With CHRISTOPHER SMART is an interrogative comment on the strange mental vicissitudes of this mediocre poet, whose one inspired work, “A Song to David,” was produced in a mad-house[126].  Of this “Song” Rossetti has said (I quote the “Athenaeum” of Feb. 19, 1887) in a published letter to Mr. Caine, “This wonderful poem of Smart’s is the only great accomplished poem of the last century.  The unaccomplished ones are Chatterton’s—­of course I mean earlier than Blake or Coleridge, and without reckoning so exceptional a genius as Burns.  A masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and reverberant sound.”  How Mr. Browning was impressed by such a work of genius, springing up from the dead level of the author’s own and his contemporary life, he describes in a simile.

He is exploring a large house.  He goes from room to room, finding everywhere evidence of decent taste and sufficient, but moderate, expenditure:  nothing to repel and nothing to attract him in what he sees.  He suddenly enters the chapel; and here all richness is massed, all fancy is embodied, art of all styles and periods is blended to one perfection.  He passes from it into another suite of rooms, half fearful of fresh surprise; and decent mediocrity, respectable commonplace again meet him on every side.  Thus, it seems to him, was the imagination of Christopher Smart for one moment transfigured by the flames of madness to resume for ever afterwards the prosaic character of its sanity; and he now asks the author of “A Song to David” how one who had thus touched the absolute in art could so decline from it.  He assumes that the madness had but revealed the poet:  whether or not the fiery outbreak was due to force suppressed or to particles of brain substance disturbed.  Why was he after as before silent?

It might be urged in answer that the full glory of that vision did not return—­that the strength and beauty of the universe never came to him again with so direct a message for the eye and ear of his fellow men.  But, Mr. Browning continues, impressions of strength and beauty are only the materials of knowledge.  They contain the lesson of life.  And that lesson is not given in the reiterated vision of what is beautiful, but in the patient conversion into knowledge and motive of such impressions of beauty—­in other words, of strength or power—­as Man’s natural existence affords.  The poet’s privilege, as the poet’s duty, is not merely to impart the pleasure, but to aid the process of instruction.  He only suggests the explanation to disclaim it in Smart’s name.

These arguments are very typical of Mr. Browning’s philosophy of Art:  of his conviction that Art has no mission, its intuitions have no authority, distinct from moral and intellectual truth.  He concludes the little sermon by denouncing that impatience of Fancy which would grasp the end of things before the beginning, and scale the heights of Knowledge, while rejecting Experience, through which, as by a ladder, we scale them step by step.