Introduction to Browning | Page 5

explained the expression on p. 87 of this volume (last
paragraph). {For etext use, section III (Browning's Obscurity) of the
Introduction, sixth paragraph before the end of the section.} He made
no reply, for a moment, and then said, meditatively, "Yes, I meant that
the commands were that she should be put to death." And then, after a
pause, he added, with a characteristic dash of expression, and as if the
thought had just started 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