C. H. Herford

“ The ‘Intellectual Beauty’ of Shelley’s hymn had its seat and stronghold in a like glow of inner vision, but its ‘awful loveliness’ was more abundantly hinted or disclosed in the world of nature and of man, giving ‘grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream,’ and luring the sensitive poet on to the pursuit of a thousand fugitive embodiments of its eternal essence. Leopardi’s language, marmoreally clear-cut and austere, seems to bear the impress of a mind powerfully self-contained, exempt from all seductions of the senses, even of colour and melody, calm with the resolution of despair. ”

“ But they are full of an exuberant joy in life itself, as seen by a keen observer exempt from its harsher conditions, to whom all power and passion are a feast. He watches the angers, the malignities of men and women, as one might watch the quarrels of wild beasts, not cynically, but with the detached, as it were professional, interest of a born "fighter." The loftier hatred, which is a form of love,—the sublime hatred of a Dante, the tragic hatred of a Timon, even the unforgetting, self-consuming hatred of a Heathcliff,—did not now, or ever, engage his imagination. ”

“ To refuse the easy assumption of Nature’s comradeship in our sorrow, to resign the cheap consolations of the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ may be the way not merely to resignation, or Stoicism, but to an apprehension of the heights and depths of the soul thrown back upon itself, and fetching strength not from any outer power, but from undreamed-of inner resources of its own. When Wordsworth, in the grasp of a great sorrow, puts aside the glamour of the poet’s dream, in order to bear with fortitude ‘what is to be borne,’ he has taken a step towards that poetry. ”

“ His delight in complex technicalities, in the tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in mere intricacy as such. His mountains are gashed and cleft and carved not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist Man. He turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous achievements of art. ”

“ Yet d’Annunzio’s vision of power, his appetency of enormous and abnormal things, was now to assume a new form. The grandiose dream of the Superman expands into the dream of the Super-nation. The discovery of Rome had taught him something of the pride of citizenship, and more than the nascent pride of nationality. But in the last year of the century he underwent an experience which turned this nascent emotion into a passion, and the poet himself into a prophet and preacher in its service, an ‘announcer’ as he was fond of saying, of the cause and creed of Italianità. ”

“ Women and Roses has an intoxicating swiftness and buoyancy of music. But there is another and more sinister kind of love-dream—the dream of an unloved woman. Such a dream, with its tragic disillusion, Browning painted in his poignant and original In a Balcony. It is in no sense a drama, but a dramatic incident in three scenes, affecting the fates of three persons, upon whom the entire interest is concentrated. The three vivid and impressive character-heads stand out with intense and minute brilliance from a background absolutely blank and void. ”

“ To imagine heroism intensely is to be convinced that whatever else is illusory, heroism is not an illusion, that the valour of man has a kinship and support somehow, somewhere, in the nature of things. And if heroism is not an illusion, human society is no illusion either. For the heroic struggler with infinite odds is no longer alone; the army of saints and martyrs are with him; and it was the poet for whom loneliness opened ways into infinity beyond any companionship who cried to one such heroic struggler, fallen in the fight ”

“ He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and plastic form,—feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power, exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he is engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, with souls picturesquely complex and diversified, or vehement, aspiring, heroic. ”

“ Earth has for him a life-history, a biography, and he forgets that she is strictly but a point at which the eternal drift of atoms thickened for a time to a cluster, to be dispersed again. Thus we see how this mechanical system, ardently embraced by a poet, working freely upon him, and itself coloured and transformed by his mind, stirred in him two seemingly opposed kinds of poetic emotion at once: the sublime sense of eternal existence, and the tragic pathos of sudden doom and inexorable passing away.
Hence the melancholy that in Lucretius goes along with an enormous sense of life. ”

“ We are in Italy once more, our senses tingle with its glowing prodigality of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the Roman streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast debate which seems to occupy the entire community, and which turns, not upon immortality, or spiritualism, or the nature of God, or the fate of man, but on the guilt or innocence of the actors in one pitiful drama,—a priest, a noble, an illiterate girl. ”

