HIGH-BROW SOCIETY
There was another poet who grew up in this unpromising Victorian
England. His father and grandfather were bank officials, and he had a
comfortable income. In his youth he was a dandy, with lemon-colored
gloves and flowing poetical locks; he turned into a leading clubman and
a prominent diner-out. He believed in the Church of England, and in
those social conventions which guide the lives of English gentlemen; he
refused to permit his wife to have anything to do with George Sand’s
Bohemian set, and when she tried to investigate spiritualism he broke up
the show.
And yet he managed to be a great and open-minded poet, and in many ways
a revolutionary force. He had in him a core of sound instinct, a healthy
belief in life and a trust in his own intellect. He fell in love with a
lady poet by the name of Elizabeth Barrett, who was an invalid, kept in
a kind of prison of duty by a tyrannical old father. The poet did not
wait twenty years for her; he persuaded her to slip around the corner
and marry him--a dreadful scandal in the polite world of England.
When I was a lad we did not have the word “high-brow”; its place was
filled by the word “Browning.” Learned ladies and gentlemen had formed a
“Browning Society,” and held solemn meetings in which they tried to find
out what these poems were about. Apparently the task proved a difficult
one, for they are at it still.
Now a poet may be obscure because he has something to say which is very
profound; but there is little of that kind of obscurity in Robert
Browning. When you decipher his message, it turns out to be something
quite obvious, like the immortality of the soul, or the rights of love,
or the fact that human motives are mixed. The cause of the obscurity is
that the poet has invented a perverse way of telling these things; he
likes to play around the outside of a subject, approach it from a dozen
different angles, and set you the task of piecing the thing together
from hints and glimpses.
He is an enormously learned person, and has rummaged in a thousand old
dust-bins of history, and acquired a million details of names and places
and things; he pays you the generally quite undeserved compliment of
assuming that you know all this as well as he does. If he wishes to tell
you about some unknown musician in the court of some obscure Renaissance
ruler, he will begin by talking about a ring this musician used to wear,
and the first dozen lines of the poem will depend upon an ancient Greek
legend concerning the stone that is in the ring. If you don’t know the
legend about the stone in the ring of the musician in the court of the
Renaissance ruler, why then the opening of the poem has no meaning to
you, and the Browning Society might hold a hundred sessions on the
subject without making head or tail of it. Such writing is simply a bad
joke; it is one of the many forms of leisure-class art perversions.
When Browning chooses to write real poetry, he can make it just as
simple and as melodious as Tennyson’s, and far more passionate. He
invented a new and fascinating poetical form, the dramatic lyric, or
dramatic soliloquy. He will take some strange and complicated character,
whom he has picked up in the junk-rooms of the past, and let this
character start to talk and reveal himself to you--not merely the things
he wants you to know, but the things he is trying to hide from you, and
which he lets slip between the lines. Thus we have Mr. Sludge, the
spiritualist medium, who would have converted Mrs. Browning if the poet
had not kicked him out of the house. Thus we have Bishop Blougram, an
elegant and thoroughly modern Catholic prelate, discussing with an
intimate friend over the wine and cigars the delicate question of how he
justifies himself for feeding base superstition to the people, who want
it and can’t get along without it.
Browning knew how to be direct, when his feelings were deeply enough
stirred. He was direct when he dealt with the old poet Wordsworth and
his apostasy from the cause of freedom. Anyone can understand the title,
“The Lost Leader,” and the opening lines
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat.
Likewise, when the Brownings went to Italy and took fire at the struggle
of the Italian people for freedom, everybody understood the poetry they
wrote home; even the Austrian police understood it, for they opened
Browning’s mail, to his furious indignation. Likewise, when Mrs.
Browning died and some persons proposed to write her biography without
her husband’s permission, the husband was able to make known his
opposition. He spoke of “the paws of these blackguards in my bowels,”
and said he would “stop the scamp’s knavery along with his breath.”
For his master-work, to which he devoted his later years, Browning made
a peculiar selection. It was a time when democracy was breaking into the
world of culture, in spite of all the opposition of academic authority.
We shall find poets and novelists in every country persisting in dealing
with vulgar reality, instead of with mythological demigods and romantic
conquerors. Browning went for his story to an old scandal pamphlet he
picked up in a second-hand bookshop of Florence. He might as well have
picked up a scrap of a Hearst newspaper from the gutter, for it dealt
with a sensational murder story, what is called a “crime of passion.” An
elderly merchant in Rome had killed his wife, and at his trial he proved
that she had run away with a young priest. The priest maintained that
the elopement had been a chaste one; he was trying to save the girl from
the cruelty of her husband.
Browning, in telling the story, adopts the ultra-modern device of the
open forum: all sides shall have a hearing. In “The Ring and the Book”
you read nine long narratives of the same events. You hear Half Rome,
which sides with the husband; then you hear the Other Half Rome, which
sides with the wife. You hear the husband, the wife, the young priest,
the lawyers for each side, and the pope, rendering judgment. When you
get through with all this reading you have learned several important
lessons: you have learned that life is a complicated thing, and truth
very difficult to arrive at; you have learned that good and evil live
side by side in the same human heart; you have learned to think for
yourself, and not to believe everything you hear; finally, you have
learned that the most sordid human events offer a potential literary
masterpiece--requiring only a man of genius to penetrate the hearts of
the persons involved!