Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/138

126 him touch on individual poems with which he is not, and still more on personal comparisons, and we shall get nothing further from him than the rhodomontade of his loves and hates. In this first section we have only to deal with his first outburst, although it is possible enough that, chronologically speaking, this outburst does not exist within any well-defined limits. None the less his work, as it seems, can be divided off into three parts, each with its fairly distinctive and specialised quality.

Two powers have perpetually struggled for him, self-abandonment and self-restraint, and this struggle has been carried into every branch of it. What is most admirable in Atalanta is just this—the effort after artistic self-restraint. He joins a perception of Æschylus and Euripides to a perception of Sophokles, of Sophokles who 'saw life steadily and saw it whole.' In the same way his criticism then felt the (to him) sanitary influence of Matthew Arnold, and the  'haute critique qui part d'enthousiasme' of the author of William Shakespeare was not despotic. What has just been called Mr. Swinburne's first outburst is that portion of his work which we have already been considering, its final poetical and critical outcomes being the first Poems and Ballads and the essay on Blake. From this we pass to the second part, where the better influences of his temperament bear