the language intensified or sublimated.  The latter type, the more technically “literary” art of Swinburne and of hosts of delicate “minor” poets, is too fragile for endurance.  It is built out of spiritualized material, not out of spirit.  The successes of the Swinburnes are as valuable for diagnostic purposes as the semi-failures of the Brownings.  They show to what extent literary art may lean on the collective art of the language itself.  The more extreme technical practitioners may so over-individualize this collective art as to make it almost unendurable.  One is not always thankful to have one’s flesh and blood frozen to ivory.

An artist must utilize the native esthetic resources of his speech.  He may be thankful if the given palette of colors is rich, if the springboard is light.  But he deserves no special credit for felicities that are the language’s own.  We must take for granted this language with all its qualities of flexibility or rigidity and see the artist’s work in relation to it.  A cathedral on the lowlands is higher than a stick on Mont Blanc.  In other words, we must not commit the folly of admiring a French sonnet because the vowels are more sonorous than our own or of condemning Nietzsche’s prose because it harbors in its texture combinations of consonants that would affright on English soil.  To so judge literature would be tantamount to loving “Tristan und Isolde” because one is fond of the timbre of horns.  There are certain things that one language can do supremely well which it would be almost vain for another to attempt.  Generally there are compensations.  The vocalism of English is an inherently drabber thing than the vowel scale of French, yet English compensates for this drawback by its greater rhythmical alertness.  It is even doubtful if the innate sonority of a phonetic system counts for as much, as esthetic determinant, as the relations between the sounds, the total gamut of their similarities and contrasts.  As long as the artist has the wherewithal to lay out his sequences and rhythms, it matters little what are the sensuous qualities of the elements of his material.

The phonetic groundwork of a language, however, is only one of the features that give its literature a certain direction.  Far more important are its morphological peculiarities.  It makes a great deal of difference for the development of style if the language can or cannot create compound words, if its structure is synthetic or analytic, if the words of its sentences have considerable freedom of position or are compelled to fall into a rigidly determined sequence.  The major characteristics of style, in so far as style is a technical matter of the building and placing of words, are given by the language itself, quite as inescapably, indeed, as the general acoustic effect of verse is given by the sounds and natural accents of the language.  These necessary fundamentals of style are hardly felt by the artist to constrain his individuality of expression.  They rather