Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/278

252 THE HOMELINESS OF BROWNING acting on his behalf, sent out to find him the EHxir if they can. Far more a physician than a meta- physician, he delights in discussing the problems of the body, and sees the soul as a superior drug or stimulus, a medicine for the man who encloses it — not greatly different in character from the large restoratives of arts or gems or seas. If renunciation is recommended, it is only that the world may be more perfectly won. It is the conqueror's code, not the prophet's — the voice of the visible world. His judgments are those of the fireside and the club (though a good club, of course, and a bright fireside). You can give some of these earthly songs a heavenly meaning if you will : — Then welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! Be our joys three parts pain ! Strive and hold cheap the strain ; Lean, nor account the pang ; dare, never judge the throe. But though you fill it with mystical wine the cup is still of clay — good, red clay. An icier and exacter philosophy, for instance, would perhaps have judged less cruelly those lovers in The Statue and the Busty still seeing in their frustration a fine achievement, fitly symbolized by the more enduring beauty of the marble and the bronze. The earthly love Sordello urged remains the supreme ideal, rarely even made a symbol of the finer devotions to which it has some- times — has it not ? — to be sacrificed, a devotion that knows nothing of sex. Even from Luria, his supreme renunciant, he never dares demand that sacrifice. It was perhaps the abnegation Browning dreaded his calculations to commend. Perhaps he instinctively falsified the crystal. For it has to be remembered