The best criticisms of the poets have usually come from other poets, and
often in the form of verse. Landor wrote of Browning,
“Since Chaucer was alive and hale
No man hath walked along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse.”
This is a thumb-nail sketch of Browning’s personality,—not complete,
but very lifelike. And when we add to it Landor’s prose saying that
“his is the surest foot since Chaucer’s, that has waked the echoes from
_the difficult places_ of poetry and of life” we have a sufficiently
plain clew to the unfolding of Browning’s genius. Unwearying activity,
intense curiosity, variety of expression, and a predominant interest
in the difficult places of poetry and of life,—these were the striking
characteristics of his mind. In his heart a native optimism, an
unconquerable hopefulness, was the ruling factor. But of that I shall
not speak until later, when we come to consider his message. For
the present we are looking simply for the mainspring of his immense
intellectual energy.
When I say that the clew to Browning’s mind is to be found in his
curiosity, I do not mean inquisitiveness, but a very much larger and
nobler quality, for which we have no good word in English,—something
which corresponds with the German _Wissbegier_, as distinguished from
_Neugier_: an ardent desire to know things as they are, to penetrate as
many as possible of the secrets of actual life. This, it seems to me, is
the key to Browning’s intellectual disposition. He puts it into words in
his first poem _Pauline_, where he makes the nameless hero speak of his
life as linked to
“a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all—
This is myself; and I should thus have been
Though gifted lower than the meanest soul.”
_Paracelsus_ is only an expansion of this theme in the biography of a
soul. In _Fra Lippo Lippi_ the painter says:
“God made it all!
For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,
For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line,
The mountain round it and the sky above,
Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
These are the frame to? What’s it all about?
To be passed over, despised? Or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? oh, this last of course!—you say.
But why not do as well as say, paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it?
God’s works—paint any one and count it crime
To let a truth slip.
... This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.”
No poet was ever more interested in life than Browning, and whatever
else may be said of his poetry it must be admitted that it is very
interesting. He touches all sides of human activity and peers into the
secret places of knowledge. He enters into the life of musicians in
_Abt Vogler_, _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_, _A Toccata of Galuppi’s_,
and _Charles Avison_; into the life of painters in _Andrea del Sarto_,
_Pictor Ignotus_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_, _Old Pictures in Florence_,
_Gerard de Lairesse_, _Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper_,
and _Francis Furini_; into the life of scholars in _A Grammarian’s
Funeral_ and _Fust and his Friends_; into the life of politicians in
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ and _George Bubb Dodington_; into the life
of ecclesiastics in the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_, _Bishop
Blougram’s Apology_, _The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s
Church_, and _The Ring and the Book_; and he makes excursions into all
kinds of byways and crooked corners of life in such poems as _Mr. Sludge,
the Medium_, _Porphyria’s Lover_, _Mesmerism_, _Johannes Agricola in
Meditation_, _Pietro of Abano_, _Ned Bratts_, _Jochanan Hakkadosh_, and
so forth.
Merely to read a list of such titles is to have evidence of Browning’s
insatiable curiosity. It is evident also that he has a fondness for
out-of-the-way places. He wants to know, even more than he wants to
enjoy. If Wordsworth is the poet of the common life, Browning is the poet
of the uncommon life. Extraordinary situations and eccentric characters
attract him. Even when he is looking at some familiar scene, at some
commonplace character, his effort is to discover something that shall
prove that it is not familiar, not commonplace,—a singular detail, a
striking feature, a mark of individuality. This gives him more pleasure
than any distant vision of an abstraction or a general law.
“All that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue;
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower hangs furled;
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me, therefore I love it.”
One consequence of this penetrating, personal quality of mind is that
Browning’s pages teem with portraits of men and women, which are like
sculptures and paintings of the Renaissance. They are more individual
than they are typical. There is a peculiarity about each one of them
which almost makes us forget to ask whether they have any general
relation and value. The presentations are so sharp and vivid that their
representative quality is lost.
If Wordsworth is the Millet of poetry, Browning is the Holbein or the
Denner. He never misses the mole, the wrinkle, the twist of the eyebrow,
which makes the face stand out alone, the sudden touch of self-revelation
which individualizes the character. Thus we find in Browning’s poetry few
types of humanity, but plenty of men.
Yet he seldom, if ever, allows us to forget the background of society.
His figures are far more individual than Wordsworth’s, but far less
solitary. Behind each of them we feel the world out of which they
have come and to which they belong. There is a sense of crowded life
surging through his poetry. The city, with all that it means, is not
often completely out of view. “Shelley’s characters,” says a thoughtful
essayist, “are creatures of wave and sky; Wordsworth’s of green English
fields; Browning’s move in the house, the palace, the street.”[13] In
many of them, even when they are soliloquizing, there is a curious
consciousness of opposition, of conflict. They seem to be defending
themselves against unseen adversaries, justifying their course against
the judgment of absent critics. Thus Bishop Blougram while he talks over
the walnuts and the wine to Mr. Gigadibs, the sceptical hack-writer, has
a worldful of religious conservatives and radicals in his eye and makes
his half-cynical, wholly militant, apology for agnostic orthodoxy to
them. The old huntsman, in _The Flight of the Duchess_, is maintaining
the honour of his fugitive mistress against the dried-up, stiff,
conventional society from which she has eloped with the Gypsies. Andrea
del Sarto, looking at the soulless fatal beauty of his Lucrezia, and
meditating on the splendid failure of his art, cries out to Rafael and
Michelangelo and all his compeers to understand and judge him.
Even when Browning writes of romantic love, (one of his two favourite
subjects), he almost always heightens its effect by putting it in relief
against the ignorance, the indifference, the busyness, or the hostility
of the great world. In _Cristina_ and _Evelyn Hope_ half the charm of the
passion lies in the feeling that it means everything to the lover though
no one else in the world may know of its existence. _Porphyria’s Lover_,
in a fit of madness, kills his mistress to keep her from going back to
the world which would divide them. The sweet searching melody of _In a
Gondola_ plays itself athwart a sullen distant accompaniment of Venetian
tyranny and ends with a swift stroke of vengeance from the secret Three.
Take, for an example of Browning’s way of enhancing love by contrast,
that most exquisite and subtle lyric called _Love Among the Ruins_.
“Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half asleep
Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stay or stop
As they crop—
Was the site once of a city great and gay
(So they say)
Of our country’s very capital, its prince
Ages since
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.
And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray
Melt away—
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come.
...
In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force—
Gold of course.
Oh heart! Oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth’s returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.”