To call any of these plays unintelligible is ridiculous; and nobody who
has ever read them ever did, and why people who have not read them
should abuse them is hard to see. Were society put upon its oath, we
should be surprised to find how many people in high places have not read
'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Timon of Athens'; but they don't go
about saying these plays are unintelligible. Like wise folk, they
pretend to have read them, and say nothing. In Browning's case they are
spared the hypocrisy. No one need pretend to have read 'A Soul's
Tragedy'; and it seems, therefore, inexcusable for any one to assert
that one of the plainest, most pointed and piquant bits of writing in
the language is unintelligible. But surely something more may be
truthfully said of these plays than that they are comprehensible. First
of all, they are _plays_, and not _works_--like the dropsical dramas of
Sir Henry Taylor and Mr. Swinburne. Some of them have stood the ordeal
of actual representation; and though it would be absurd to pretend that
they met with that overwhelming measure of success our critical age has
reserved for such dramatists as the late Lord Lytton, the author of
'Money,' the late Tom Taylor, the author of 'The Overland Route,' the
late Mr. Robertson, the author of 'Caste,' Mr. H. Byron, the author of
'Our Boys,' Mr. Wills, the author of 'Charles I.,' Mr. Burnand, the
author of 'The Colonel,' and Mr. Gilbert, the author of so much that is
great and glorious in our national drama; at all events they proved
themselves able to arrest and retain the attention of very ordinary
audiences. But who can deny dignity and even grandeur to 'Luria,' or
withhold the meed of a melodious tear from 'Mildred Tresham'? What
action of what play is more happily conceived or better rendered than
that of 'Pippa Passes'?--where innocence and its reverse, tender love
and violent passion, are presented with emphasis, and yet blended into a
dramatic unity and a poetic perfection, entitling the author to the very
first place amongst those dramatists of the century who have labored
under the enormous disadvantage of being poets to start with.
Passing from the plays, we are next attracted by a number of splendid
poems, on whose base the structure of Mr. Browning's fame perhaps rests
most surely,--his dramatic pieces; poems which give utterance to the
thoughts and feelings of persons other than himself, or as he puts it
when dedicating a number of them to his wife:--
"Love, you saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead, or fashioned by my fancy,
Enter each and all, and use their service,
Speak from every mouth the speech--a poem;"
or again in 'Sordello':--
"By making speak, myself kept out of view,
The very man as he was wont to do."
At a rough calculation, there must be at least sixty of these pieces.
Let me run over the names of a very few of them. 'Saul,' a poem beloved
by all true women; 'Caliban,' which the men, not unnaturally perhaps,
often prefer. The 'Two Bishops': the sixteenth-century one ordering his
tomb of jasper and basalt in St. Praxed's Church, and his
nineteenth-century successor rolling out his post-prandial _Apologia_.
'My Last Duchess,' the 'Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister,' 'Andrea del
Sarto,' 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' 'Rabbi Ben Ezra,' 'Cleon,' 'A Death in the
Desert,' 'The Italian in England,' and 'The Englishman in Italy.'
It is plain truth to say that no other English poet, living or dead,
Shakespeare excepted, has so heaped up human interest for his readers as
has Robert Browning....
Against these dramatic pieces the charge of unintelligibility fails as
completely as it does against the plays. They are all perfectly
intelligible; but--and here is the rub--they are not easy reading, like
the estimable writings of the late Mrs. Hemans. They require the same
honest attention as it is the fashion to give to a lecture of Professor
Huxley's or a sermon of Canon Liddon's; and this is just what too many
persons will not give to poetry. They
"Love to hear
A soft pulsation in their easy ear;
To turn the page, and let their senses drink
A lay that shall not trouble them to think."
