Prisoned glory in every niche, it glowed with colour and gleamed with carving: it was “Art’s response to earth’s despair.” He leaves the chapel big with expectation of what might be in store for him in other rooms in the mansion, but there was nothing but the same dead level of indifferent work everywhere, just as in the rooms which he had passed through on his way to the exquisite chapel: nothing anywhere but calm Common-Place. Browning says this is a diagnosis of Smart’s case: he was sound and sure at starting, then caught up in a fireball. Heaven let earth understand how heaven at need can operate; then the flame fell, and the untransfigured man resumed his wonted sobriety. But what Browning wants to know is, How was it this happened but once? Here was a poet who always could but never did but once! Once he saw Nature naked; once only Truth found vent in words from him. Once the veil was pulled back, then the world darkened into the repository of show and hide.
Clara de Millefleurs. (Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.) The mistress of Miranda, the jeweller of Paris.
Claret. See [“Nationality in Drinks”] (Dramatic Lyrics).
Classification. Mr. Nettleship’s classification of Browning is the best I know. It is no easy matter to table the poet’s works: they do not readily accommodate themselves to classification. Such poems as the great Art and Music works, the Dramas, Love, and Religious poems are to be found in this book under the respective subjects.
Cleon. (Men and Women, 1855.) The speculation of this poem may be compared with a picture in a magic lantern slowly dissolving into another view, and losing itself in that which is succeeding it. We have the latest utterances of the beautiful Greek thought, saddened as they were by the despairing note of the sense of hopelessness which marred the highest effort of man, and which was never so acutely felt as at the period when the Sun of Christianity was rising and about to fill the world with the Spirit of Eternal Hope. The old heathenism is dissolving away, the first faint outlines of the gospel glory are detected by the philosopher who has heard of the fame of Paul, and is not sure he is not the same as the Christ preached by some slaves whose doctrine “could be held by no sane man.” The quotation with which the poem is headed is from Acts of the Apostles, chap. xvii. 28: “As certain also of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’” The quotation is from the Phænomena of Aratus, a poet of Tarsus, in Cilicia, St. Paul’s own city. There is also a very similar passage in a hymn of the Stoic Cleanthes: “Zeus, thou crown of creation, Hail!—We are thy offspring.” The persons of the poem are not historical, though the thought expressed is highly characteristic of that of the Greek philosophers of the time. As the old national creeds disappeared under the advancing tide of Roman conquest, and as philosophers calmly discussed the truth or falsity of their dying religions, an easy tolerance arose, all religions were permitted because “indifference had eaten the heart out of them.” Four hundred years before our era Eastern philosophy, through the Greek conquests in Asia, had begun to influence European thinkers by its strange and subtle attempts to solve the mystery of existence. A spirit of inquiry, and a restless craving for some undefined faith which should take the place of that which was everywhere dying out, prepared the way for the progress of the simple, love-compelling religion of Christ, and made every one’s heart more or less suitable soil for the good seed. Cleon is a poet from the isles of Greece who has received a letter from his royal patron and many costly gifts, which crowd his court and portico. He writes to thank his king for his munificence, and in his reply says it is true that he has written that epic on the hundred plates of gold; true that he composed the chant which the mariners will learn to sing as they haul their nets; true that the image of the sun-god on the lighthouse is his also; that the Pœcile—the portico at Athens painted with battle pictures by Polygnotus the Thasian, has been adorned, too, with his own works. He knows the plastic anatomy of man and woman and their proportions, not observed before; he has moreover
“Written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again.”
He has combined the moods for music, and invented one:—
“In brief, all arts are mine.”
All this is known; it is not so marvellous either, because men’s minds in these latter days are greater than those of olden time because more composite. Life, he finds reason to believe, is intended to be viewed eventually as a great whole, not analysed to parts, but each having reference to all: the true judge of man’s life must see the whole, not merely one way of it at once; the artist who designed the chequered pavement did not superimpose the figures, putting the last design over the old and blotting it out,—he made a picture and used every stone, whatever its figure, in the composition of his work. So he conceives that perfect, separate forms which make the portions of mankind were created at first, afterwards these were combined, and so came progress. Mankind is a synthesis—a putting together of all the single men. Zeus had a plan in all, and our souls know this, and cry to him—
“To vindicate his purpose in our life.”