Sir, or Sirs,

It is necessary at times, I believe, for theguardians of public safety to search all kinds of unsavouryaccumulations; and doubtless it must be no uncommoncase for two dead dogs to lie there, one beneath the other. Were the hidden one conceivably wanted for some purposeof judicial evidence, the task of digging it out would not bea pleasant one; and more time would inevitably be lost thanif the upper carcass, perhaps purposely paraded, happenedto be the one required. A kindred operation to this is thecause why my present favour has not reached you earlier;but I still trust that, for all that, you may prove no loserby the delay.

The expedients of ordinary delinquency might furnishmany illustrations to my present subject. For instance, ‘It worn't me, it were 'im,’ is not an elevated plea of self-defence; nor does it suggest, at first hearing, either theexpression of truth or the protection of honesty. It isgenerally heard by a policeman; and his usual answer is agrip of the speaker's collar, resulting finally, as the case may be, in a roll in the gutter, a night in the station-house, or a term of penal servitude. Every man, Sir, must be his own ‘Force’ on occasion. As you read this, you feel the firstclutch; and I assure you I am going to ‘run you in.’

It is now some years since a good deal began to be saidas to the irresponsible nature of anonymous criticism; andsome literary journals were established in which the manwho spoke for or against another was no more nameless atlength than the man he spoke of. Such journals there are still, honestly pursuing their new course; and among these, the Contemporary Review might, for anything I know to the contrary, have been fairly reckoned till now. But in October of this year at any rate (whether or not for the first time I do not know,) this Review seems desirous to prove that, if the anonymous in criticism was but a creeping caterpillar stage, the nominate too was no better than a homely transitional chrysalis, and that the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who likes to sport in sunlight and yet to elude the grasp, is after all the pseudonymous. And yet, capitally as this seems to combine apparent fearlessness with real safety, there are dangers too even here. What cap, flung at random, brought the gay wings down? I cannot tell; but I know that they have somehow come into my hand for dissection, and that I find the interests of entomo-logical science too much concerned to let the creature go again.

With the odds on this footing, I feel there is no great merit on my part if I at once give you one or two points at the outset of the game. Accordingly, for one thing, I shall abstain from all opportunities of calling you a Stealthy Person. I know, and you know, and the reader knows that such you are; and it is only untruths or uncertainties that call for repeated proclamation. One other point I have no choice but to forgo. I have never read a single line of your acknowledged works, or even set eyes on one of them; The printer has marked an “X” in the right margin at lines 15 and 17 to indicate a spacing problem in the type. therefore whatever sport they might afford I must cheerfully resign, feeling no more able to claim such a privilege than would a sportsman who had a glorious day's hunting offered him on condition of his repeating the Church Catechism one hundred times. Nevertheless, when I take up your pseu- donymous writings, and, as it were, glance from my seat in the saddle over a fine hunting country, teeming everywhere with the Common Skunk and the Scotch Fox, I feel that, with such game before me, I have no cause to complain.

The two animals above-named present no very salientpoints of generic distinction; yet the question between Thomas Maitland and Robert Buchanan, as spokesman in this instance, was doubtless of some moment to you. I am not the only individual attacked in your article; and (taking advantage of my commended modesty to put my- self out of the question for the moment,) I am disposed to concur heartily in your own view, that what Robert Buchanan might have to say about Algernon Swinburne or William Morris was exactly what no mortal out of Bedlam could be expected to listen to. A wild whirl towards the fire-grate, amid an atmosphere highly charged with the more explosive parts of our language, would be the fate, with most readers, of any Review which should furnish, in an undisguised form, that particular commodity to its public. Thomas Maitland, on the other hand,— unheard-of and indeed non-existent, — merely embodied himself unobtrusively with the obvious features of the situa-tion: as, firstly, — a Publisher who has some expensive poetic copyrights to uphold, and is quite indifferent to their author's dignity or wishes in the means he takes for their supposed advantage: secondly, — some other poetry, published elsewhere, and causing palpitations to this Pub-lisher: thirdly, — a Review at command, to abuse such poets in: and lastly, — a Critic just suited to serve the Publisher's turn, and be paid for it. The proceedings of all parties here seemed of a kind too well known in the ‘literary’ world to excite much remark.

