Page:Poet Lore, volume 1, 1889.djvu/18

2 Some uniform test we must have, some common measure to apply to poets great and small; not, indeed, depending on it alone, but on it as, after all, the truest test for our individual selves. You will find among art critics that the one selects color, the other composition, the third chiaro-oscuro, and so on, as his main guide in judging paintings. So in poetry; some choose rhythm, others simplicity, others moral or intellectual expression, as a standard for estimating a writer's claim to the crown of bays.

I do not undervalue these tests; they are all good in their way; but my test is different from any of them; and it is my intention this evening to see if I cannot persuade you that it is better than any of them, by applying it to the poet whom we meet to study.

I will tell you this, my test, in two words, as the French say. To me, he is the greatest poet who, in measured melody, most powerfully and faithfully portrays the passions of the human heart, and of all passions, that one, universal, intense, all-embracing, which we call love. This is to me the Holy Grail.

And here let me explain under what limitations I use this nebulous word, love. I confine it to that longing which one personality, real or supposed, creates in another. You will see that this excludes all materialisms, as the love of money or of localities; and all abstractions, as the love of justice or of travel. Love is rooted in personality; it is the desire of one individual for and toward another, be the latter divine or human, existent or but dreamed of I am persuaded that not only will you agree with me in this cardinal limitation, but that you will grant that a true poet could conceive the passion in no other sense.

This, then, is the test I shall endeavor to apply to the poems of Browning this evening: do they portray this master-passion in all its phases, in all its powers? He himself has spoken of love as—

Has he fearlessly, faithfully, depicted its hundred facettes, its myriad flashes, whether of quintessential whiteness gleaming up to heaven, or of such sulphurous and smutchy tint as would "stain