The World’s Tragedy

PREFACE. XXXIII — what a washerwoman lost to mankind ! was the French nation’s epitaph upon her — drove the last nail into the coffin of art in England. Though ’twas needless cruelty : whom have we had of the first rank in England since Eli- zabeth but the Revolutionaries ? Blake, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Swinburne, Swift, Butler, Milton, every one exiled, starved, bullied, driven insane ; except Milton, whose supreme hypocrisy saved him, as it damned the nation for ever. Anyhow, bad as it was, Victoria made it worse, and, under a queen with a high-necked collar, it is left for me to unite in myself all the blare of all the trumpets. Call me Israfel, last of the angles, and let the dead rise from their tombs ! I therefore hold the legendary Jesus in no wise respon- sible for the trouble : it began with Luther, perhaps, and went on with Wesley : but no matter ! — what I am trying to get at is the religion which makes England to-day a hell for any man who cares at all for freedom. That religion they call Christianity ; the devil they honour they call God. I accept these definitions, as a poet must do, if he is to be at all intelligible to his age, and it is their God and their religion that I hate and will destroy. THE POEM ITSELF I should really leave this to my friend Captain Fuller to dissect at his leisure, that he might bye-and-bye edify the public in a little monograph of say 350,000 words. But