And what are Mr. Browning's chief doctrines on the subject of Art? . . . The true glory of art is that in its creation there arise desires and aspirations never to be satisfied on earth, but generating new desires and new aspirations, by which the spirit of man mounts to God himself. The artist (Mr. Browning loves to insist on this point) who can realize in marble or in color or in music his ideal has thereby missed the highest gain of art. In Pippa Passes the regeneration of the young sculptor's work turns on his finding that in the very perfection which he had attained lies ultimate failure. And one entire poem, Andrea del Sarto, has been devoted to the exposition of this thought.

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what's a heaven for?"...

A large number of Mr. Browning's poems have love for their theme; and here again we find the same recurring thoughts. . . . The dramatis personæ of many of Mr. Browning's poems fall into two groups-the group of those whose souls are saved by love, and the group of those whose souls are lost by some worldliness, or cowardice, or faintness of heart. The old French academician, too prudent or selfrestrained to yield to the manifold promptings of nature and utter his love, has ruined four lives, which for that sin have been condemned to be henceforth respectable and passionless [Dis Aliter Visum]. . . . So again in Youth and Art the same lesson is enforced. Boy-sculptor and girl-singer afterwards to be each successful in the world, the one to be wife of "a rich old lord," the other to be "dubbed knight and an R. A.," are too prudent to yield to the summons of love. And therefore in the deepest sense each has failed:

"Each life's unfulfilled you see;

It hangs still patchy and scrappy;
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired, been happy."

Over against the group of these lost souls who have abjured or forfeited love stands the group of those whom love has purified and saved, pure, it may be, with a radiant spotlessness, or, it may be, soiled and stained with griefs and shames and sins, but yet redeemed by love. . . .

With Mr. Browning the moments are most glorious in which the obscure tendency of many years has been revealed by the lightning of sudden passion, or in which a resolution that changes the current of life has been taken in reliance upon that insight which vivid emotion bestows; and those periods of our history are charged most fully with moral purpose which take their direction from moments such as these. We cannot always burn with the ecstasy, we cannot always retain the vision. Our own languors and lethargy spread a mist over the soul, or the world with its prudential motives and sage provisos, and chicane of counsels of moderation, tempts us to distrust the voice of every transcendent passion. But even in the hour of faithlessness, if we can cling blindly to the facts revealed in the vanished moment of inspiration we shall be saved.

"Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows!
But not quite so sunk that moments
Sure though seldom are denied us,
When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And apprise it if pursuing

Or the right way or the wrong way,
To its triumph or undoing.

"There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fire-flames noondays kindle,
Whereby piled-up honors perish,
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle,
While just this or that poor impulse,
Which for once had play unstifled,
Seems the sole work of a lifetime
That away the rest have trifled."

[From Swinburne's Essay on George Chapman's Works.*]

The charge of obscurity is perhaps of all charges the likeliest to impair the fame or to imperil the success of a rising or an established poet. It is as often misapplied by hasty or ignorant criticism as any other on the roll of accusations, and was never misapplied more persistently and perversely than to an eminent writer of our own time. The difficulty found by many in certain of Mr. Browning's works arises from a quality the very reverse of that which produces obscurity, properly so called. Obscurity is the natural product of turbid forces and confused ideas; of a feeble and clouded or of a vigorous but unfixed and chaotic intellect . . . Now if there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure. . . He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man's, as the speed of a railway to that of a wagon, or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway. It is hopeless to enjoy the charm or to apprehend the gist of his writings except with a mind thoroughly alert, an attention awake on all points, a spirit open and ready to be kindled by the contact of the writer's. . . . The proper mood in which to study for the first time a book of Mr. Browning's is the freshest, clearest, most active mood of the mind in its brightest and keenest hours of work. . The very essence of Mr. Browning's aim and method, as exhibited in the ripest fruits of his intelligence, is such as im

* Essay on the Poetical and Dramatic Works of George Chapman. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. Introduction to Works of Chapman (London, 1875).

plies above all other things the possession of a quality the very opposite of obscurity-a faculty of spiritual illumination rapid and intense and subtle as lightning, which brings to bear upon its central object by way of direct and vivid illustration every symbol and every detail on which its light is flashed in passing.

NOTE. We talk glibly about the canons of art. We have long believed that beauty of form, careful refinement of phrase to thought, logical adaptation of details to each other, clear simplicity of expression, are essential to the immortality of a work of art. The demand for beauty has gone even farther. Certainly one writer * of the past decade has said that in exact proportion as the beauty of form transcends the excellence of matter, will a work gain the admiration of posterity. It seems true that when a great thinker has disregarded conventional canons of ex. pression his work as such has fallen into neglect, and his thought has passed into other hands more skilful to perpetuate it. Now it may as well be confessed at the outset of any study of Browning that he does not observe the methods which have been evolved by the years as most effective for the embodiment of thought. We must grant also that this is a conscious and deliberate act. A man who can command music like that in the Song from A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, or vigor like that in Cavalier Tunes, is not forced to express himself so blindly as in the last ten lines of the Invocation from The Ring and the Book, or so harshly as in Red Cotton Night-Cap Country. He chooses so to express himself. Many of his shorter poems not included in this selection, as, for example, Popularity, Life in a Love, Love in a Life, Another Way of Love, etc., are totally unintelligible to the man who reads Shakespeare with delight and Wordsworth with appreciation. But Browning knows English poetry as few of his critics know it. He knows, also, how to make smooth verse which shall tell its story to him who runs. Granting these facts, it is no more than fair that we treat with respect both the poet and his large following, and ask if our notions about art may not need reconstruction. Perhaps we have become both finical and lazy. Perhaps, too, we scarcely realize the novel conditions under which the poet of this century works. The knowledge, the experiences, the complicated emotions, the responsibilities accumulating in the life of the world since the days of Homer, are thrust into his arms. Is it wonder that he staggers under the burden, and that his speech comes haltingly from his lips?

* Dr. John Bascom, in his Philosophy of English Literature.

Another fact needs recall. Browning is not the calm high-priest of humanity, as was Shakespeare. He is rather a prophet. He has a new, strange message which he scarcely understands himself. But he must

utter it. It may be that it will pass into the life of the world and be absorbed there, rather than find its way into the treasure-house of the world's art. But to this ultimate test at least it answers: it moves men. We may parody Browning's style, we may question the novelty of his thought, we may deny his artistic power; but the fact remains that a large number of men and women of his race to-day-many of whom do not belong to the Browning Society-find in him their greatest inspiration to high, divine, and noble thinking.

"And this I know: whether the one true light
Kindle to Love, or Wrath consume me quite,
One flash of It within the Tavern caught
Better than in the Temple lost outright." *