right attitude to become explicit — bring about a silent adjustment through sympathy induced by the concrete; in other words, prepare the way for the perception of the truth —"do the thing shall breed the thought, nor wrong the thought missing the mediate word"; meaning, that Art, so to speak, is the word made flesh, is the truth, and, as Art, has nothing directly to do with the explicit. "So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, beyond mere imagery on the wall, so, note by note, bring music from your mind, deeper than ever the Andante dived, so write a book shall mean beyond the facts, suffice the eye and save the soul beside." And what is the inference the poet would have us draw from this passage? It is, that the life and efficacy of Art depends on the personality of the artist, which "has informed, transpierced, thridded, and so thrown fast the facts else free, as right through ring and ring runs the djereed and binds the loose, one bar without a break." And it is really this fusion of the artist's soul, which kindles, quickens, informs those who contemplate, respond to, reproduce sympathetically within themselves the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own. The work of Art is apocalyptic of the artist's own personality. It cannot be impersonal. As is the temper of his spirit, so is, must be, the temper of his Art product. It is hard to believe, almost impossible to believe, that Titus Andronicus' could have been written by Shakespeare, the external testimony to the authorship, notwithstanding. Even if he had written it as a burlesque of such a play as Marlow's 'Jew of Malta,' he could not have avoided some revelation of that sense of moral proportion which is omnipresent in his Plays. But I can find no Shakespeare in 'Titus Andronicus.' Are we not certain what manner of man Shakespeare was from his Works (notwithstanding that critics are ever asserting their impersonality) 1 "And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem.”. MILTON'S Apology for Smectym. nuus. far more certain than if his biography had been written by one who knew him all his life, and sustained to him the most intimate relations? We know Shakespeare or he can be known, if the requisite conditions are met, better, perhaps, than any other great author that ever lived — know, in the deepest sense of the word, in a sense other than that in which we know Dr. Johnson, through Boswell's Biography. The moral proportion which is so signal a characteristic of his Plays could not have been imparted to them by the conscious intellect. It was shed from his spiritual constitution. By "speaking truth" in Art's way, Browning means, inducing a right attitude toward, a full and free sympathy with, the True, which is a far more important and effective way of speaking truth than delivering truth in re. A work of Art, worthy of the name, need not be true to fact, but must be true in its spiritual attitude, and being thus true, it will tend to induce a corresponding attitude in those who do fealty to it. It will have the influence, though in an inferior degree, it may be, of a magnetic personality. Personality is the ultimate source of spiritual quickening and adjustment. Literature and all forms of Art are but the intermediate agencies of personalities. The artist cannot be separated from his art. As is the artist so must be his art. The aura, so to speak, of a great work of Art, must come from the artist's own personality. The spiritual worth of Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale' is not at all impaired by the fact that Bohemia is made a maritime country, that Whitsun pastorals and Christian burial, and numerous other features of Shakespeare's own age, are introduced into pagan times, that Queen Hermione speaks of herself as a daughter of the Emperor of Russia, that her statue is represented as executed by Julio Romano, an Italian painter of the 16th century, that a puritan sings psalms to hornpipes, and, to crown all, that messengers are sent to consult the oracle of Apollo, at Delphi, which is represented as an island! All this jumble, this gallimaufry, I say, does not impair the spiritual worth of the play. As an Art-product, invites a rectified attitude toward the True and the Sweet. If we look at the letter of the trial scene in 'The Merchant of Venice,' it borders on the absurd; but if we look at its spirit, we see the Shakespearian attitude of soul which makes for righteousness, for the righteousness which is inherent in the moral constitution of the universe. The inmost, secretest life of Shakespeare's Plays came from the personality, the inmost, secretest life, of the man Shakespeare. We might, with the most alert sagacity, note and tabulate and aggregate his myriad phenomenal merits as a dramatic writer, but we might still be very far from that something back of them all, or rather that immanent something, that mystery of personality, that microcosmos, that "inmost centre, where truth abides in fulness," as Browning makes Paracelsus characterize it, "constituting man's self, is what Is," as he makes the dying John characterize it, in 'A Death in the Desert,' that "innermost of the inmost, most interior of the interne," as Mrs. Browning characterizes it," the hidden Soul," as Dallas characterizes it, which is projected into, and constitutes the soul of, the Plays, and which is reached through an unconscious and mystic sympathy