“ For the voice of Lucretius is here a distinctive, almost a solitary voice. The poets for the most part have been the weavers of the veil of dreams and visions in whose glamour the races of mankind have walked: but here came a poet, and one of the greatest, who rent the veil asunder and bade men gaze upon the nature of things naked and unadorned. And his austere chaunt of triumph as he pierces illusion and scatters superstition, has in it something more poignant and thrilling than many a song of voluptuous ecstacy or enchanted reverie. ”

“ A barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full tide of youthful passion. The richest in this tender sunset beauty is the St Martin's Summer, where the late love is suddenly smitten with the discovery that its apparent warmth is a ghost of old passion buried but unallayed. Again and again Browning here dwells upon the magic of love,—as if love still retained for the ageing poet an isolated and exceptional irradiating power in a world fast fading into commonplace and prose. ”

“ Man in the grip of Nature is like the anthill crushed by a chance-falling apple, and the lava field of Vesuvius, covering extinct cities, where but the broom plant sheds a forlorn fragrance, aptly symbolizes the desolate earth he is doomed to tread. While this earth itself, a vanishing film of vapour in the universe, traverses by its insignificance his dream of immortality. And his humorous irony sports, in the prose dialogues, with this annihilating disparity between man’s pretensions and the truth. ”

“ Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which undid the rainbow's spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders to dissect, and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy, as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words, which comes to the heart that watches and receives. On all these issues Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast. ”

“ Wordsworth, apprehending soul with his poet’s intuition, apprehends it as he knew it in himself. He saw it, therefore, as an energy operating not through ‘meddling intellect’ but through vision and vision-illuminated will, with open eye and ear for its indispensable associates, and love as its core. The ‘soul’ whereby alone the nations shall be great and free was something in which the humblest peasant and the simplest child had part, and in which the meanest flower struck answering chords. ”

“ The Christmas Vision makes humanity seem more divine; the Easter Vision makes the divine seem less human. The hypersensitive moral nature of the Easter-Day speaker, on the other hand, sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind before all else, and the divine visitation becomes a Last Judgment, with the fierce vindictive red of the Northern Lights replacing the mild glory of the lunar rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination the silent swift convoy of the winged robe. ”

“ Love above all else irradiates the waste of life, it is ‘the source of good, of the highest joy found in the ocean of existence’; it alone holds equal bliss for man with Death, which for ever allays his ills. ‘Love and Death’ are twin brothers, and the fairest things on the earth or under the stars. [47] [180] Even the memory of love can make ‘abhorred old age’ endurable, and send a man willingly to the scourge or the wheel, as the face of Beatrice could make her lover ‘happy in the flames.’ [48] Hence Love makes the heart ‘wise,’ for it inspires men with the contempt of life ”

“ The disasters of love rarely, with Browning, stir us very deeply. His temperament was too elastic, his intellect too resourceful, to enter save by artificial processes into the mood of blank and hopeless grief. Tragedy did not lie in his blood, and fortune—kinder to the man than to the poet—had as yet denied him, in love, the "baptism of sorrow" which has wrung immortal verse from the lips of frailer men. ”

“ And because of its bent to think greatly of man, it makes for the assertion, in the great sense, of freedom—of man’s freedom to be himself. Neither the shibboleths of political freedom nor those of free thought have always, it is true, found response among poets. Their part has rather been to keep alive in mankind the temper which treats outward obstacles not as the soul’s constraints, but as its opportunities; the faith that iron bars do not make a cage, and that you may be bounded in a nutshell, and yet not only count yourself, but be, a king of infinite space. ”

“ Browning as the poet of Love is thus the last, and assuredly not the least, in the line which handed on the torch of Plato. The author of the Phoedrus saw in the ecstasy of Love one of the avenues to the knowledge of the things that indeed are. To Dante the supreme realities were mirrored in the eyes of Beatrice. For Shelley Love was interwoven through all the mazes of Being; it was the source of the strength by which man masters his gods. To all these masters of idealism Browning's vision of Love owed something of its intensity and of its range. ”