* * * * *
Next to these dramatic pieces come what we may be content to call
simply poems: some lyrical, some narrative. The latter are
straightforward enough, and as a rule full of spirit and humor; but this
is more than can always be said of the lyrical pieces. Now, for the
first time in dealing with this first period, excluding 'Sordello,' we
strike difficulty. The Chinese puzzle comes in. We wonder whether it all
turns on the punctuation. And the awkward thing for Mr. Browning's
reputation is this, that these bewildering poems are for the most part
very short. We say awkward, for it is not more certain that Sarah Gamp
liked her beer drawn mild than it is that your Englishman likes his
poetry cut short; and so, accordingly, it often happens that some
estimable paterfamilias takes up an odd volume of Browning his volatile
son or moonstruck daughter has left lying about, pishes and pshaws! and
then, with an air of much condescension and amazing candor, remarks that
he will give the fellow another chance, and not condemn him unread. So
saying, he opens the book, and carefully selects the very shortest poem
he can find; and in a moment, without sign or signal, note or warning,
the unhappy man is floundering up to his neck in lines like these, which
are the third and final stanza of a poem called 'Another Way of Love':--
"And after, for pastime,
If June be refulgent
With flowers in completeness,
All petals, no prickles,
Delicious as trickles
Of wine poured at mass-time,
And choose One indulgent
To redness and sweetness;
Or if with experience of man and of spider,
She use my June lightning, the strong insect-ridder
To stop the fresh spinning,--why June will consider."
He comes up gasping, and more than ever persuaded that Browning's poetry
is a mass of inconglomerate nonsense, which nobody understands--least of
all members of the Browning Society.
We need be at no pains to find a meaning for everything Mr. Browning has
written. But when all is said and done--when these few freaks of a
crowded brain are thrown overboard to the sharks of verbal criticism
who feed on such things--Mr. Browning and his great poetical achievement
remain behind to be dealt with and accounted for. We do not get rid of
the Laureate by quoting:--
"O darling room, my heart's delight,
Dear room, the apple of my sight,
With thy two couches soft and white
There is no room so exquisite--
No little room so warm and bright
Wherein to read, wherein to write;"
or of Wordsworth by quoting:--
"At this, my boy hung down his head:
He blushed with shame, nor made reply,
And five times to the child I said,
"'Why, Edward? tell me why?'"
or of Keats by remembering that he once addressed a young lady as
follows:--
"O come, Georgiana! the rose is full blown,
The riches of Flora are lavishly strown:
The air is all softness and crystal the streams,
The west is resplendently clothèd in beams."
The strength of a rope may be but the strength of its weakest part; but
poets are to be judged in their happiest hours, and in their
greatest works.
The second period of Mr. Browning's poetry demands a different line of
argument; for it is, in my judgment, folly to deny that he has of late
years written a great deal which makes very difficult reading indeed. No
doubt you may meet people who tell you that they read 'The Ring and the
Book' for the first time without much mental effort; but you will do
well not to believe them. These poems are difficult--they cannot help
being so. What is 'The Ring and the Book'? A huge novel in twenty
thousand lines--told after the method not of Scott but of Balzac; it
tears the hearts out of a dozen characters; it tells the same story from
ten different points of view. It is loaded with detail of every kind and
description: you are let off nothing. As with a schoolboy's life at a
large school, if he is to enjoy it at all, he must fling himself into
it, and care intensely about everything--so the reader of 'The Ring and
the Book' must be interested in everybody and everything, down to the
fact that the eldest daughter of the counsel for the prosecution of
Guido is eight years old on the very day he is writing his speech, and
that he is going to have fried liver and parsley for his supper.
If you are prepared for this, you will have your reward; for the
_style_, though rugged and involved, is throughout, with the exception
of the speeches of counsel, eloquent and at times superb; and as for the
_matter_, if your interest in human nature is keen, curious, almost
professional--if nothing man, woman, or child has been, done, or
suffered, or conceivably can be, do, or suffer, is without interest for
you; if you are fond of analysis, and do not shrink from dissection--you
will prize 'The Ring and the Book' as the surgeon prizes the last great
contribution to comparative anatomy or pathology.
But this sort of work tells upon style. Browning has, I think, fared
better than some writers. To me, at all events, the step from 'A Blot in
the 'Scutcheon' to 'The Ring and the Book' is not so marked as is the
_mauvais pas_ that lies between 'Amos Barton' and 'Daniel Deronda.' But
difficulty is not obscurity. One task is more difficult than another.
