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--and, with the latter, a scrupulous respect for the mere
means as well as for that to which they conduce. The poet who does not
love words for themselves, as an artist loves any chance colour upon his
palette, or as the musician any vagrant tone evoked by a sudden touch in
idleness or reverie, has not entered into the full inheritance of the
sons of Apollo. The writer cannot aim at beauty, that which makes
literature and art, without this heed--without, rather, this creative
anxiety: for it is certainly not enough, as some one has said, that
language should be used merely for the transportation of intelligence,
as a wheelbarrow carries brick. Of course, Browning is not persistently
neglectful of this fundamental necessity for the literary artist. He is
often as masterly in this as in other respects. But he is not always,
not often enough, alive to the paramount need. He writes with "the verse
being as the mood it paints:" but, unfortunately, the mood is often
poetically unformative. He had no passion for the quest for seductive
forms. Too much of his poetry has been born prematurely. Too much of it,
indeed, has not died and been born again--for all immortal verse is a
poetic resurrection. Perfect poetry is the deathless part of mortal
beauty. The great artists never perpetuate gross actualities, though
they are the supreme realists. It is Schiller, I think, who says in
effect, that to live again in the serene beauty of art, it is needful
that things should first die in reality. Thus Browning's dramatic
method, even, is sometimes disastrous in its untruth, as in Caliban's
analytical reasoning--an initial absurdity, as Mr. Berdoe has pointed
out, adding epigrammatically, 'Caliban is a savage, with the
introspective powers of a Hamlet, and the theology of an evangelical
Churchman.' Not only Caliban, but several other of Browning's personages
(Aprile, Eglamour, etc.) are what Goethe calls _schwankende
Gestalt