However, as it is, by help of some new electric light, we have both Robert and Thomas, — Scotch Bard and English Reviewer in one, — to contemplate; and what better fun than to interpret between you and your double, now that one can see the puppets dallying? In the very first page, Thomas, having vowed Fee Fo Fum against certain poets, thinks it wise, by the first law of nature, to give Robert a gentle slap too, all of course for self-preservation and for his own good in the end. Poor anxious little soul! What man that has a laugh in him but must half forgive you? For does one not here see you lying back for a moment with a rapid rub of the hands, and hear you chuckle, ‘Catch them nosing me out after that!’ Further on, Robert, having stood in his corner like a good boy for some time, gets a sudden pat on the back from Thomas at my expense, and is informed that whatever merit may exist in an otherwise worthless poem called he alone is responsible for. This question can, no doubt, be easily settled by others who have read your acknowledged writings. For me, not being in that position, I must rank myself with those — pro-bably a minority — who cannot pretend to an opinion on the subject. You tell me, however, that the poem of yours thus plagiarized by me is entitled, This reminds me that my ‘true profession’ is that of an Artist; and without ever having seen you, I would venture to predict that, as a Model for certain characters, you would be invaluable. Thus, should it chance to be the case that your calling as poet had somewhat failed you before you took to criticism, and that your calling as critic were to languish a little henceforward, I would invite you to drop in on me some light day in the slack season, when I would at once A2 gladly commence a or a You already know that I am shy of exhibiting my pictures; so I need not remind you that the above pseu- donyms, while profitable (a shilling an hour is the profes-sional fee), might really pass unnoticed.

I observe that, on reading this poem of Robert-Thomas ‘fairly lost patience.’ Why, you sorry trickster! Do you think anyone will believe, with the facts and your precious farrago of malice before him, that you ever lost patience in your life? You are nothing but patience, to your own little ends. What man but yourself would not indeed have lost patience much less than midway, when he found himself betrayed by envy into skulking and shuffling behind a wretched mask, and all to traduce another man because he too writes verses as best he may?

So this brings us to our true ground, Robert-Thomas; and I will now tell you what I mean and do not mean. I do not mean to object for a moment to whatever any well-hidden Scotch head, or ‘well-known American hand’ ap-proved by it, may have to say against the poetic value of what I write for my own satisfaction. I publish it, and there it is as a prey for the gods and dogs. Whether at present any accepting fire descend on it, or it be merely digested by the consumers of carrion, that can matter little. It has a soul to be blessed or damned, and one fate or the other it will meet in the long run, quite inde-pendently of what may be said or done to it now. It is amusing, doubtless, to see the very same contempt now brought to bear on one's own writings that one has long ago seen lavished on the same poets who are now cited against one in scornful comparison: yet is not this also written in the book of Dishonest Mediocrity, and has not every one read it there too often to pay it much attention now? ‘Morbidity,’ ‘Self-consciousness,’ ‘Affectation’—why, these are catch-words that have been almost identified by turns, in the mouths of fools and liars (and that but yesterday), with every name one most warms to, — Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, and who not else besides? If one has no pretension to share the fulness of their glory, this at least is something that one clearly has attained to in common with them. It is pitiful enough to see the would-be successors of such a critic as Christopher North, — that ‘bantam Thun-derer,’ as ‘a modern writer’ has called him, — now reduced to exorcising new verse-makers in the very name of the great poet who wrote —

Another silly device which has been tried a thousand times is the one which you re-exemplify by calling all poetic work of this immediate day ‘sub-Tennysonian.’ This, if it has any meaning, must mean that, were it not for Tennyson's exemplar, this English generation would present the unusual phenomenon of giving birth to no leading faculty in verse. This is improbable on the face of it; and as ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ are also improbable in these days of increased opportunity, it is most likely that the poets who have written with Tennyson in the field are the very same who would have written without him. Besides, real analogies are easy to trace, in every poet, to his pre-decessors, and especially his immediate ones; in addition to that other large class of critical accusations of plagia- rism which are mere untruth and nothing else.