The angles at the base of the isosceles triangles are apt to get mixed,
and to confuse us all--man and woman alike. 'Prince Hohenstiel'
something or another is a very difficult poem, not only to pronounce but
to read; but if a poet chooses as his subject Napoleon III.--in whom the
cad, the coward, the idealist, and the sensualist were inextricably
mixed--and purports to make him unbosom himself over a bottle of
Gladstone claret in a tavern at Leicester Square, you cannot expect that
the product should belong to the same class of poetry as Mr. Coventry
Patmore's admirable 'Angel in the House.'
It is the method that is difficult. Take the husband in 'The Ring and
the Book.' Mr. Browning remorselessly hunts him down, tracks him to the
last recesses of his mind, and there bids him stand and deliver. He
describes love, not only broken but breaking; hate in its germ; doubt at
its birth. These are difficult things to do either in poetry or prose,
and people with easy, flowing Addisonian or Tennysonian styles cannot
do them.
I seem to overhear a still, small voice asking, But are they worth
doing? or at all events, is it the province of art to do them? The
question ought not to be asked. It is heretical, being contrary to the
whole direction of the latter half of this century. The chains binding
us to the rocks of realism are faster riveted every day; and the Perseus
who is destined to cut them is, I expect, some mischievous little boy at
a Board-school. But as the question has been asked, I will own that
sometimes, even when deepest in works of this, the now orthodox school,
I have been harassed by distressing doubts whether after all this
enormous labor is not in vain; and wearied by the effort, overloaded by
the detail, bewildered by the argument, and sickened by the pitiless
dissection of character and motive, have been tempted to cry aloud,
quoting--or rather, in the agony of the moment, misquoting--Coleridge:--
"Simplicity--thou better name
Than all the family of Fame."
But this ebullition of feeling is childish and even sinful. We must take
our poets as we do our meals--as they are served up to us. Indeed, you
may, if full of courage, give a cook notice, but not the time-spirit who
makes our poets. We may be sure--to appropriate an idea of the late Sir
James Stephen--that if Robert Browning had lived in the sixteenth
century, he would not have written a poem like 'The Ring and the Book';
and if Edmund Spenser had lived in the nineteenth century he would not
have written a poem like the 'Faerie Queene.'
It is therefore idle to arraign Mr. Browning's later method and style
for possessing difficulties and intricacies which are inherent to it.
The method at all events has an interest of its own, a strength of its
own, a grandeur of its own. If you do not like it you must leave it
alone. You are fond, you say, of romantic poetry; well, then, take down
your Spenser and qualify yourself to join "the small transfigured band"
of those who are able to take their Bible-oaths they have read their
'Faerie Queene' all through. The company, though small, is delightful,
and you will have plenty to talk about without abusing Browning, who
probably knows his Spenser better than you do. Realism will not for ever
dominate the world of letters and art--the fashion of all things passeth
away--but it has already earned a great place: it has written books,
composed poems, painted pictures, all stamped with that "greatness"
which, despite fluctuations, nay, even reversals of taste and opinion,
means immortality.
But against Mr. Browning's later poems it is sometimes alleged that
their meaning is obscure because their grammar is bad. A cynic was once
heard to observe with reference to that noble poem 'The Grammarian's
Funeral,' that it was a pity the talented author had ever since allowed
himself to remain under the delusion that he had not only buried the
grammarian, but his grammar also. It is doubtless true that Mr. Browning
has some provoking ways, and is something too much of a verbal acrobat.
Also, as his witty parodist, the pet poet of six generations of
Cambridge undergraduates, reminds us:--
He loves to dock the smaller parts of speech,
As we curtail the already cur-tailed cur."
It is perhaps permissible to weary a little of his _i_'s and _o_'s, but
we believe we cannot be corrected when we say that Browning is a poet
whose grammar will bear scholastic investigation better than that of
most of Apollo's children.
A word about 'Sordello.' One half of 'Sordello,' and that, with Mr.
Browning's usual ill-luck, the first half, is undoubtedly obscure. It is
as difficult to read as 'Endymion' or the 'Revolt of Islam,' and for the
same reason--the author's lack of experience in the art of composition.
We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase
in his house, which contained fine rooms, but no way of getting into
them. 'Sordello' is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his
twenties, essayed a high thing. For his subject--
"He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years.'"
He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed
generosity, and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never
ceased girding at him because forty-two years ago he published at his
own charges a little book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even
such of them as were then able to read could not understand.
End of Volume IV.