Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/1044



HE difficulties experienced by Eugenio in giving advice to young writers, as our neighbor, the Easy Chair, has presented them, disclose obliquely and by implication so many essential truths concerning the art of writing that, for the sake of variety, we are tempted in this Study to turn aside from our usual discussion of matters relating to the production of literature. But this piece of art which the Easy Chair has given us—we would say masterpiece but in the case of so intimate a neighbor—lures us on by its suggestiveness, especially as in matter and manner it is a remarkable exemplification of that kind of indirection which, in the last number of the Study, we said was a growing habit of modern thought and expression. We see how the thing would look put tersely, in the naked terms of an argument, summed up in a paragraph, in which everything would seem to be told, the whole situation disclosed—as indeed it would be in its logical bearings. But the writer has not in view the completeness of a rational explication, which, when it is made, would seem as uninteresting as it would be obviously convincing—everything vital left out; so he puts on his robe of magic and takes his wand in hand, not to be picturesque himself, but as a token that the truth which is to be unfolded, or which is to unfold itself, must be shown in a dramatic masque, must have investment, therefore, something different from the plain clothes of an argument,—must have the tropical quality of life, showing, as it turns, its many phases of light and color and all its implications and involvements. It is a play, for the writer with Hamlet-like intuition divines the power of the play for the purposes of disclosure, and all truth becomes dramatic when, freed from formal definition and straight courses of logic, it is left to disport after its native fashion, thus resuming its proper grace and charm and showing itself at one with beauty. There is but one dramatis persona in the little play, but this Eugenio is in full character, and, by way of telling us that he cannot impart his secret, gives it all away in a brave show—every fine trick of it.

The poem, through the play of fancy and the nobler investment of imagination, renders high service toward this enfranchisement of truth, though a rather solemn service because of its obligatory forms. Poetry in the dramatic form allows a freer movement; the pace is not so severe, except in the classic French drama, bound by the rhymed couplet. Marc Antony's speech over Caesar's dead body, as Shakespeare feigns it, is a remarkable example of the nimble magic which makes the most of a situation by ingenious implication and indirection—following into every nook and recess of Roman sensibility the cruel rent which has been made there, and probing with lambent lightning every dark corner in the hearts of the assassins.

The thought in Browning's poetry has more of free disport than in Tennyson's because Browning's poetry is essentially dramatic even when it is not so in form, evading the smooth, plain course, its path gleaming with innumerable cleavages, which are ridges of light—electric flashes from broken currents—effecting magical surprises in their disclosures of truth. Thus it is that Browning was the forerunner of our great prose-writers in the essay and in fiction, whose vagrant graces and kaleidoscopic tropes seem, at least, to follow naturally in the wake of his wondrous voyage of discovery.

Even in so early prose as that of Plato we are delighted with the imaginative vision and investment of the truth. He chose the form of the Dialogue not so much for its fitness to dialectic discourse as for that æsthetic quality which this form of speech suggests—the charm of the play, which we find so subtle and alluring in his "Phædo." Though he would have expelled the poets from his ideal commonwealth, he had himself both the creative imagination and the temperament of the poet. Holding by preference to the simple Dorian manner; the advocate of stability against the Heraclitean plea for the universal and everlasting "flux" of things; the stern an-