There Is A Certain Wine Of France Known In
England In Some Gaseous Disguise, But When Drunk In The Land Of Its
Nativity Still As A Pool, Clean As River Water, And As Heady As
Verse.
It is more than probable that in its noble natural
condition this was the very wine of Anjou so
Beloved by Athos in
the 'Musketeers.' Now, if the reader has ever washed down a
liberal second breakfast with the wine in question, and gone forth,
on the back of these dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling noontide,
he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although strangely
grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves among the snow
and sunshine of the Alps. That also is a mode, we need not say of
intoxication, but of insobriety. Thus also a man walks in a strong
sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial
meditations. And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he
supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts.
The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary
ways. A certain sort of laboured pleasantry has already been
recognised, and may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as
a sort peculiar to that climate. People utter their judgments with
a cannonade of syllables; a big word is as good as a meal to them;
and the turn of a phrase goes further than humour or wisdom. By
the professional writer many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone.
At first he cannot write at all. The heart, it appears, is unequal
to the pressure of business, and the brain, left without
nourishment, goes into a mild decline. Next, some power of work
returns to him, accompanied by jumping headaches. Last, the spring
is opened, and there pours at once from his pen a world of blatant,
hustling polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old joke, to be
positively offensive in hot weather. He writes it in good faith
and with a sense of inspiration; it is only when he comes to read
what he has written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind.
What is he to do, poor man? All his little fishes talk like
whales. This yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting
architecture of the sentence has come upon him while he slept; and
it is not he, it is the Alps, who are to blame. He is not,
perhaps, alone, which somewhat comforts him. Nor is the ill
without a remedy. Some day, when the spring returns, he shall go
down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter inflections
and more modest language. But here, in the meantime, there seems
to swim up some outline of a new cerebral hygiene and a good time
coming, when experienced advisers shall send a man to the proper
measured level for the ode, the biography, or the religious tract;
and a nook may be found between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr.
Swinburne shall be able to write more continently, and Mr. Browning
somewhat slower.
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