Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/238

 Count Cenci. Here again a comparison is patched up between two things utterly unamenable to the same rule. The wonderful figure so cunningly drawn and coloured by Mr. Browning is a model of intense and punctilious realism. Every nerve of the mind is touched by the patient scalpel, every vein and joint of the subtle and intricate spirit divided and laid bare. A close and dumb soul compelled into speech by mere struggle and stress of things labours in literal translation and accurate agony at the lips of Guido. This scientific veracity which unbuilds and rebuilds the whole structure of spirit, thought by thought and touch by touch, till the final splendour of solution is achieved, and the consummate labour made perfect from key-stone to coping-stone, is so triumphant a thing that on its own ground it can be matched by no poet; to match it we must look back to Balzac. Shelley worked by other rules to another end: with the sculptor's touch rather than the anatomist's. But his figure of Cenci is not the less accurate for its breadth of handling. We might as well consign Manon Lescaut to a place below Emma Bovary, because Prévost wrought out his immortal study with broader lines and fewer colours than Flaubert. A figure may be ideal and yet accurate, realistic and yet untrue, as a fact not thoroughly fathomed may be in effect a falsehood. There is a far stronger cross of the ideal in the realism of