Laudator Temporis Acti

Algernon Swinburne, letter to the New York Daily Tribune (written January 30, 1874, published February 25, 1874), from The Swinburne Letters. Edited by Cecil Y. Lang, Vol. 2: 1869-1875 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 274-275:

I am informed that certain American journalists, not content with providing filth of their own for the consumption of their kind, sometimes offer to their readers a dish of beastliness which they profess to have gathered from under the chairs of more distinguished men. While the abuse lavished on my name and writings could claim no higher than a nameless source, I have always been able to say with Shelley²—'I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.' If I am to believe that that name has been made the mark for such vile language as is now publicly attributed to men of note in the world of letters, I, who am not sufficiently an expert in the dialect of the cesspool and the dung-cart to retort in their own kind on these venerable gentlemen—I, whose ears and lips alike are unused to the amenities of a conversation embroidered with such fragments of flowery rhetoric as may be fished up by congenial fingers or lapped up by congenial tongues out of the sewerage of Sodom—can return no better or more apt reply than was addressed by the servant of Octavia to the satellites of Nero and applied by Lord Denman when counsel for Queen Caroline to the sycophants of George IV. A foul mouth is so ill matched with a white beard that I would gladly believe the newspaper scribes alone responsible for the bestial utterances which they declare to have dropped from a teacher whom such disciples as these exhibit to our disgust and compassion as performing on their obscene platform the last tricks of tongue now possible to a gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle, and who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own finding and fouling; Coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian tribe of autocoprophagous baboons who make the filth they feed on.

Averting with a peculiar emotion which I need not specify my eyes and nostrils from the sight and savour of such things, I need not stoop as though to blow off any speck of leaving from a name which I trust and think, though it may well be that it has gained nothing, has at least lost nothing in my hands of its hereditary honour. Those to whom it is known only as an object of reviling from writers with or without a name of their own, may yet do well to ask themselves how far such follies and such villainies may be likely to affect the repute or disturb the consciousness of one to whom it is given to remember that wellnigh at the very outset of his course he had earned the praise and won the friendship of Landor, of Hugo, and of Mazzini; and who, though he may see no need and feel no inclination to seek shelter behind the name or beneath the countenance of any man, has yet in the sense of this not unmerited honour an enduring source of such pleasures and such pride as the 'most sweet voices'³ of his revilers are about equally competent to give and to take away.

2. Letter to Leigh Hunt, Jan. 25, 1822, published in Richard Garnett's Relics of Shelly (1862).

3. Coriolanus, II.iii.180.

The "gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape" was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in an interview had called Swinburne "a perfect leper and a mere sodomite." See Clyde K. Hyder, "Emerson on Swinburne: A Sensational Interview," Modern Language Notes 48.3 (March, 1933) 180-182.

Thanks very much to Eric Thomson for his help. His notes on Octavia, Nero, Lord Denman, and Queen Caroline will be featured on this blog tomorrow.