To dwell on any charges against myself of poetic in-feriority, is what, as I have said, I do not intend doing. Any one has a perfect right to make these, so long as he # The printer has a hash mark in the margin at line 27 to indicate that the words “me address”, which are run together in the text, should be spaced apart. confines himself to the literary question; and if he does so under a mask, that merely shows timidity and lack of self-confidence from one cause or another, and need not of itself invalidate his criticism, though it must of course, when discovered, place him at a disadvantage with the reader.

But in this instance, under the guise of criticism, the use made by me of poetic means has been grossly and unscrupulously misrepresented; and it is my intention to show that your article in the Contemporary Review, put forward as it is under an outer cover of falsehood, is no less in itself throughout an example of literary duplicity. I need hardly say that it is not for your benefit that I takethis course, since you know just as well as I do how true it is that you have spoken in great measure untruly; but certain honest people will read what you have said without any means of discovering its bad faith; and that means I will afford them if they like to hear me.

In many phases of outward nature, the principle of chaff and grain holds good, — the base enveloping the precious continually; but a lie was never yet the husk of a truth. Thresh and riddle and winnow it as you may, — let it fly in shreds to the four winds, — falsehood only will be that which flies and that which stays. Thus the sheath of deceit which this undertaking of yours presents at the outset insures in fact what we shall find to be its real character to the core.

[But here, parenthetically, let me address the general reader; for a certain impatience soon becomes inevitable in speaking on points of moment to one whose personal conduct makes it impossible to address him without some contempt.

The primary accusation, on which this writer grounds all the rest, seems to be that others and myself ‘extol fleshliness The printer has marked an “X” in the margin at line 15 to indicate that the line has an extra space. as the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; aver that poetic expression is greater than poetic thought; and by inference that the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense.’ As my own writings are alone formally dealt with in the article, I shall confine my an- swer to myself; and this must first take unavoidably the form of a challenge to prove so broad a statement. It is true, some fragmentary pretence at proof is put in here and there throughout the attack, and thus far an oppor-tunity is given of contesting the assertion; so let this be undertaken as rapidly as possible.

A Sonnet entitled is quoted and abused at page 338 of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a ‘whole poem’ describing ‘merely animal sensations.’ It is no more a whole poem in reality than is any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written in sonnets and of which this is one sonnet stanza, is entitled and even in my first published in-stalment of the whole work (as contained in the volume under notice,) ample evidence is included that no such passing phase of description as the one headed could possibly be put forward by the author of the House of Life as his own representative view of the subjectof Love. In proof of this, I will direct attention (among the love-sonnets) to Nos. 2, 8, 11, 17, 28, and more espe- cially 13, which, indeed, I had better print here.

Any reader may bring any artistic charge he pleases against the above sonnet; but one charge it would be im-possible to maintain against the writer of the series in which it occurs; and that is, the wish on his part to assert that the body is greater than the soul. For here all the passionateand just delights of the body are declared — somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakably — to be as nought if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times. Moreover, nearly one half of this series of Sonnets has nothing to do with love, but treats of quite other life-influences. I would defy any one to couple with fair quo-tation of Sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 41, 43, or others, the slander that their author was not impressed, like all other thinking men, with the responsibilities and higher mysteries of life; while Sonnets 35, 36, and 37, entitled sum up the general view taken in a manner only to be evaded by conscious insincerity. Thus much for the House of Life, of which the Sonnet is one stanza, embody-ing, for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural uni- versal function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have shown that it is not here) to the exclusion of those other highest things of which it is the harmonious concomitant.

