Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/145

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Is there any French poet who would be ashamed to sign it?

When we come to the Songs before Sunrise we come to what Mr. Swinburne evidently looks upon as an important spiritual development in himself. In a Prelude which is often as singularly suggestive of the letter as of the spirit of Arnold's wonderful 'New Sirens,' he draws attention to this. The sincerity and inevitability of the development are rather problematical. 'Love's passion is played out, let us then take to the passion of politics,' is the burden of it. But how, Mr. Swinburne would say, can you be troubling about the sincerity or inevitability of the thing when it is expressed to you in music such as this is? But Mr. Swinburne, with his pretty theory that 'the excellence of verse justifies its injustice,' loses sight of the fact that the spiritual element enters into the very texture of its actual expression, and, if this spiritual element is wanting in a certain quality, the actual expression of it will be wanting also. When, and only when, in Mr. Swinburne his essential qualities all meet together and, made clear by some