An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry. Robert Browning
Epilogue to ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’.
{Called “The Faultless Painter”.}
How it strikes a Contemporary.
“We shall soon lose a celebrated building.”—Paris Newspaper.
Shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe.
An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.
On which the Jews were forced to attend an Annual Christian Sermon in Rome.
A LIST OF CRITICISMS OF BROWNING’S WORKS.
Notes on the Genius of Robert Browning. By James Thomson.
INTRODUCTION.
I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning.
Literature, in its most restricted art-sense, is an expression in letters of the life of the spirit of man co-operating with the intellect. Without the co-operation of the spiritual man, the intellect produces only thought; and pure thought, whatever be the subject with which it deals, is not regarded as literature, in its strict sense. For example, Euclid’s ‘Elements’, Newton’s ‘Principia’, Spinoza’s ‘Ethica’, and Kant’s ‘Critique of the Pure Reason’, do not properly belong to literature. (By the “spiritual” I would be understood to mean the whole domain of the emotional, the susceptible or impressible, the sympathetic, the intuitive; in short, that mysterious something in the constitution of man by and through which he holds relationship with the essential spirit of things, as opposed to the phenomenal of which the senses take cognizance.)
The term literature is sometimes extended in meaning (and it may be so extended), to include all that has been committed to letters, on all subjects. There is no objection to such extension in ordinary speech, no more than there is to that of the signification of the word, “beauty” to what is purely abstract. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration; but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal, not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate, effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit—“the accommodation,” in Bacon’s words, “of the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”
It follows that the relative merit and importance of different periods of a literature should be determined by the relative degrees of spirituality which these different periods exhibit. The intellectual power of two or more periods, as exhibited in their literatures, may show no marked difference, while the spiritual vitality of these same periods may very distinctly differ. And if it be admitted that literature proper is the product of co-operative intellect and spirit (the latter being always an indispensable factor, though there can be no high order of literature that is not strongly articulated, that is not well freighted, with thought), it follows