on the part of him who habitually communes with and does fealty to them. That personality, that living force, co-operated spontaneously and unconsciously with the conscious powers, in the creative process; and when we enter into a sympathetic communion with the concrete result of that creative process, our own mysterious personalities, being essentially identical with, though less quickened than, Shakespeare's, respond, though it may be but feebly, to his. This response is the highest result of the study of Shakespeare's works. It is a significant fact that Shakespearian critics and editors, for nearly two centuries, have been a genus irritabile, to which genus Shakespeare himself certainly did not belong. The explanation may partly be, that they have been too much occupied with the letter, and have fretted their nerves in angry dispute about readings and interpretations; as theologians have done in their study of the sacred records, instead of endeavoring to reach, through the letter, the personality of which the letter is but a manifestation more or less imperfect. To know a personality is, of course, a spiritual knowledge the result of sympathy, that is, spiritual responsiveness. Intellectually it is but little more important to know one rather than another personality. The highest worth of all great works of genius is due to the fact that they are apocalyptic of great personalities. Art says, as the Divine Person said, whose personality and the personalities fashioned after it, have transformed and moulded the ages, "Follow me!" Deep was the meaning wrapt up in this command: it was, Do as I do, live as I live, not from an intellectual perception of the principles involved in my life, but through a full sympathy, through the awakening, vitalizing, actuating power of the incarnate Word. Art also says, as did the voice from the wilderness, inadequately translated, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." (Μετανοεῖτε ἤγγικε γὰρ ἡ Βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν.) Rather, be transformed, or, as De Quincey puts it, " Wheel into a new centre your spiritual system; geocentric has that system been up to this hour - that is, having earth and the earthly for its starting-point; henceforward make it heliocentric (that is, with the sun, or the heavenly, for its principle of motion)." The poetry of Browning everywhere says this, and says it more emphatically than that of any other poet in our literature. It says everywhere, that not through knowledge, not through a sharpened intellect, but through repentance, in the deeper sense to which I have just alluded, through conversion, through wheeling into a new centre its spiritual system, the soul attains to saving truth. Salvation with him means that revelation of the soul to itself, that awakening, quickening, actuating, attitude-adjusting, of the soul, which sets it gravitating toward the Divine. Browning's idea of Conversion is, perhaps, most distinctly expressed in a passage in the Monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi, in 'The Ring and the Book,' wherein he sets forth the circumstances under which his soul was wheeled into a new centre, after : a life of dalliance and elegant folly, and made aware of "the marvellous dower of the life it was gifted and filled with." He has been telling the judges, before whom he has been summoned, the story of the letters forged by Guido to entrap him and Pompilia, and of his having seen "right through the thing that tried to pass for truth and solid, not an empty lie." The conclusion and the resolve he comes to, are expressed in the soliloquy which he repeats to the judges, as having uttered at the time: "So, he not only forged the words for her but words for me, made letters he called mine what I sent, he retained, gave these in place, all by the mistress messenger! As I recognized her, at potency of truth, so she, by the crystalline soul, knew me, never mistook the signs. Enough of this- let the wraith go to nothingness again, here is the orb, have only thought for her!" What follows admits us to the very heart of Browning's poetry -- admits us to the great Idea which is almost, in these days, strange to say, peculiarly his - which no other poet, certainly, of this intellectual, analytic, scientific age, with its "patent, truth-extracting processes," has brought out with the same degree of distinctness – the great Idea which may be variously characterized as that of soul-kindling, soul-quickening, adjustment of soul-attitude, regeneration, conversion, through personality—a kindling, quickening, adjustment, regeneration, conversion, in which thought is not even a coefficient. As expressed in Sordello, "Divest mind of e'en thought, and lo, God's unexpressed will dawns above us!" "Thought?" the Canon goes on to say, "Thought? nay, Sirs, what shall follow was not thought I have thought sometimes, and thought long and hard. I have stood before, gone round a serious thing, tasked my whole mind to touch and clasp it close, . . . God and man, and what duty I owe both, I dare to say I have confronted these in thought but no such faculty helped here. I put forth no thought, -powerless, all that night I paced the city: it was the first Spring. By the invasion I lay passive to, in rushed new things, the old were rapt away; alike abolished the imprisonment of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world that pulled me |