The evolutionary ideal appears again in his utterances upon poetry, though when speaking of poetry it is the value of the subject matter and its intimate relation to the form upon which he dwells.
The little poem “Popularity” shows as clearly as any the importance which he attaches to a new departure in poetic expression, besides giving vent to his scorn of the multitude which sees nothing in the work of the innovator but which is ready at a later date to laud his imitators. Any minor poet, for that matter, any Nokes or Stokes who merely prints blue according to the poetic conventions of the past, possessing not a suspicion of the true inspiration which goes to the making of a poet of the new order, is more acceptable to an unseeing public than him with power to fish “the murex up” that contains the precious drop of royal blue.
More than one significant hint may be gleaned from his verse in regard to his opinion upon the formal side of the poet’s art. In “Transcendentalism” he has his fling at the didactic poet who pleases to speak naked thoughts instead of draping them in sights and sounds, for “song” is the art of the poet. Some stout mage like him of Halberstadt has his admiration, who with a
“‘Look you!’ vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,
Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
And musty volumes, Boehme’s book and all,—
Buries us with a glory young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.”
He was equally averse to an ornate classical embellishment of a latter day subject or to a looking at nature through mythopœic Greek eyes. This is driven home in the splendid fooling in “Gerard de Lairesse” where the poet himself indulges by way of a joke in some high-flown classical imagery in derision of the style of Lairesse and hints covertly probably at the nineteenth-century masters of classical resuscitation, in subject matter and allusion, Swinburne and Morris. Reacting to soberer mood, he reiterates his belief in the utter deadness of Greek ideals of art, speaking with a strength of conviction so profound as to make one feel that here at least Browning suffered from a decided limitation, all the more strange, too, when one considers his own masterly treatment of Greek subjects. To the poets whose poetic creed is
“Dream afresh old godlike shapes,
Recapture ancient fable that escapes,
Push back reality, repeople earth
With vanished falseness, recognize no worth
In fact new-born unless ’tis rendered back
Pallid by fancy, as the western rack
Of fading cloud bequeaths the lake some gleam
Of its gone glory!”
he would reply,
“Let things be—not seem,
I counsel rather,—do, and nowise dream!
Earth’s young significance is all to learn;
The dead Greek lore lies buried in the urn
Where who seeks fire finds ashes. Ghost, forsooth!
What was the best Greece babbled of as truth?
A shade, a wretched nothing,—sad, thin, drear,
······
Sad school
Was Hades! Gladly,—might the dead but slink
To life back,—to the dregs once more would drink
Each interloper, drain the humblest cup
Fate mixes for humanity.”
The rush onward to the supreme is uppermost in the poet’s mind in this poem. Though he does indulge in the refrain that there shall never be one lost good echoing the thought in “Charles Avison,” the climax of his mood is in the contemplation of the evolutionary force of the soul which must leave Greek art behind and find new avenues of beauty:
“The Past indeed
Is past, gives way before Life’s best and last
The all-including Future! What were life
Did soul stand still therein, forego her strife
Through the ambiguous Present to the goal
Of some all-reconciling Future? Soul,
Nothing has been which shall not bettered be
Hereafter,—leave the root, by law’s decree
Whence springs the ultimate and perfect tree!
Busy thee with unearthing root? Nay, climb—
Quit trunk, branch, leaf and flower—reach, rest sublime
Where fruitage ripens in the blaze of day.”