Chapter 2 - Page 2

insulated intellect help nothing toward even a glimpse
of these secrets. In one of his later poems, that entitled 'House',
he has intimated, and forcibly intimated, his sense of
the impossibility of penetrating to the Holy of Holies of this
wondrous human heart, though assured as he is that all our hopes
in regard to the soul's destiny are warmed and cherished
by what radiates thence. He quotes, in the last stanza of this poem,
from Wordsworth's sonnet on the Sonnet, "With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart," and then adds, "DID Shakespeare?
If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

Mrs. Browning, in the Fifth Book of her 'Aurora Leigh',
has given a full and very forcible expression to the feeling
which has caused the highest dramatic genius of the present day
to seek refuge in the poem and the novel. "I will write no plays;
because the drama, less sublime in this, makes lower appeals,
defends more menially, adopts the standard of the public taste
to chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round its regal neck,
and learns to carry and fetch the fashions of the day,
to please the day; . . . 'Tis that, honoring to its worth the drama,
I would fear to keep it down to the level of the footlights. . . .
The growing drama has outgrown such toys of simulated stature, face,
and speech, it also, peradventure, may outgrow the simulation
of the painted scene, boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume;
and TAKE FOR A WORTHIER STAGE, THE SOUL ITSELF, ITS SHIFTING FANCIES
AND CELESTIAL LIGHTS, WITH ALL ITS GRAND ORCHESTRAL SILENCES
TO KEEP THE PAUSES OF THE RHYTHMIC SOUNDS."

Robert Browning's poetry is, in these days, the fullest realization
of what is expressed in the concluding lines of this passage:
he has taken for a worthier stage, the soul itself,
its shifting fancies and celestial lights, more than any other poet
of the age. And he has worked with a thought-and-passion capital
greater than the combined thought-and-passion capital of the richest
of his poetical contemporaries. And he has thought nobly of the soul,
and has treated it as, in its essence, above the fixed and law-bound
system of things which we call nature; in other words,
he has treated it as supernatural. "Mind," he makes the Pope say,
in 'The Ring and the Book', -- and his poetry bears testimony to
its being his own conviction and doctrine, -- "Mind is not matter,
nor from matter, but above." With every student of Browning,
the recognition and acceptance of this must be his starting-point.
Even that which impelled the old dog, in his poem entitled 'Tray'
('Dramatic Lyrics', First Series), to rescue the beggar child
that fell into the river, and then to dive after the child's doll,