Introduction to Browning | Page 5

in his mind, "Or he might have had her shut up in a convent." This was to me very significant. When he wrote the expression, "I gave commands", etc., he may not have thought definitely what the commands were, more than that they put a stop to the smiles of the sweet Duchess, which provoked the contemptible jealousy of the Duke. This was all his art purpose required, and his mind did not go beyond it. I thought how many vain discussions take place in Browning Clubs, about little points which are outside of the range?of the artistic motive of a composition, and how many minds are occupied with anything and everything under the sun,?except the one thing needful (the artistic or spiritual motive), the result being "as if one should be ignorant of nothing concerning the scent of violets, except the scent itself."
H.C.
CONTENTS.
PREFACE.
INTRODUCTION.
I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry
from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning.?{This section contains Browning's `Popularity' and many excerpts.}
II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency
of Personality, as embodied in Browning's Poetry.
III. Mr. Browning's "Obscurity".
{This section contains Browning's `My Last Duchess'}
IV. Browning's Verse.
V. Arguments of the Poems.
Wanting is -- What??My Star.?The Flight of the Duchess.?The Last Ride Together.?By the Fireside.?Prospice.?Amphibian.?James Lee's Wife.?A Tale.?Confessions.?Respectability.?Home-Thoughts from Abroad.?Home-Thoughts from the Sea.?Old Pictures in Florence.?Pictor Ignotus.?Andrea del Sarto.?Fra Lippo Lippi.?A Face.?The Bishop orders his Tomb.?A Toccata of Galuppi's.?Abt Vogler.?`Touch him ne'er so lightly', etc.?Memorabilia.?How it strikes a Contemporary.?"Transcendentalism".?Apparent Failure.?Rabbi Ben Ezra.?A Grammarian's Funeral.?An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.?A Martyr's Epitaph.?Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.?Holy-Cross Day.?Saul.?A Death in the Desert.
POEMS.
Wanting is -- What??My Star.?The Flight of the Duchess.?The Last Ride Together.?By the Fireside.?Prospice.?Amphibian.?James Lee's Wife.?A Tale.?Confessions.?Respectability.?Home Thoughts, from Abroad.?Home Thoughts, from the Sea.?Old Pictures in Florence.?Pictor Ignotus.?Andrea del Sarto.?Fra Lippo Lippi.?A Face.?The Bishop orders his Tomb.?A Toccata of Galuppi's.?Abt Vogler.?"Touch him ne'er so lightly."?Memorabilia.?How it strikes a Contemporary.?"Transcendentalism":?Apparent Failure.?Rabbi Ben Ezra.?A Grammarian's Funeral.?An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.?A Martyr's Epitaph.?Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.?Holy-Cross Day.?Saul.?A Death in the Desert.
A LIST OF CRITICISMS OF BROWNING'S WORKS.
INTRODUCTION.
I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry
from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning.
Literature, in its most restricted art-sense, is an expression in letters of the life of the spirit of man co-operating with the intellect. Without the co-operation of the spiritual man, the intellect produces only thought; and pure thought,?whatever be the subject with which it deals, is not regarded as literature, in its strict sense. For example, Euclid's `Elements', Newton's `Principia', Spinoza's `Ethica', and Kant's?`Critique of the Pure Reason', do not properly belong to literature. (By the "spiritual" I would be understood to mean the whole domain of the emotional, the susceptible or impressible, the sympathetic, the intuitive; in short, that mysterious something in the constitution of man by and through which he holds relationship with?the essential spirit of things, as opposed to the phenomenal of which the senses take cognizance.)
The term literature is sometimes extended in meaning (and it may be so extended), to include all that has been committed to letters, on all subjects. There is no objection to such extension?in ordinary speech, no more than there is to that of the signification of the word, "beauty" to what is purely abstract. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration; but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal, not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate,?effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit, -- "the accommodation," in Bacon's words, "of the shows of things to the desires of the mind."
It follows that the relative merit and importance of different periods of a literature should be determined by the relative degrees of spirituality which these different periods exhibit.?The intellectual power of two or more periods, as exhibited in their literatures, may show no marked difference,?while the spiritual vitality of these same periods may?very distinctly differ. And if it be admitted that literature proper is the product of co-operative intellect and spirit (the latter being always an indispensable factor, though there can be no high order of literature that is not strongly articulated, that is not well freighted, with thought), it follows that the periods?of a literature should be determined by the ebb and flow?of spiritual life which they severally register, rather than by any other considerations. There are periods which?are characterized by a "blindness of heart", an inactive,?quiescent condition of the spirit, by which the intellect?is more or less divorced from the essential, the eternal,?and it directs itself to the shows of things. Such periods may embody in their literatures a large amount of thought, -- thought which is conversant with the externality of things; but that of itself will not