Adams had neither. To the
end of his life he never listened to a French recitation with
pleasure, or felt a sense of majesty in French verse; but he did
not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade
Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading an affection for
Alfred de Musset. Swinburne would have none of it; de Musset was
unequal; he did not sustain himself on the wing.
Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, to
sustain himself on the wing like de Musset, or even like Hugo;
but his education as well as his ear was at fault, and he
succumbed. Swinburne tried him again on Walter Savage Landor. In
truth the test was the same, for Swinburne admired in Landor's
English the qualities that he felt in Hugo's French; and Adams's
failure was equally gross, for, when forced to despair, he had to
admit that both Hugo and Landor bored him. Nothing more was
needed. One who could feel neither Hugo nor Landor was lost.
The sentence was just and Adams never appealed from it. He knew
his inferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. Keenly
mortified by the dullness of his senses and instincts, he knew he
was no companion for Swinburne; probably he could be only an
annoyance; no number of centuries could ever educate him to
Swinburne's level, even in technical appreciation; yet he often
wondered whether there was nothing he had to offer that was worth
the poet's acceptance.
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