[122] Fifine at the Fair, ii. 325.
Sordello's slowly won lyric speech is called
"a rude
Armour ... hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it."[123]
[123] Sordello, i. 135.
And thirty years later he used the kindred but more recondite simile of a ring with its fortifying alloy, to symbolise the welded Wahrheit and Dichtung of his greatest poem.
Between Dichtung and Wahrheit there was, indeed, in Browning's mind, a closer affinity than that simile suggests. His imagination was a factor in his apprehension of truth; his "poetry" cannot be detached from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his poetry. Not that all parts of his apparent [teaching] belong equally to his poetic mind. On the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of principles. But with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker slowly works out. The characteristic ways of Browning's poetry, the fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which in the last resort they return. In the following chapter we shall have to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides.
CHAPTER X.
THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE.
His voice sounds loudest and also clearest for the things that as a race we like best; ... the fascination of faith, the acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of great human passion.
—HENRY JAMES.