Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/272

246 246 THE HOMELINESS OF BROWNING mob. The books that baffled a Ruskin and were too tough for a Jowett are everybody's reading to-day — the only feature about them that bewilders us being the report that they ever bewildered any one. We need cribs for Sordello no longer ; Polonius's occu- pation is gone. Miss Lilian Whiting has taken his place. The correct thing now is to run through Pacchiarotto with a smile, lay it down with a laugh, and then ask for something really craggy to break our minds on. Now, there is more in this than the natural desire of us young folk to smile indulgently down upon our parents. It is not just posterity's pertness. Nor is it even due — altogether — to our unavoidable superiority. Nor yet to the way our musical ears have been genuinely quickened and toughened of late by the last crashing multiplex choruses, criss-crossed so variously, of the great late-Victorian choir. The main reason is something so simple — and yet, at the same time, so terribly like gawky paradox — that it is possible to feel shy about naming it. Named, however, it must be — this morning especially : for, being true, it involves a high tribute, and probably the tribute which Browning himself would most have liked to see us bringing. It was just his sweet sanity, then, that made him seem a madcap eccentric ; it was his friendly normality and family likeness to themselves that filled our grand- fathers with expostulating terror. No escaping this conclusion : look where you will, fresh evidence leaps up and locks you in. Take, first, the larger literary aspect. Seen suddenly against the elaborate curtain of nineteenth-century song. Browning does seem to stand out with an abrupt incongruity, like a workman in front of a tapestry. But when we step fifty years or so back from it, the figure not only falls into focus, but becomes a kind of centre-piece and summary, a concentration of all the colours behind : he almost