ABSTRACT
How abruptly the opening interrogation breaks upon us. How enigmatic the reply;—we do not mean that its drift is not soon enough apprehended, but that on the first blush the reply seems to be explaining not the essence of the state of want, but the essence of those conditions which ought most to satisfy want. And then, how curiously elliptic is the question,—‘Where is the spot?’ Of course, what Mr. Browning means is something of this sort,—‘Where is the spot where the redundant summer and the abundant blueness find their way into the soul so as to satisfy it?’ But that is carrying ellipsis to the point of an electric shock, for it is startling merely to feel how much of the poet’s meaning we are expected to gather from his hints, and supply in part from our own resources. Then the adjective ‘beamy’, which is chosen to describe the world, is unquestionably an odd one for the purpose, and chosen, as we should say, for the jerk it administers to the imagination. Nothing, on the whole, could express the sense of a blank somewhere, which the poet wants to express, better than these sudden little tugs and jerks at the reader’s mind. But then, again, when he wants to indicate what would best fill in the blank, and give a rounded completion to the desolate framework, one is startled afresh to find that the new power which is to give us this, and which is ‘to complete incom pletion’, is expected to ‘pant through the blueness’, and so to ‘perfect the summer’. Could anything that ‘panted’ really ‘complete incompletion’? The phrase suggests a locomotive rather than a divine presence. That which breathes a breath of rose-beauty, surely ought not to pant. But Mr. Browning loves spasm, loves successive shocks of thought or feeling, and can hardly deny himself the satisfaction of thinking that even the spirit of perfect love and harmony is perpetually starting this dull world by galvanising it
administer. the reader’s mind, as the steel strikes sparks out of a flint; and the result naturally is that the reader feels towards Mr. Browning somewhat as a bit of flint might feel which has served this purpose to a fragment of steel,—a little sore and a little fractured.… It is Mr. Browning’s method of startle as often and as smartly as he can the imagination he appeals to, and to indicate rather than state, the directions he wishes their minds to follow. It is this which makes Mr. Browning at his best and vividest the most awakening of writers, the one who most signally arrests the attention, and most successfully insists on his reader’s lending him the whole force of his own mind. But for that very reason, his work is almost always defective as poetry. The part of it which he does for us is too incisive, too short, sharp, and sudden, for anything like harmony; and the part which he obliges us to do for him in order to enter into his drift, is too imperfectly done to succeed in connecting the isolated points which he has jotted down for us into the flowing curve of true beauty. Mr. Browning touches life, especially the life of the intellect and the spirit, at as many points as any poet who ever wrote; but he does not blend these touches into the true poetic vision. He awakens and educates the highest imaginative powers, but he does not attempt to satisfy their cravings.
