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Luria,
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Shakespeare is not our poet but the world's, Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee, Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale No man has walked along our roads with step So active, so enquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse. But warmer climes Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
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Pippa Passes, towards the close of the preceding chapter, as the most imperishable because the most nearly immaculate of Browning's dramatic poems, I would not have it understood that its pre-eminence is considered from the standpoint of technical achievement, of art, merely. It seems to me, like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough for the searching plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses. It has, more than any other long composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that _symmetria prisca_ recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air. By its side, the more obviously
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in the curve of the rising wave, no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the short leaping sounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands for joy and are no more. To them it is but a desert: obscure, imponderable, a weariness. The
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of Browning, so dear a claim in the eyes of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense, only in his inferior work. There is more profound insight in Blake's Song of Innocence,
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Piping down the valleys wild, or in Wordsworth's line,
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Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, or in Keats' single verse,
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There is a budding morrow in midnight,
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She comes like the husht beauty of the night, But sees too deep for laughter; Her touch is a vibration and a light From worlds before and after--
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in any of these than in libraries of
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Sludge the Medium literature. Mere hard thinking does not involve profundity, any more than neurotic excitation involves spiritual ecstasy. _De profundis,_ indeed, must the poet come: there must the deep rhythm of life have electrified his
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to a living rhythmic joy. In this deep sense, and this only, the poet is born, not made. He may learn to fashion anew that which he hath seen: the depth of his insight depends upon the depth of his spiritual heritage. If wonder dwell not in his eyes and soul there can be no
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for him. Here it seems apt to point out that Browning was the first writer of our day to indicate this transmutive, this inspired and inspiring wonder-spirit, which is the deepest motor in the evolution of our modern poetry. Characteristically, he puts his utterance into the mouth of a dreamy German student, the shadowy Schramm who is but metaphysics embodied, metaphysics finding apt expression in tobacco-smoke:
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Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?--there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at men?--there's God to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one.
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He who, having no touch of the Muse's madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of Art--he, I say, and his poetry, are not admitted.
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Pippa Passes