But such sharing is somewhat
too familiar for dignity; such community of goods parodies the
Franciscans. As one friar goes darned for another's rending, having no
property in cassock or cowl, so does many a poet, not in humility, but in
a paradox of pride, boast of the past of others. And yet one might
rather choose to make use of one's fellow-men's old shoes than to put
their old secrets to usufruct, and dress poetry in a motley of shed
passions, twice corrupt. Promiscuity of love we have heard of; Pope was
accused, by Lord Hervey's indignation and wit, of promiscuity of hatred,
and of scattering his disfavours in the stews of an indiscriminate
malignity; and here is another promiscuity--that of memories, and of a
licence partaken.
But by the unanimous poets' splendid love of the landscape and the skies,
by this also was Swinburne possessed, and in this he triumphed. By this,
indeed, he profited; here he joined an innumerable company of that
heavenly host of earth. Let us acknowledge then his honourable alacrity
here, his quick fellowship, his agile adoption, and his filial
tenderness--nay, his fraternal union with his poets. No tourist's
admiration for all things French, no tourist's politics in Italy--and
Swinburne's French and Italian admirations have the tourist manner of
enthusiasm--prompts him here. Here he aspires to brotherhood with the
supreme poets of supreme England, with the sixteenth century, the
seventeenth, and the nineteenth, the impassioned centuries of song.
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