Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/100

I welcome Heine, and could listen to his mad laughter for a summer day. I love Byron better than Tupper, and of all Byron's books I best love "Don Juan." I reverence Hugo, and I see nothing in him that is shocking, save, perhaps, certain abominable eccentricities in "L'Homme qui Rit." I still beguile many an hour, when snug at anchor in some lovely Highland loch, with the inimitable, yet questionable, pictures of Parisian life left by Paul de Kock; and I know no sweeter poet in some respects than the egregious Alfred de Musset. To my thinking, there is no grander passage in literature than that tremendous scene between Ottilia and her paramour, in "Pippa Passes:" no one accuses the author of that, and of the "Ring and the Book," of neglecting love or overlooking the body; and yet I do daily homage to the genius of Robert Browning, I deem "Vivien" an essential pendant to that wonderful apotheosis of Masculine Chastity, which is the heart of that Arthurian epic on which the laureate has poured all his orient poetic wealth. I have praised Whitman, and hope to praise him over and over again. I know no fresher, finer work of this generation than certain novels by Mr. Charles Reade, who is not generally considered an ascetic author. In one word, I have no earthly objection to the Body and the Flesh in their rightful time and place, as part of great work and noble art; I do not see any great wickedness in the old-fashioned use of the gaudriole; and I am ready (as any sane man must be ready) to regard with kindness, and even sympathy, all work of a really good and honest author, even if it here and there, as I may think, exceeds the just limits of reserve, and becomes indecent, as sometimes happens, by sheer force of power. But Flesh,