a little while
longer, Alfred the Little would have to protect England from the growing
threat to bourgeois culture. Austin's first publication as Laureate was
England's Darling (1896), a verse-drama recounting how Alfred the Great
saved England from Danish invasion. It ends with the rhetorical question
"For why on English soil should foe's foot stand?" 50 But the enemy was
already within.
NOTES
1 Carlyle's "Signs of the Times" first appeared in the Edinburgh Review 49
(1829), 439-59. In this essay, he famously defined the coming age as the "the
Mechanical Age" (442), reprinted in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols.
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99), XXVII, 59; further volume and page
references appear in parentheses.
2 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. George Ford and Sylvere Monod (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 5.
3 Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, New York edition, 26 vols. (New
York: Scribner's, 1908), V, xxii.
4 Emile Zola, "Preface de la deuxieme edition," in Zola, La Confession de Claude
et Therese Raquin, Les Romans d'Emile Zola, 24 vols. (Lausanne: Editions
Recontre, i960), XXI, 214.
5 The libel was made in John Ruskin, "Letter 79" (18 June 1877), Fors Claveriga,
vol. 7, reprinted in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T Cook and
Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1907), XXIX, 160.
Whistler began libel proceedings in November that year, and exactly twelve
months later the case came to court.298