“ Only, if great and original genius has set its hall-mark upon this noble metal, the crowd of small poets have mixed it with their feeble alloys. There is a Nature which responds to the greatest and sublimest aspirations of man, and one which answers to his self-indulgent dreams; a Nature which is wedded to his soul, and one which is but the casual mistress of his light desires. If the term ‘poetical’ has a slightly derisive air, it is because a cheap glamour, which disguises truth, so often replaces the profound symbol which touches its core. ”

“ For Browning now, as in the days of the Flight of the Duchess, the gipsy symbolised the life of joyous detachment from the constraints of society and civilisation. The elementary mood, out of which the wondrous woof of reasonings and images is evolved, is simply the instinctive beat of the spirit of romance in us all, in sympathy with these light-hearted losels of the wild, who "cast allegiance off, play truant, nor repine," and though disgraced but seem to relish life the more. ”

“ So that a conception apparently so thin and abstract as ‘difference’ can assume for him the shape and potency of an alluring divinity: ‘Diversity,’ he cries, ‘the siren of the world! I am he who love thee!’
And then, with adolescence, came the passion of sex; for d’Annunzio no shy and gradual discovery, but a veritable explosion, before which all obstacles, moral and material, vanished into air. ”

“ What preoccupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her word or kiss,—the moment made eternal, the "blaze" in which he became "lord of heaven and earth." But some of the greatest love-poetry of the world—from Dante onwards—has reflected an intellect similarly absorbed in articulating a marvellous experience. For the rest, Asolando is a miscellany of old and new,—bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience of the nearing end. ”

“ In Antony and Cleopatra, on the other hand, a type of love not in its origin loftier or purer than that of Troilus and Cressida is seen dominating two souls of magnificent compass and daemonic force. Antony is held by his serpent of old Nile in the grip of a passion which insolently tramples on moral and institutional bonds, private and public alike; which brings the lovers to ruin and to death; and which yet invests their fall with a splendour beside which the triumph of their conqueror appears cold and mean. ”

“ He loves the daybreak hour of the world's awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping Florence in that "live translucent bath of air" [64] ; he loves the blaze of the Italian mid-day—
"Great noontides, thunderstorms, all glaring pomps
That triumph at the heels of June the god."
Even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue." [65] He loves the play of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even in the sombre South and the dusky East ”

“ With Leopardi, martyred in his prime by painful disease, the gloomy shades closed in more and more impenetrably upon the world of man and nature, and death was happy because it was the end of life. With Shelley the universe grew more and more visibly transfigured by a spirit deeply responsive to his own; all things worked and moved in beauty, and were woven through and through with love. ”

“ Just as this lover of crowded labyrinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of pure and simple colour, untroubled by blur or modulation, so in the long procession of Browning's men of the world, adepts in the tangled lore of experience, there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a pure, intense, immaculate spiritual light,—Pippa, Pompilia, the David of the earlier Saul. Something of the strange charm of these naïvely beautiful beings springs from their isolation. ”

“ Sometimes Love's triumph is, for Browning, the rapture of complete union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the lonely glory of his love.
The triumph of Browning's united lovers has often a superb Elizabethan note of defiance. Passion obliterates for them the past and throws a mystically hued veil over Nature. The gentle Romantic sentiments hardly touch the fresh springs of their emotion. ”

“ By one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in Browning, the poet who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of musicians par excellence, is also the poet of grindings and jostlings, of jars and clashes, of grating hinges and flapping doors; civilisation mated with barbarism, "like Jove in a thatched house."
Music appealed to him by its imaginative suggestiveness, or by its intricate technique; as the mine from which Abt Vogler reared his palace, the loom on which Master Hugues wove the intertwining harmonies of his fugue. ”