Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/141

 and his sentences become congested with suggestion. Hence their stimulating effect,, but it is not a poetical one. The poet's art consists in selecting one particular order of impressions out of the totality which 'inspires' him. To attempt to give the whole is, we will not say inartistic, but extra-artistic. The poetic influence is diffracted and dispersed among the conflicting orders of interest that are aroused. It is much the same effect, to use a homely illustration, as is produced by the attempt to watch Barnum's five performances all at once. Only one art is capable of producing unity amid such complexity; not poetry, but music, was the art in which Browning's method was possible. His whole conception of poetic form was consequently false, and goes far to mar the greatest poetic force England has seen for centuries. Perhaps the secret of the matter was that his imagination was less intense than that of most poets of anything like his power. With them the vivid mental picture enables them to concentrate attention on it, and to inhibit, as the psychologists say, the crowd of surging thoughts that accompany it. That Browning had less of this visual insight than most poets is shown by the comparative infrequency of descriptive passages as well as by a certain lack of minute observation of