An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry by Robert Browning
page 84 of 525 (16%)
page 84 of 525 (16%)
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an island! All this jumble, this gallimaufry, I say,
does not impair the spiritual worth of the play. As an Art-product, it 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 |
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