A “Whirl of Aesthetic Terminology”: Swinburne, Shakespeare, and Ethical Criticism

Abstract

W hen Robert Buchanan assailed the so-called “Fleshly School of Poetry” in 1871, he chastised the writers, including A. C. Swinburne, for being “intellectual hermaphrodite[s]” who could not distinguish between fact and fantasy because they were “lost in a whirl of aesthetic terminology.”1 Although Buchanan specifically referred to poetry, the derogatory reference to “aesthetic terminology” also reflects the moral outrage that initially greeted Swinburne’s criticism. Indeed, for many of his contemporaries, Swinburne’s morality and aesthetics were one and the same, for by privileging art for art’s sake over conservative Victorian ideology, Swinburne’s writing was, by their definition, immoral: “feverish carnality,” cried one journal; “prurient trash,” proclaimed another; “unhappy perversities,” declared a third.2 Swinburne’s name became almost synonymous with indecency and immorality during the 1860s and 1870s, and his first collection of poetry, Poems and Ballads (1866), was loudly denounced for its transgressive qualities. In his prose criticism on Shakespeare, however, Swinburne used his insistence on aesthetic values as an ethical critique of the “scientific” methods of the New Shakespere Society. Here, ethics and aesthetics joined productively for Swinburne, rehabilitating his image in the public eye and giving him new stature as protector of Shakespeare’s artistic value.