So writes the critic. The name I have omitted is that of the last of the great Victorian poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne. In the dying glory of this last great singer of the nineteenth century, the deepening twilight shows but few rising stars; alone perhaps amid the younger generation of poets – alas, how many and yet how few – Aleister Crowley stands forth with no little of the glory of the great Victorian cast o'er him; enhancing our pleasures, and enchanting our senses. The Sun kisses the Moon, and through the diaphanous veil of the vestal is seen the subtle contour of her form. But no vestal is Crowley, no mere milk-and-bun-walk, where we may rest and take our fill; for he has unstrung the mystic lyre of life from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil, singing old songs and new, flinging shrill notes of satire to this tumultuous world, as some stormy petrel shrilly crying to the storm; or sweet notes of love, soft as the whispering wings of a butterfly.
Here are the jewels of Heaven, of Havilah, and of Eden, with not a little of the fire of Hell, the flames of Gehenna, and the darkness of Dûat. If we look for pyramids and colossi disappointment will be our lot; we cannot hold, as Hanuman of Ind, a mountain in one hand and a forest in the other, neither can we gaze on a celestial Meru or Olympus; but as we look, and here it is only the searcher who is rewarded, we find a little jewel, then another, and still another, till, as we grasp them, their very light is caught by their unfound fellows, and our path is lit as a fairy dell by a thousand wonders of light and of beauty.
"A little more clothing," the critic writes, as he perused the "Poems and Ballads," perhaps, yet we do not feel its need in the glowing works before us. Forty long years have passed, and the world moves. Crowley fairly puts his characters to bed, tucks them up, and does not blow the candle out with cryptic Morse-like dot and dash, leaving the imagination to wallow in the dark, intelligible to the baby-mind of sucklings, and we admire him all the more for not doing so; his undraped virginity is delightful, and if his maidens lack vestments and his matrons mantles, it is a hearty sight, a robust sight, it flushes the drains of our mind, and discloses a heart lying beneath all the conventional tweeds and silks of our sleek respectability. The stale odour of Mrs. Grundy's petticoats vanishes, neither is it replaced by the patchouli of Thais, nor the musk of Aspasia; and if the aroma of a little human sweat does salute our nostrils, it is at least a healthy human smell – an odour of sanctity – infinitely preferable to all the ancient pot-pourri of Philistia, that young and old ladies are alike so fond of distributing among their pretty speeches, as well as their pretty garments.
And life for every one.
The holy heaven of will!
Ye shall see things as they are!
The cast that hideth – Pan!
Shall swim in the fervid flood.
The flowers that bear no seed.
Its flame is a wandering star.
Shall pass in measure and mirth!
* Orpheus, vol. iii, p. 207.