Life of Robert Browning [36]
Geraldine's Courtship", and other ballads
by the sweet singer who afterwards became a partner in the loveliest marriage
of which we have record in literary history, that, even were there nothing
to substantiate the fact, it were fair to infer that Mertoun's song to Mildred
was the electric touch which compelled to its metric shape
one of Mrs. Browning's best-known poems.
The further interest lies in the lordly acknowledgment
of the dedication to him of "Luria", which Landor sent to Browning --
lines pregnant with the stateliest music of his old age: --
"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."
Chapter 5.
In my allusion to "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 "profound" poems,
Bishop Blougram and the rest, are mere skilled dialectics.
The art that is most profound and most touching must ever be the simplest.
Whenever Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, are at white heat
they require no exposition, but meditation only -- the meditation akin to
the sentiment of little children who listen, intent upon every syllable,
and passionately eager of soul, to hearthside tragedies.
The play of genius is like the movement of the sea. It has its solemn rhythm:
its joy, irradiate of the sun; its melancholy, in the patient moonlight:
its surge and turbulence under passing tempests: below all,
the deep oceanic music. There are, of course, many to whom
the sea is but a waste of water, at best useful as a highway
and as the nursery of the winds and rains. For them there is no hint
"of the incommunicable dream" 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 "profundity" 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, "Piping down the valleys wild,"
or in Wordsworth's line, "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,"
or in Keats' single verse, "There is a budding morrow in midnight,"
or in this quatrain on Poetry, by a young living poet --
"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 ----"
there is more "profundity" in any of these than in libraries
of "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
by the sweet singer who afterwards became a partner in the loveliest marriage
of which we have record in literary history, that, even were there nothing
to substantiate the fact, it were fair to infer that Mertoun's song to Mildred
was the electric touch which compelled to its metric shape
one of Mrs. Browning's best-known poems.
The further interest lies in the lordly acknowledgment
of the dedication to him of "Luria", which Landor sent to Browning --
lines pregnant with the stateliest music of his old age: --
"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."
Chapter 5.
In my allusion to "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 "profound" poems,
Bishop Blougram and the rest, are mere skilled dialectics.
The art that is most profound and most touching must ever be the simplest.
Whenever Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, are at white heat
they require no exposition, but meditation only -- the meditation akin to
the sentiment of little children who listen, intent upon every syllable,
and passionately eager of soul, to hearthside tragedies.
The play of genius is like the movement of the sea. It has its solemn rhythm:
its joy, irradiate of the sun; its melancholy, in the patient moonlight:
its surge and turbulence under passing tempests: below all,
the deep oceanic music. There are, of course, many to whom
the sea is but a waste of water, at best useful as a highway
and as the nursery of the winds and rains. For them there is no hint
"of the incommunicable dream" 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 "profundity" 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, "Piping down the valleys wild,"
or in Wordsworth's line, "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,"
or in Keats' single verse, "There is a budding morrow in midnight,"
or in this quatrain on Poetry, by a young living poet --
"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 ----"
there is more "profundity" in any of these than in libraries
of "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