Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/275

249 THE HOMELINESS OF BROWNING 249 were his nursery toys. Paracelsus, for instance, was his father's pet hobby. To make rhymes about the Piper of Hamelin was almost an established family game. The more we learn of his life the plainer do we see that his air of dangerous abstruseness is largely due to a kind of domestic economy, to the sensible practice, which he maintained to the end of his life, of using the material that lay nearest to his hand. But these are minor matters after all. Like his later levities — his willingness to guy his critics, to scribble ribaldry on the tabernacle walls of his verse, to out-Browning Browning and to live up to — and beyond — his reputation ; they are just offshoots and illustrations of a yet more profoundly wholesome and philistine quality — his inability, that is, to see poetry as anything but a tool, a useful subordinate to life, to be treated like a servant. He could never be one of those who crush their lives to produce the wine of their art. He would never sell himself for a new song. And this sterling refusal to allow life to approach art with salaams flustered his fellow- philistines in all sorts of curious ways. One of the most interesting relates to the notorious difficulty of Sordello — the " mountain of unintelligibilities." When he wrote it, in his twenties, he was indeed determined to succeed as a poet, but only as part of his programme for making a thorough success of the larger business of life ; and when he took up his pen it was less to learn how to write than to learn how to act and eat and comport himself. In it, and in Paracelsus and Pauline, those companion-studies of " aspiring souls," you see him using poetry — not only to educate his faculties gymnastically, as Sordello did— Fondling, in turn of fancy, verse ; the Art Developing his soul a thousand ways —