Introduction to Browning | Page 6

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 constitute a noble literature, however perfect

the forms in which it may be embodied, and the general sense of the
civilized world, independently of any theories of literature, will not
regard such a literature as noble. It is made up of what must be, in time,
superseded; it has not a sufficiently large element of the essential, the
eternal, which can be reached only through the assimilating life of the
spirit. The spirit may be
so "cabined, cribbed, confined" as not to
come to any consciousness of itself; or it may be so set free as to go
forth and recognize its kinship, respond to the spiritual world outside of
itself, and, by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual
philosophers call the UNKNOWABLE.
To turn now to the line of English poets who may be said to have
passed the torch of spiritual life, from lifted hand to hand, along the
generations. And first is
"the morning star of song, who made
His music heard below:

"Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those
melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth

With sounds that echo still."
Chaucer exhibits, in a high degree, this life of the spirit, and it is the
secret of the charm which his poetry possesses for us after a lapse of
five hundred years. It vitalizes, warms, fuses, and imparts a
lightsomeness to his verse; it creeps and kindles beneath the tissues of
his thought. When we compare Dryden's modernizations of Chaucer
with the originals, we see the difference between the verse of a poet,
with a healthy vitality of spirit, and, through that healthy vitality of
spirit, having secret dealings with things, and verse which is largely the
product of the rhetorical or literary faculty. We do not feel, when
reading the latter, that any unconscious might co-operated with the
conscious powers of the writer. But we DO feel this when we read
Chaucer's verse.
All of the Canterbury Tales have originals or analogues,
most of
which have been reproduced by the London Chaucer Society. Not one
of the tales is of Chaucer's own invention. And yet they may all be said
to be original, in the truest, deepest sense of the word. They have been
vitalized from the poet's own soul. He has infused his own personality,
his own spirit-life, into his originals; he has "created a soul under the
ribs of death." It is this infused vitality which will constitute the charm
of
the Canterbury Tales for all generations of English speaking and
English reading people. This life of the spirit,
of which I am speaking,
as distinguished from the intellect, is felt, though much less distinctly,
in a contemporary work, `The Vision of William concerning Piers the
Plowman'.
What the author calls "KIND WIT", that is, "natural
intelligence", has, generally, the ascendency. We meet, however,
with
powerful passages, wherein the thoughts are aglow
with the warmth
from the writer's inner spirit. He shows at times the moral indignation
of a Hebrew prophet.
The `Confessio Amantis' of John Gower, another contemporary work,
exhibits comparatively little of the life of the spirit,
either in its verse

or in its thought. The thought rarely passes the limit of natural
intelligence. The stories, which the poet drew from the `Gesta
Romanorum' and numerous other sources, can hardly be said to have
been BORN AGAIN. The verse is smooth and fluent, but the reader
feels it to be the product of literary skill. It wants what can be imparted
only by an unconscious might
back of the consciously active and
trained powers. It is this unconscious might which John Keats, in his
`Sleep and Poetry', speaks of as "might half slumbering on its own right
arm",
and which every reader, with the requisite susceptibility,
can
always detect in the verse of a true poet.
In the interval between Chaucer and Spenser, this life of the spirit is not
distinctly marked in any of its authors, not excepting even Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose sad fate gave a factitious interest to his
writings. It is more noticeable in Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst's
`Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates', which, in the words of Hallam,
"forms a link which unites the school of Chaucer and Lydgate to the
`Faerie Queene'."
The Rev. James Byrne, of Trinity