Some eminent Victorians: personal recollections in the world of art and letters; . true office of the poet, that hestands among them all as their undisputed master. In every art the last word is simplicity. Thereis no phase of thought or feeling rightly admissibleinto the domain of poetry that the might of geniusmay not force to simple utterance. It is this whichconstitutes the final triumph of all the greatestwizards of our tongue, of Shakespeare as of Milton ;of Wordsworth no less than of Keats. All of themfound a way to wed the subtlest music with thesimplest speech, striving with ever-incr
Some eminent Victorians: personal recollections in the world of art and letters; . true office of the poet, that hestands among them all as their undisputed master. In every art the last word is simplicity. Thereis no phase of thought or feeling rightly admissibleinto the domain of poetry that the might of geniusmay not force to simple utterance. It is this whichconstitutes the final triumph of all the greatestwizards of our tongue, of Shakespeare as of Milton ;of Wordsworth no less than of Keats. All of themfound a way to wed the subtlest music with thesimplest speech, striving with ever-increasing severityfor that chastened perfection of form which standsas the last and the surest test of the presence ofsupreme poetic genius. So much cannot be said of Browning. Thereis enough and to spare in the great body of hiswork to leave his position as a poet unassailed, butthere is more to prove that, beside the purely poeticimpulse, there were other forces working in hisnature, which, in so far as they prevail, must tendto rob the result of that faultless music which alone. ROBERT BROWNINGFrom the painting by G. F. Watts, , in the National Portrait Gallery tiOllyt To /acc page 201. SOME VICTORIAN POETS 201 can give to verse its final right of survival. Thisis doubtless true also of Wordsworth, but in his casethe good and the bad are easily separable, and thegood at its best is flawless. But with Browning theconflicting elements of his genius are so closely-locked together that the task of selection is not soeasy, and the triumph, even when it has to beacknowledged, is not so secure. And yet, for all who then came under his in-fluence, the charm can never quite be broken. Hespoke to those of us who first learned to knowhim in our youth with a quickened authority thatnothing can quite destroy. The faults which timenow thrusts forward were hardly then matter forpardon. For those who come after they mayindeed serve to set his fame in peril, but themessage he had for us was
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