Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/146

134 absorbing cause, speak with simplicity, is the result something like a masterpiece, a poem flawless in detail, perfect in conception. It wants all this to restrain his vagabond imagination. Then, too, in poetry such as most of these songs are, he has the temptation of his imperfect sense of melody. Here, more than anywhere else, he makes apparent the gift which as a worker he has done so much to give to our poetry—movement, rapidity, speed; and here, too, more than anywhere else, is apparent the want of both delicacy and variety in his music. His sense of regular rhythms and metres is splendid; his sense of melody was never even remarkable. His blank verse is often brilliant, never sovereign. He must have a brass-band or nothing. Then there is his alliterative trick, which ends in positive disgust. Could parody go further than a line like

Or, to take an example from the Songs, how ineffective are lines like this:

It is something very like balderdash.

There is still more to say. Mr. Swinburne's democracy has not the genuine ring. The trail of the amateur-enthusiast is over it all. What democracy is, what it means, and what it wants, is wholly