Men and Women | Page 3

by their

maker to conjure up in his house of song the figures that people its
niches. Could a poem be imagined more cunningly devised to reveal a
typical poetic personality, and a typical theory of poetic method,
through its way of revealing another? What poet could have composed
it but one who himself employed the dramatic method of causing the
abstract to be
realizable through the concrete image of it, instead of
the contrary mode of seeking to divest the objective of its concrete
form in order to lay bare its abstract essence? This opposite theory of
the poetic function is precisely the Boehme mode, against which the
veiled dramatic poet, who is speaking in favor of the Halberstadtian
magic, admonishes his brother, while he himself in practical
substantiation of his theory of poetics brings bodily in sight the
boy-face above the winged harp, vivified and beautiful himself,
although his poem is but a shapeless mist.
Not directly, then, but indirectly, as the dramatic poet ever reveals
himself, does the sophisticated face of the subtle poet of "Men and
Women" appear as the source of power behind both of the poets of this
poem, prepossessing the reader of the verity and beauty of the theory of
poetic art therein exemplified. Such an interpretation of
"Transcendentalism," and such a conception of it as a key to the art of
the volume it opens, chimes in harmoniously with the note sounded in
the next following poem, "How it Strikes a Contemporary." Here again
a typical poet is personified, not, however, by means of his own poetic
way of seeing, but of the prosaic way in which he is seen by a
contemporary, the whole, of course, being poetically seen and
presented by the
over-poet. Browning himself, and in such a manifold
way that the reader is enabled to conceive as vividly of the talker and
his mental atmosphere and social background--the people and
habitudes of the good old town of Valladolid--as of the betalked-of
Corregidor himself; while by the totality of these concrete images an

impression is conveyed of the dramatic mode of poetic expression
which is far more convincing than any explicit theoretic statement of it
could be, because so humanly animated.
"Artemis Prologizes" seems to have been selected to close this little
opening sequence of poems on the poet, because that fragment of a

larger projected work could find place here almost as if it were a poet's
exercise in blank verse. Its smooth and spacious rhythm, flawless and
serene as the distant Greek myth of the hero and the goddess it
celebrates, is in striking contrast with the rougher, but brighter and
more humanly colloquial blank verse of "Bishop Blougram's Apology,"
for example, or the stiff carefulness of the "Epistle" of Karshish. It
might alone suffice, by comparison with the metrical craftsmanship of
the other poems of "Men and Women," to assure the observant reader
that never was a good workman more baselessly accused of metrical
carelessness than the poet who designedly varies his complicated
verse-effects to suit every inner impulse belonging to his dramatic
subject. A golden finish being in place in this statuesque,
"Hyperion"-like monologue of Artemis, behold here it is, and none the
less perfect because not merely the outcome of the desire to produce a
polished piece of poetic mechanism.
Browning, perhaps, linked his next poem, "The Strange Medical
Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician," with the calm

prologizing of the Hellenic goddess, by association of the "wise
pharmacies" of AEsculapius, with the inquisitive sagacity of Karshish,
"the not-incurious in God's handiwork." By this ordering of the poems,
the reader may now enjoy, at any rate, the contrasts between three
historic phases of wisdom in bodily ills: the phase presented in the
dependence of the old Greek healer upon simple physical effects,
soothing "with lavers the torn brow," and laying "the stripes and jagged
ends of flesh even once more"; and the phases typified, on the one side,
by the ingenious Arab, sire of the modern scientist, whose patient
correlation of facts and studious, sceptical scrutiny of cause and effect
are caught in the bud in the diagnosis transmitted by Karshish to Abib,
and, on the other side, by the Nazarene physician, whose inspired secret
of summoning out of the believing soul of man the power to control his
body--so baffled and fascinated Karshish, drawing his attention in
Lazarus to just that connection of the known physical with the
unknown psychical nature which is still mystically alluring the
curiosity of
investigators.
From the childlike, over-idealizing mood of Lazarus toward the God

who had succored him, inducing in him so fatalistic an indifference to
human concerns, there is but a step to the rapture of absolute theology
expressed in the person of Johannes Agricola. Such poems as these put
before the cool gaze