Swinburne has put his 'hell' into a vocabulary, with
the inevitable consequences to the word. And when the minor men of his
school have occasion for a 'hell' (which may very well happen to any
young man practising authorship), I must not be accused of phantasy if I
say that they put their hands into Mr. Swinburne's vocabulary and pick
it. These vocabularies are made out of vigorous and blunt language.
'What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here?' Alas, they are
homespuns from the factory, machine-made in uncostly quantities.
Obviously, power needs to make use of no such storage. The property of
power is to use phrases, whether strange or familiar, as though it
created them. But even more than lack of power is lack of humour the
cause of all the rankness and the staleness, of all the Anglo-Saxon of
commerce, of all the weary 'quaintness'--that quaintness of which one is
moved to exclaim with Cassio: 'Hither comes the bauble!' Lack of a sense
of humour betrays a man into that perpetual too-much whereby he tries to
make amends for a currency debased. No more than any other can a witty
writer dispense with a sense of humour. In his moments of sentiment the
lack is distressing; in his moments of wit it is at least perceptible.
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