Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/137

Rh could be found who should sit down at the poetical piano and play a few chords so many, many times in succession. Young men and women, enamoured of the last waltz or patter song, will do this sort of thing and escape alive, but that is only because centuries of purposeless torture and death have taught us the supreme value of patience. Furthermore, speaking of 'Anactoria' and that poor Sappho whose 'supreme head of song' Mr. Swinburne has 'vexed' so endlessly in both poetry and prose, one has to notice that his poetical insistence has not the effect of emphasis but quite the reverse. In poetry, if anywhere, the part is greater than the whole. An extract from 'Anactoria' and its fellow-sinners (and what extracts one can make!) is worth more than the poem in its entirety, which is all but unreadable. Indeed, from no writer of our time can such appetising extracts be made as from Mr. Swinburne. If he were to be judged by these alone, his place would be with our highest; but the memory of a man's beauty is not perpetuated by the fact that he had a superb knuckle or an irreproachable calf.

It is the same with Mr. Swinburne's criticism, so inchoate and unsatisfactory as a whole. When he begins to generalise he is lost. So long as he confines himself to individual poems with which he is in accord, he is more than worth listening to; but let