Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/84

 own. Nothing can take its place. Ahana and Pharphar will not do instead of the waters of Israel.

Theories something like Wordsworth's have been ex pressed in prose, and sometimes in phrases that seem wel fitted for large advertisements: e. g. 'Cosmic Consciousness,' 'In Tune with the Infinite.' It looks as if Wordsworth's knowledge might be shared in part with people who not only have no poetic utterance, but no decent language at all to say what they mean. Wordsworth himself in his unfinished philosophical poem sought to give as argument what he knew as vision. But what is only known in vision can only be conveyed to other minds by some different art from logic; by language like that of the stars, in momentary points of light; by the language of poetry, where poetry comes nearest to music and is furthest from prose. Which does not mean that Wordsworth's knowledge is simply feeling, but that it is different from the intelligence which argues and explains. Browning, on the other hand, was openly and by his own confession given to analysis. One might quote from Sordello the head-line 'Analyst who turns in due course synthetist', or compare that extraordinary poem Pacchiarotto, which was written as a travesty of Sordello, and flung in the face of the reviewers: 'harsh analytics' is Browning's phrase there for the kind of minute work which many reviewers condemned in Browning.

The analytical mind is the critical mind, and its work is commonly thought to be the opposite of creation, of imaginative art, of poetry. One variety of it is the satire. The satirist, the analyst, expounds his subject instead of making the characters live and speak in drama. Browning knew as well as any one the difference between the two processes, but he had something in him that made him unafraid of the dangers and hindrances of the analytic method. He knew (like Balzac, may we say?) that it was senseless to refuse the analytic method when it was part of his own mind.