Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/110

98 towards vivacity, towards variety, towards intellectuality, without setting up a Browning school even in the Browning Society. It is somewhat grievous to think of the coming neglect, after the preliminary contemporary penalty of indifference. But by such quasi-martyrdoms is progress made in the age of tolerance; and after all Browning found life abundantly sweet, and is sure of immortality for a score of things.

Of Mr. Swinburne, little need be said. His preciosity too is that of a marked idiosyncrasy of utterance — this time a superfœtation of phrase, a plethora of vocabulary. His vice of style, too, was hotly persisted in when the matter of his first volume was denounced; and a life of semi-seclusion, in uncritically sympathetic company, has excluded whatever chance there may be supposed to have been of a corrective action of normal literary intercourse or outside criticism. Thus, though we notice in his case the usual tendency of the press to pay tribute to the aging writer when his faults are no longer novel, Mr. Swinburne has partly outlived his early influence as well as the early antagonism to his work; and of him too it may be said that what was new and strong in his performance, his enlargement and special tillage of the field of rhythm, has counted for good in English poetry; while his preciosity, consisting in his tautology and his archaism, has been but slightly contagious. It was not really a new way of speaking, not really a widening of expression, so much as a congestion of it, a heaping up of words for lack of valid ideas; differing here from the other modern preciosities just mentioned, which visibly come of a sense of something special to say. Hence Mr. Swinburne has not been the main influence even in the return to archaism. The other archaistic poets of the day are so independently of his influence.

Contrasted with the exaggerated egoisms of such writers as Carlyle, Browning, and Mr. Swinburne, some recent styles that Rh