They rejoice, after long and frequent dippings, to find their plummet,
almost lost in remote depths, touch bottom. Enough `meaning'
has been educed from `Childe Roland', to cite but one instance,
to start a School of Philosophy with: though it so happens
that the poem is an imaginative fantasy, written in one day.
Worse still, it was not inspired by the mystery of existence,
but by `a red horse with a glaring eye standing behind a dun one
on a piece of tapestry that used to hang in the poet's drawing-room.'*
Of all his faults, however, the worst is that jugglery,
that inferior legerdemain, with the elements of the beautiful in verse:
most obvious in "Sordello", in portions of "The Ring and the Book",
and in so many of the later poems. These inexcusable violations
are like the larvae within certain vegetable growths: soon or late
they will destroy their environment before they perish themselves.
Though possessive above all others of that science of the percipient
in the allied arts of painting and music, wherein he found
the unconventional Shelley so missuaded by convention,
he seemed ever more alert to the substance than to the manner of poetry.
In a letter of Mrs. Browning's she alludes to a friend's "melodious feeling"
for poetry. Possibly the phrase was accidental, but it is significant.
To inhale the vital air of poetry we must love it, not merely
find it "interesting", "suggestive", "soothing", "stimulative": in a word,
we must have a "melodious feeling" for poetry before we can deeply enjoy it.
Browning, who has so often educed from his lyre melodies and harmonies
of transcendent, though novel, beauty, was too frequently, during composition,
without this melodious feeling of which his wife speaks.
The distinction between literary types such as Browning or Balzac
on the one hand, and Keats or Gustave Flaubert on the other,
is that with the former there exists a reverence for the vocation
and a relative indifference to the means, in themselves --