At page 342 an attempt is made to stigmatize four short quotations as being specially ‘my own property,’ that is, (forthe context shows the meaning,) as being grossly sensual; though all guiding reference to any precise page or poem in my book is avoided here. The first of these unspecified quotations is from the and is the descrip-tion referring to the harlot's laugh, the hideous character of which, together with its real or imagined analogy to the laugh heard soon afterwards from the lips of one long cherished as an ideal, is the immediate cause which makes the maddened hero of the poem a murderer. Assailants may say what they please; but no poet or poetic reader will blame me for making the incident recorded in these sevenlines as repulsive to the reader as it was to the hearer and beholder. Without this, the chain of motive and result would remain obviously incomplete. Observe also that these are but seven lines in a poem of some five hundred, not one other of which could be classed with them.

A second quotation gives the last two lines only of the following sonnet, which is the first of four sonnets in the House of Life, jointly entitled

The critic has quoted (as I said) only the last two lines, and he has italicized the second as something un- bearable and ridiculous. Of course the inference would be that this was really my own absurd bubble-and-squeak notion of an actual kiss. The reader will perceive at once, from the whole sonnet transcribed above, how untrue such an inference would be. The sonnet describes a dream or trance of divided love momentarily reunited by the longing fancy; and in the imagery of the dream, the face of the beloved rises through deep dark waters to kiss the lover. Thus the phrase, ‘Bubbled with brimming kisses, &c.’ bears purely on the special symbolism employed, and from that point of view will be found, I believe, perfectly simple and just.

A third quotation is from and says,

Here again no reference is given, and naturally the reader would suppose that a human embrace is described. The em-brace, on the contrary, is that of a fabled snake woman and a snake. It would be possible still, no doubt, to object on other grounds to this conception; but the ground inferred and relied on for full effect by the critic is none the less an absolute misrepresentation. These three extracts, it will be admitted, are virtually, though not verbally, garbled with malicious intention; and the same is the case, as I have shown, with the sonnet called when purposely treated as a ‘whole poem.’

The last of the four quotations grouped by the critic as conclusive examples consists of two lines from Neither some thirteen years ago when I wrote this poem, nor last year when I published it, did I fail to foresee impending charges of recklessness and aggressiveness, or to perceive that even some among those who could really read the poem and acquit me on these grounds might still hold that the thought in it had better have dispensed with the situation which serves it for framework. Nor did I fail to consider how far a treatment from without might here be possible. But the motive powers of art reverse the require-ment of science, and demand first of all an inner standing point. The heart of such a mystery as this must be plucked from the very world in which it beats or bleeds; and the beauty and pity, the self-questionings and all-questionings which it brings with it, can come with full force only from the mouth of one alive to its whole appeal, such as the speaker put forward in the poem,— that is, of a young and thought- ful man of the world. To such a speaker, many half cynical revulsions of feeling and reverie, and a recurrent presence of the impressions of beauty (however artificial) which first brought him within such a circle of influence, wouldbe inevitable features of the dramatic relation portrayed. Here again I can give the lie, in hearing of honest readers, to the base or trivial ideas which my critic labours to connect with the poem, as easily as to his pardonable personal vanity in the attribution of its origin.

It would be humiliating, need one come to serious detail, to have to refute such an accusation as that of ‘binding oneself by solemn league and covenant to extol fleshliness as the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art;’ and one cannot but feel that here every one will think it allowable merely to pass with a smile by the foolish fellow who has brought a charge thus framed against any reasonable man. Indeed, what I have said already is substantially enough to refute it, even did I not feel sure that a fair balance of my poetry must, of itself, do so in the eyes of every candid reader. I say nothing of my pictures; but those who know them will laugh at the idea. That I may, nevertheless, take a wider view than some poets or critics, of how much, in the material conditions absolutely given to man to deal with as distinct from his spiritual aspirations, is ad-missible within the limits of art, — this, I say, is possible enough, nor do I wish to shrink from such responsibility. But to state that I do so to the ignoring or overshadowing of spiritual beauty is an absolute falsehood, impossible to put forward except in the indulgence of prejudice or rancour.