II
KAREN ALKALAY-GUTAesthetic and Decadent poetry
When John Morley sharply criticized Algernon Charles Swinburne for
"gloating" with "hot lustfulness" over "quivering flanks," "splendid supple
thighs," "hot sweet throats," and "hotter hands than fire" throughout the
first series of Poems and Ballads (1866), 1 the poet defended himself by
asserting new criteria for art. Swinburne declared that he was not writing
lyrics that expressed his own feelings or opinions. His work, he insisted,
comprised dramatic monologues whose speakers should not be confused
with himself: "the book is dramatic, many-faced, multifarious; and no
utterance of enjoyment or despair, belief or unbelief, can properly be
assumed as the assertion of its author's personal feeling or faith." 2 While
some scholars have dismissed this defense as a marvelous ruse - one that
allows Swinburne to deflect moral responsibility from his work by
suggesting, "I'm not sick - it's those crazy characters of mine" - many
Victorian readers reacted to this response by observing that the kind of
mind that conceived of such personae could only be diseased. (Ralph
Waldo Emerson, for one, condemned Swinburne as a "perfect leper and a
mere sodomite." 3 ) The polemic ignited by Swinburne's early poetry points
to a crucial paradigm shift in how Victorian culture thought about
literature. His defense involved a radical divergence from Matthew Ar-
nold's influential demand that the best literary works should uphold a high
moral seriousness that could both act as a modern substitute for religion
and provide the basis of an improving education. "More and more
mankind," Arnold writes in "The Study of Poetry" (1880), "will discover
that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, t o console us, to
sustain us." 4 Indeed, according to Arnold, "the matter and substance of the
best poetry" embodies the "superior character of truth and seriousness." 5
The powerful Arnoldian idea that art possessed a moral function - one
that validated the genre of poetry in a period when society was driven to
assign value through practical economics - in many ways harmonized with
the prevailing Victorian belief that everything should have a calculable
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