Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/95

Rh and truly called la patience angéligue du génie; and of the obvious truth, above all, that if knowledge is power, suffering should be acceptable as a part of power." Without in any way endorsing Miss Barrett's theory, and, indeed, feeling that it is radically false to nature and genius, and that no poet should humiliate himself to the "world's use," or suffer unresistingly the humiliation of the "world's cruelty," it must at once be acknowledged that the grandeur and power of the poem is likely to blind readers to its perverse doctrine. Apart from Dante and Shakespeare, it would be difficult to meet with so great a condensation of thought, such abridged yet complete characterisation, as is frequently met with in this marvellous poem, and yet, all things considered, it is not perhaps very strange that the "Vision of Poets" has failed to elicit the applause of critics, and indeed to find that many of them have refrained from speaking of it at all. In the whole range of literature it would be difficult to parallel, in prose or verse, such concise yet descriptive portraiture as the poem contains. It is replete with compound words and epigrammatic sentences, but it must be confessed that the "Conclusion" is out of tone with the rest of the poem, and uncalled for. Every poem should, as Elizabeth Barrett says herself, have "an object and a significance"; but her propensity to drag in a moral, or to tag on a didactic dissertation of some kind, even from an artistic point of view, disfigures her most beautiful work.

Her Preface to the collection concludes with the hope that some of the faults which she had formerly been reproached with may have been outgrown:—

Because some progress in mind and in art every active thinker and honest writer must consciously or unconsciously make, with the