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26
SYNTAX
With this love of adjectives compare § 2 a. of the
Sematology.
§ 2. Sentence-Structure.
The influence of classical literature is seldom seen
more clearly than in the department of sentence-structure.
Almost every page of Swinburne’s poems bears the image
and superscription of the classical authors. To account
for this we have three factors to take into consideration.
First and foremost, the essential feature of the poet’s
character, his extraordinary faculty of enthusiasm, already
alluded to in the introduction. Clearly such a nature must
be in harmony with the never-ending torrent of words and
sentences in classical languages. The languages of
Aristophanes and Catullus, even in England, have had no
adherent more easily won than Swinburne. But we shall also
find that in the arrangement and order of this army of
classical sentences there can often be seen the methods of
Hebrew poetry.
The second factor referred to above, also accounts
for this. That there was in Swinburne an extraordinary
faculty of imitation, is proved by every volume of his poetry.
More especially is it shown in the Hellenic dramas and
the little volume of parodies of contemporary poets called
«Heptalogia» (vol. V. of Coll. Works). But it has stamped
all the work of the poet; and it is often difficult to
tell at what point of his poems imitation ceases or begins.
In the third place, I have already mentioned (Introd.,
page 8) the unusual funds of knowledge about classical
antiquity possessed by Swinburne.
These three factors account for most of the
characteristic peculiarities of Swinburne’s sentence-structure. I
should like to enumerate them in this way: Swinburne has
a marked fondness for long sentences in which subordi-
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