Candlestick-maker much acquaints
His soul with song, or, haply mute,
Blows out his brains upon the flute.
But—shop each day and all day long!
Friend, your good angel slept, your star
Suffered eclipse, fate did you wrong!
For where these sorts of treasures are
There should our hearts be—Christ, how far!
Here we have the romantic richness, the direct conversational idiom, and the crabbed Hobbs-Nobbs figure all in one. And this last in Browning’s work was, I think, a further development of his dissatisfaction with the habit of verse as he found it in general use. If the “elevated” manner seemed to him to be exhausted, the colloquial manner that he adopted as an alternative may very well soon have seemed to him to be too flat and commonplace, to lack the spring of good poetic writing, and it was a natural thing for his genius to enliven it not by a return to the accepted manner only—though he did this as well—but also by inventing a new complex of the common idiom, fantastic, involved, and striking, if sometimes only by its oddity, yet always alert and personal. “I want to know a butcher paints” is the idiom of ordinary speech lifted bodily into poetry with the slightest of sea-changes; “O lyric love” is the same idiom ennobled and intensified, transfigured in the traditional way by a poetic master; in Nokes and Stokes and their azure feats is again the same idiom, but now vexed into an attitude, not in the least insincerely, but by a poet who has bravely but wilfully cut the old moorings and finds new ones very far to seek. Nothing could be less just than to accuse Browning of deliberate antics, but if, even for the most disinterested reasons, you forsake solid earth for the tight-rope you cannot help performing with the pole, and you are lucky if you get across even at that, which it must be allowed Browning generally did. I said that the stanzas from Shop showed the three strains in his style satisfactorily blended, but it would perhaps be nearer to the truth to say that they show them in close association, each contributing to a satisfactory whole, and kept by Browning’s art from striking any discord, shown by him, in short, equally to be natural and congruous elements in the unity of his style. As showing these elements more indistinguishably combined worked into one texture, three stanzas may be given from A Toccata of Galuppi’s—
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?