Letters on Literature | Page 5

Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of
"Rizpah," the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the fairy
music of the "Lotus Eaters," the grace as of a Greek epigram which
inspires the lines to Catullus and to Virgil. He is with Milton for
learning, with Keats for magic and vision, with Virgil for graceful
recasting of ancient golden lines, and, even in the latest volume of his
long life, "we may tell from the straw," as Homer says, "what the grain
has been."
There are many who make it a kind of religion to regard Mr. Browning
as the greatest of living English poets. For him, too, one is thankful as
for a veritable great poet; but can we believe that impartial posterity
will rate him with the Laureate, or that so large a proportion of his
work will endure? The charm of an enigma now attracts students who
feel proud of being able to understand what others find obscure. But
this attraction must inevitably become a stumbling-block.
Why Mr. Browning is obscure is a long question; probably the answer
is that he often could not help himself. His darkest poems may be made
out by a person of average intelligence who will read them as hard as,
for example, he would find it necessary to read the "Logic" of Hegel.
There is a story of two clever girls who set out to peruse "Sordello,"
and corresponded with each other about their progress. "Somebody is
dead in 'Sordello,'" one of them wrote to her friend. "I don't quite know
who it is, but it must make things a little clearer in the long run." Alas!
a copious use of the guillotine would scarcely clear the stage of
"Sordello." It is hardly to be hoped that "Sordello," or "Red Cotton

Night Cap Country," or "Fifine," will continue to be struggled with by
posterity. But the mass of "Men and Women," that unexampled gallery
of portraits of the inmost hearts and secret minds of priests, prigs,
princes, girls, lovers, poets, painters, must survive immortally, while
civilization and literature last, while men care to know what is in men.
No perversity of humour, no voluntary or involuntary harshness of
style, can destroy the merit of these poems, which have nothing like
them in the letters of the past, and must remain without successful
imitators in the future. They will last all the better for a certain
manliness of religious faith--something sturdy and assured-- not moved
by winds of doctrine, not paltering with doubts, which is certainly one
of Mr. Browning's attractions in this fickle and shifting generation. He
cannot be forgotten while, as he says -
"A sunset touch, A chorus ending of Euripides,"
remind men that they are creatures of immortality, and move "a
thousand hopes and fears."
If one were to write out of mere personal preference, and praise most
that which best fits one's private moods, I suppose I should place Mr.
Matthew Arnold at the head of contemporary English poets. Reason
and reflection, discussion and critical judgment, tell one that he is not
quite there.
Mr. Arnold had not the many melodies of the Laureate, nor his versatile
mastery, nor his magic, nor his copiousness. He had not the
microscopic glance of Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts, which
tears the life out of them as the Aztec priest plucked the very heart from
the victim. We know that, but yet Mr. Arnold's poetry has our love; his
lines murmur in our memory through all the stress and accidents of life.
"The Scholar Gipsy," "Obermann," "Switzerland," the melancholy
majesty of the close of "Sohrab and Rustum," the tenderness of those
elegiacs on two kindred graves beneath the Himalayas and by the
Midland Sea; the surge and thunder of "Dover Beach," with its
"melancholy, long-withdrawing roar;" these can only cease to whisper
to us and console us in that latest hour when life herself ceases to
"moan round with many voices."
My friends tell me that Mr. Arnold is too doubting, and too didactic,
that he protests too much, and considers too curiously, that his best
poems are, at most, "a chain of highly valuable thoughts." It may be so;

but he carries us back to "wet, bird- haunted English lawns;" like him
"we know what white and purple fritillaries the grassy harvest of the
river yields," with him we try to practise resignation, and to give
ourselves over to that spirit
"Whose purpose is not missed, While life endures, while things
subsist."
Mr. Arnold's poetry is to me, in brief, what Wordsworth's was to his
generation. He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, when
nature does for him what his "lutin" did for Corneille, "takes the pen
from his hand and writes for him."