BROWNING’S ENERGY.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 479, 11 June 1890, Page 3

BROWNING’S ENERGY.

The energy of action in Browning’s work has counted for much in the appeal to his contemporaries. Energy tells at all times, bub in a century remarkable for its vigour, in ceaseless unrest, seeking outlets for its life in every direction, excited by its more constant and direct consciousness of its daily life throughout the world, and also better acquainted with the history of the past, filled with great popular movements and wide-reaching philanthropy and sympathy, a poet who infuses his work with vitality and seoms to prize it for its own sake breathes the air of the times. .It is said that the purest artistic pleasure lies in contemplation ; in action there is pleasure of another kind, more strenuous. A poet who sets forth the energy of life appeals to this latter sensibility, aroused through sympathy with the doing of a deed, rather than to the former, which involves disinterestednessand disengagement of themind. Browning himself in many exculpatory verses sets forth his claim to the virtue of strength ; he is ever praising force for its own sake, in the vein of Carlyle ; he likes to exhibit it in others at its highest pitch. Our own age sympathises withjjthis spirit, and finds it more native to itself than the mood of contemplation, which is the condition of a more ideal art. Browning, however, has reinforced even this powerful attraction. by presenting life, not only with great vital force, but upon the broadest scale. He works in the whole field of history, brings his reading in forgotten books to bear, and crowds the stage with a marvellously diverse gathering of great and obscure men, of artists and musicians, of Jew, Arab, and Greek, of real and imaginary characters; and thus ho has satisfied the intelligent curiosity of his readers, playing on the past of the race’s history, and seeking to reconstruct it. He has dealt with the life of man in this varied way, in all ages, in all moods of the mind, and has added to his observation a mass of reflection which keeps curiosity itself alive and supports it. He is poesibly as much obliged to the intellect of his readers, to their appetite for knowledge, as to their poetical sense, in a large portion of his writings.— ‘ Atlantic Monthly.’