APPRECIATIONS
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hakespeare is not our poet, but the world's,Therefore, on him no speech! and brief for thee,Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and haleNo man has walked along our roads with stepSo active, so inquiring eye, or tongueSo varied in discourse. But warmer climesGive brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breezeOf Alpine heights thou playest with, borne onBeyond Sorrento and Amalfi, whereThe Siren waits thee, singing song for song. --WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. Tennyson has a vivid feeling of the dignity and potency of_law_.... Browning vividly feels the importance, the greatnessand beauty of passions and enthusiasms, and his imaginationis comparatively unimpressed by the presence of law and itsoperations.... It is not the order and regularity in the processes ofthe natural world which chiefly delight Browning's imagination, butthe streaming forth of power, and will, and love from the whole faceof the visible universe.... Tennyson considers the chief instruments of human progress to be avast increase of knowledge and of political organization. Browningmakes that progress dependent on the production of higher passions,and aspirations,--hopes, and joys, and sorrows; Tennyson finds theevidence of the truth of the doctrine of progress in the universalpresence of a self-evolving law. Browning obtains his assurance ofits truth from inward presages and prophecies of the soul, fromanticipations, types, and symbols of a higher greatness in store forman, which even now reside within him, a creature ever unsatisfied,ever yearning upward in thought, feeling, and endeavour. ... Hence, it is not obedience, it is not submission to the lawof duty, which points out to us our true path of life, but ratherinfinite desire and endless aspiration. Browning's ideal of manhoodin this world always recognizes the fact that it is the ideal of acreature who never can be perfected on earth, a creature whom otherand higher lives await in an endless hereafter.... The gleams of knowledge which we possess are of chief value becausethey "sting with hunger for full light." The goal of knowledge, as oflove, is God himself. Its most precious part is that which is leastpositive--those momentary intuitions of things which eye hath not seennor ear heard. The needs of the highest parts of our humanity cannotbe supplied by ascertained truth, in which we might rest, or which wemight put to use for definite ends; rather by ventures of faith, whichtest the courage of the soul, we ascend from surmise to assurance, andso again to higher surmise.--Condensed from EDWARD DOWDEN, _Studiesin Literature_. ... Browning has not cared for that poetic form which bestowsperennial charm, or else he was incapable of it. He fails in beauty,in concentration of interest, in economy of language, in selection ofthe best from the common treasure of experience. In those works wherehe has been most indifferent, as in the _Red Cotton Night-CapCountry_, he has been merely whimsical and dull; in those workswhere the genius he possessed is most felt, as in _Saul_, _A Toccataof Galuppi's_, _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, _The Flight of the Duchess_, _The BishopOrders his Tomb in Saint Praxed's Church_, _Herve Riel_, _Cavalier Tunes_,_Time's Revenges_, and many more, he achieves beauty, or nobility,or fitness of phrase such as only a poet is capable of. It is in theselast pieces and their like that his fame lies for the future. Itwas his lot to be strong as the thinker, the moralist, with "theaccomplishment of verse," the scholar interested to rebuild the pastof experience, the teacher with an explicit dogma in an intellectualform with examples from life, the anatomist of human passions,instincts, and impulses in all their gamut, the commentator on his ownage; he was weak as the artist, often unnecessarily and by choice, inthe repulsive form,--in the awkward, the obscure, the ugly. He belongswith Jonson, with Dryden, with the heirs of the masculine intellect,the men of power not unvisited by grace, but in whom mind ispredominant. Upon the work of such poets time hesitates, consciousof their mental greatness, but also of their imperfect art, theirheterogeneous matter; at last the good is sifted from that whenceworth has departed.--From GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY'S _Studies inLetters and Life_. When it is urged that for a poet the intellectual energies are toostrong in Browning, that for poetry the play of intellectual interestsand activities is too great in his work, and that Browning often andat times ruthlessly sacrifices the requirements and effects of artfor the expression of thought, that "though he refreshes the heart hetires the brain," we should admit this with regard to a good deal ofthe work of the third period. We should allow that this is the sideto which he leans generally, but still hold that, though to many hisintellectual quality and energy may well seem excessive, yet in greatpart of his work, and that of course, his best, the passion of thepoet and his kind of imagination are just as fresh and powerful asthe intellectual force and subtlety are keen and abundant.--JAMESFROTHINGHAM, _Studies of the Mind and Art of Robert Browning_. Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak,And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier,Our words are sobs, our cry or praise a tear:We are the smitten mortal, we the weak.We see a spirit on earth's loftiest peakShine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear:See a great Tree of Life that never sereDropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak;Such ending is not death: such living showsWhat wide illumination brightness shedsFrom one big heart,--to conquer man's old foes:The coward, and the tyrant, and the forceOf all those weedy monsters raising headsWhen Song is muck from springs of turbid source. --GEORGE MEREDITH. * * * * *
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