Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/138

 gambollings of the human intellect, and especially of his own intellect, much of his work reads like so many exercises in forensic dialectics. 'What a grand Q.C. the world has lost!' is our thought, but that is not a thought that a great poet should arouse. The Browningites, with the perverse ingenuity of the uncritical worshipper, lay stress upon this side of the poet's characteristics as if it were his most desirable quality. 'He is so subtle,' say they, and think they have thereby pronounced his greatest praise. Profound a poet should be, but hardly subtle. All art is at root selective; the poet's art consists in selecting out of the mass of thoughts and feelings which a poetic subject arouses in his soul those streams of thought and emotion that are essential to the subject. But Browning too often did not select, but gave, or attempted to give, the whole mass. The outcome has its interest—the interest of the riddle and the puzzle, which have their attraction for the uncultivated or the immature mind. But it is a vital mistake to confuse this interest, as the Browningites do, with the poetic effect which the poet quâ poet alone arrives at. 'How clever I am to have solved that!' is the feeling produced by the solution of the riddle. We have no quarrel with the feeling, but it is vastly different from the