Chapter 4 - Page 2

words, or pretty amusement
for harpsichord or piano, but rather a divine trigonometry,
a process of celestial triangulation, a taking observations of
celestial places and spheres, an attempt to estimate our world,
its place, its life amidst the boundless immeasurable sweeps
of space and time; or if describing, then describing
the animating stories of the giants, how they fought and fell,
or conquered. . .a great all-inclusive strength of song,
which is as a battle march to warriors, or as the refreshment
of brooks and dates to the spent and toiling soldiers on their way,
is more than the pretty idyll, whose sweet and plaintive story
pleases the idle hour or idle ear."

The Rev. Prof. E. Johnson, in the section entitled 'Poets of the Ear
and of the Eye', of his valuable paper on 'Conscience and Art
in Browning' ('Browning Soc. Papers', Part III., pp. 345-380),
has ably shown that "the economy of music is a necessity
of Browning's Art" -- that music, instead of ever being an end
to itself, is with him a means to a much higher end. He says: --

"All poetry may be classified according to its form or its contents.
Formal classification is easy, but of little use. When we have
distinguished compositions as dramatic, lyrical, or characterized
a poet in like manner, we have done little. What we want to ascertain
is the peculiar quality of the imaginative stuff with which
he plastically works, and to appreciate its worth. This is always
a great task, but one particularly necessary in the case of Browning,
because the stuff in which he has wrought is so novel
in the poet's hands. Psychology itself is comparatively a new
and modern study, as a distinct science; but a psychological poet,
who has made it his business to clothe psychic abstractions
'in sights and sounds', is entirely a novel appearance in literature.

"Now that phrase 'clothing in sights and sounds' may yield us the clue
to the classification we are seeking. The function of artists,
that is, musicians, poets in the narrower sense, and painters,
is to clothe Truth in sights and sounds for the hearing and seeing
of us all. Their call to do this lies in their finer and fuller
aesthetic faculty. The sense of hearing and that of seeing
stand in polar opposition, and thus a natural scale offers itself
by which we may rank and arrange our artists. At the one end
of the scale is the acoustic artist, i.e., the musician. At the other
end of the scale is the optic artist, the painter and sculptor.
Between these, and comprising both these activities in his own,
is the poet, who is both acoustic and optic artist. He translates
the sounds of the world, both external and internal, --
the tumult of storms, the murmurs of