The Medieval Background of Swinburne's The Leper

Abstract

Among the contents of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, 1866, few pieces aroused more hostility than The Leper. John Morley and Robert Buchanan, it is true, ignored that poem in their damaging critical notices in The Saturday Review and The Athenæum for August 4, nor did Swinburne mention it in Notes on Poems and Reviews. But The Spectator of September 22, discussing the question of immorality in literature, after citing Swinburne's Faustine as a poem in which artistic treatment justifies the subject, added: “It is entirely otherwise with his Anactoria and Phaedra, and other foul stuff, worst of all, The Leper, which we think no critics can speak worse of than they deserve.” An article in Fraser's Magazine for November, though predominantly favorable to Poems and Ballads, named The Leper among the poems that should be suppressed. The Athenæum for November 3, in a criticism of Notes on Poems and Reviews, remarked: “To our thinking, nothing can be more horribly impure, more utterly loathsome, than the story of the unclean priest [sic] and his leprous mistress [sic].” The Westminster Review for April 1, 1867, mentioned Laus Veneris, The Leper, and Les Noyades as the chief objects of popular clamor.