For in that compound he labours to exaggerate
Shakespeare, and by his insistence and iteration goes about to spoil for
us the "flower-soft hands" of Cleopatra's rudder-maiden; but he shall not
spoil Shakespeare's phrase for us. And behold, in all this fundamental
fumbling Swinburne's critics saw only a "mannerism," if they saw even
thus much offence.
One of the chief pocket-words was "Liberty." O Liberty! what verse is
committed in thy name! Or, to cite Madame Roland more accurately, O
Liberty, how have they "run" thee!
Who, it has been well asked by a citizen of a modern free country, is
thoroughly free except a fish? _Et encore_--even the "silent and
footless herds" may have more inter-accommodation than we are aware. But
in the pocket of the secondary poet how easy and how ready a word is
this, a word implying old and true heroisms, but significant here of an
excitable poet's economies. Yes, economies of thought and passion. This
poet, who is conspicuously the poet of excess, is in deeper truth the
poet of penury and defect.
And here is a pocket-word which might have astonished us had we not known
how little anyway it signified. It occurs in something customary about
Italy:
Hearest thou,
Italia? Tho' deaf sloth hath sealed thine ears,
The world has heard thy children--and God hears.
Was ever thought so pouched, so produced, so surely a handful of loot, as
the last thought of this verse?
What, finally, is his influence upon the language he has ransacked? A
temporary laying-waste, undoubtedly.
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