school have occasion for a 'hell' (which may very well happen to any
young man practising authorship), I must not be accused of phantasy if I
say that they put their hands into Mr. Swinburne's vocabulary and pick
it. These vocabularies are made out of vigorous and blunt language.
'What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here?' Alas, they are
homespuns from the factory, machine-made in uncostly quantities.
Obviously, power needs to make use of no such storage. The property of
power is to use phrases, whether strange or familiar, as though it
created them. But even more than lack of power is lack of humour the
cause of all the rankness and the staleness, of all the Anglo-Saxon of
commerce, of all the weary 'quaintness'--that quaintness of which one is
moved to exclaim with Cassio: 'Hither comes the bauble!' Lack of a sense
of humour betrays a man into that perpetual too-much whereby he tries to
make amends for a currency debased. No more than any other can a witty
writer dispense with a sense of humour. In his moments of sentiment the
lack is distressing; in his moments of wit it is at least perceptible. A
sense of humour cannot be always present, it may be urged. Why, no; it
is the lack of it that is--importunate. Other absences, such as the
absence of passion, the absence of delicacy, are, if grievous negatives,
still mere negatives. These qualities may or may not be there at call,
ready for a summons; we are not obliged to know; we are not momentarily
aware, unless they ought to be in action, whether their action is
possible. But want of power and want of a sense of the ridiculous: these
are lacks wherefrom there is no escaping, deficiencies that are
all-influential, defects that assert themselves, vacancies that proclaim
themselves, absences from the presence whereof there is no flying; what
other paradoxes can I adventure? Without power--no style. Without a
possible humour,--no style. The weakling has no confidence in himself to
keep him from grasping at words that he fancies hold within them the true
passions of the race, ready for the uses of his egoism. And with a sense