It is peculiar to the millennial condition that we have almost no occasion ever to celebrate a passing moment for its own singular delights. Everyday is rigorously transcribed to us as another failed peace summit or an unforgivable assault on minority rights or planes raining from a sky dark with industrial waste and bad feelings. Sound-bite minimalism and the shifting tableau of relativistic vogues have displaced the vast mosaic of Natural Law, reducing to mythology the great chain of being. In the absurdist diction of inclusive ideology, Nature's multiplicity is reconstructed as social diversity and eternal nature, as oppressive anachronism.
The truth however, is not only more compelling, it is more fun. Charles Swinburne, the great 19th century British poet, is today wholly excluded from the American curriculum, not because his revolutionary scansion makes him inaccessible to diffident students (though this may also be true), but because his vision of Nature was hierarchical, majestic, cruel, and, thus, inconsistent with the new paradigm that requires even the objets d'arts to be sensitive and healing. But immense and splendid Nature does not unite us, does not bring us together as one. Rather, it divides and partitions us, each from the other and all of us from itself. It is supreme and incomprehensible. In Nature, discrimination is the first principle of survival; the reflex for the primacy of excellence supercedes the social tropism for protecting the weak or the stupid. Natural Law precludes the existence of any civil right.
So, too does Swinburne's extraordinary verse move ever downward from God to Nature to man, documenting the chaotic modulations of hard experience with the supple acuity of imaginative frisson. The naive language of affirmation – to say nothing of affirmative action – does not survive the sudden storms of his Mid-Summer Holiday. Only the poet, through cunning and prosody, escapes with his lyrics intact. And his sublimely sexy Atalanta of Calydon ruins with humor and resourcefulness the plodding, equilibrationist schemes of Toxeus and Plexippus, whose notion that inherited wealth must be redistributed reminds us that the welfare state has not only an ironic name, but a distinguished history.
Indeed, Swinburne's remarkable oeuvre is unfashionable because it regards history and Nature as central to the poetic project and the human enterprise. He saw the world as place humanity and divinity intersect, sometimes violently, often beautifully, as in his lovely encomium for this fine month of August, in which: "the gracious glories of thine eyes/Make night a noon where darkness dies."
August 30, 2000
Scott Wilkerson is a graduate student in philosophy.
