Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/187

 It would clearly be impossible to show him, to make him feel, the silent horror and wonder with which other ears receive such utterances from him as from the common Briton we expect and accept with all composure. Whether it be "the German paste in his composition" which so far thickens and deadens his subtle sense of song, I cannot say; but I can say that in that case it would be well for him to get quit of it. The cadence and impulse of harmonies in French verse are of course unlike those in English verse or Italian, and the laws which are their outgrowth are unlike too; but the one is not more sure and satisfying than the other: only there must be the right hands to play and the right ears to hear. Mr. Arnold says that a Frenchman born with the faculty or instinct of poetry finds in prose a fuller and easier expression than in verse. As justly might a French critic say this of an Englishman. In either case, the man who is a poet or nothing must be judged by his power of writing verse. If he can neither do that well nor do any other work, whatever his charm of aspiration and sentiment and sincerity may be, he slips into the second rank as surely if French as if English. Imagine that Frenchman's tone of mind, or his tone of ear, who should proclaim the inadequacy of a language which has sufficed for all the great lyric poets of France, all the copious and glorious roll from François Villon and Charles of Orleans to Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier, but is now convicted of inaptitude to render in full the sentiments of a Maurice de Guérin! The English poet is here hopelessly at sea without oar or rudder, haven or guiding-star. He cannot even be trusted to speak of the academic