It has come to be a matter of course that some new book on Browning
shall appear with every season. Already the number of these manuals has
grown so large that any one interested in critical literature finds he
must devote a whole corner of his library to them--where, the cynical
may add, they are better lodged than in his brain. To name only a few of
the more recent publications: there was Stopford Brooke's volume, which
partitioned the poet's philosophy into convenient compartments, labelled
nature, human life, art, love, etc. Then came Mr. Chesterton, with his
biting paradoxes and his bold justification of Browning's work, not as
it ought to be, but as it is. Professor Dowden followed with what is, on
the whole, the best _vade mecum_ for those who wish to preserve their
enthusiasm with a little salt of common sense; and, latest of all, we
have now a critical study[7] by Prof. C. H. Herford, of the University
of Manchester, which once more unrolls in all its gleaming aspects the
poet's "joy in soul." Two things would seem to be clear from this
succession of commentaries: Browning must need a deal of exegesis, and
he must be a subject of wide curiosity. Now obscurity and popularity do
not commonly go together, and I fail to remember that any of the critics
named has paused long enough in his own admiration to explain just why
Browning has caught the breath of favour; in a word, to answer the
question: Why is Browning popular?
There is, indeed, one response to such a question, so obvious and so
simple that it might well be taken for granted. It would hardly seem
worth while to say that despite his difficulty Browning is esteemed
because he has written great poetry; and in the most primitive and
unequivocal manner this is to a certain extent true. At intervals the
staccato of his lines, like the drilling of a woodpecker, is interrupted
by a burst of pure and liquid music, as if that vigorous and exploring
bird were suddenly gifted with the melodious throat of the lark. It is
not necessary to hunt curiously for examples of this power; they are
fairly frequent and the best known are the most striking. Consider the
first lines that sing themselves in the memory:
O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire--
there needs no cunning exegete to point out the beauty of these. Their
rhythm is of the singing, traditional kind that is familiar to us in all
the true poets of the language; the harmony of the vowel sounds and of
the consonants, the very trick of alliteration, are obvious to the least
critical; yet withal there is that miraculous suggestion in their charm
which may be felt but cannot be converted into a prosaic equivalent.
They stand out from the lines that precede and follow them in _The Ring
and the Book_, as differing not so much in degree as in kind; they are
lyrical, poetical, in the midst of a passage which is neither lyrical
nor, precisely speaking, poetical. Elsewhere the surprise may be on the
lower plane of mere description. So, throughout the peroration of
_Paracelsus_, despite the glory and eloquence of the dying scholar's
vision, one feels continually an alien element which just prevents a
complete acquiescence in their magic, some residue of clogging analysis
which has not quite been subdued to poetry--and then suddenly, as if
some discordant instrument were silenced in an orchestra and unvexed
music floated to the ear, the manner changes, thus:
The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts,
A secret they assemble to discuss
When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare
Like grates of hell.
And, take his works throughout, there is a good deal of this writing
which has the ordinary, direct appeal to the emotions. Yet it is
scattered, accidental so to speak; nor is it any pabulum of the soul as
simple as this which converts the lover of poetry into the Browningite.
Even his common-sense admirers are probably held by something more
recondite than this occasional charm.
You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack;
Him you must watch--he's sure to fall, yet stands!
Our interest 's on the dangerous edge of things--
says Bishop Blougram, and the attraction of Browning to many is just
watching what may be called his acrobatic psychology. Consider this same
_Bishop Blougram's Apology_, in some respects the most characteristic,
as it is certainly not the least prodigious, of his poems. "Over his
wine so smiled and talked his hour Sylvester Blougram"--talked and
smiled to a silent listener concerning the strange mixture of doubt and
faith which lie snugly side by side in the mind of an ecclesiastic who
is at once a hypocrite and a sincere believer in the Church. The mental
attitude of the speaker is subtile enough in itself to be fascinating,
but the real suspense does not lie there. The very balancing of the
priest's argument may at first work a kind of deception, but read more
attentively and it begins to grow clear that no man in the wily bishop's
predicament ever talked in this way over his wine or anywhere else. And
here lies the real piquancy of the situation. His words are something
more than a confession; they are this and at the same time the poet's,
or if you will the bishop's own, comment to himself on that confession.
He who talks is never quite in the privacy of solitude, nor is he ever
quite conscious of his listener, who as a matter of fact is not so much
a person as some half-personified opinion of the world or abstract
notion set against the character of the speaker. And this is Browning's
regular procedure not only in those wonderful dramatic monologues, _Men
and Women_, that form the heart of his work, but in _Paracelsus_, in
_The Ring and the Book_, even in the songs and the formal dramas.
Perhaps the most remarkable and most obvious example of this suspended
psychology is to be found in _The Ring and the Book_. Take the canto in
which Giuseppe Caponsacchi relates to the judges his share in the
tangled story. It is clear that the interest here is not primarily in
the event itself, nor does it lie in that phase of the speaker's
character which would be revealed by his confession before such a court
as he is supposed to confront. The fact is, that Caponsacchi's language
is not such as under the circumstances he could possibly be conceived to
use. As the situation forms itself in my mind, he might be in his cell
awaiting the summons to appear. In that solitude and uncertainty he goes
over in memory the days in Arezzo, when the temptation first came to
him, and once more takes the perilous ride with Pompilia to Rome. He
lives again through the great crisis, dissecting all his motives,
balancing the pros and cons of each step; yet all the time he has in
mind the opinion of the world as personified in the judges he is to
face. The psychology is suspended dexterously between self-examination
and open confession, and the reader who accepts the actual dramatic
situation as suggested by Browning loses the finest and subtlest savour
of the speech. In many places it would be simply preposterous to suppose
we are listening to words really uttered by the priest.
We did go on all night; but at its close
She was troubled, restless, moaned low, talked at whiles
To herself, her brow on quiver with the dream:
Once, wide awake, she menaced, at arms' length
Waved away something--"Never again with you!
My soul is mine, my body is my soul's:
You and I are divided ever more
In soul and body: get you gone!" Then I--
"Why, in my whole life I have never prayed!
Oh, if the God, that only can, would help!
Am I his priest with power to cast out fiends?
Let God arise and all his enemies
Be scattered!" By morn, there was peace, no sigh
Out of the deep sleep--
no, those words were never spoken in the ears of a sceptical, worldly
tribunal; they belong to the most sacred recesses of memory; yet at the
same time that memory is coloured by a consciousness of the world's
clumsy judgment.
It would be exaggeration to say that all Browning's greater poems
proceed in this involved manner, yet the method is so constant as to be
the most significant feature of his work. And it bestows on him the
honour of having created a new genre which follows neither the fashion
of lyric on the one hand nor that of drama or narrative on the other,
but is a curious and illusive hybrid of the two. The passions are not
uttered directly as having validity and meaning in the heart of the
speaker alone, nor are they revealed through action and reaction upon
the emotions of another. His dramas, if read attentively, will be found
really to fall into the same mixed genre as his monologues. And a
comparison of his _Sordello_ with such a poem as Goethe's _Tasso_ (which
is more the dialogue of a narrative poem than a true drama) will show
how far he fails to make a character move visibly amid opposing
circumstances. In both poems we have a contrast of the poetical
temperament with the practical world. In Browning it is difficult to
distinguish the poet's own thought from the words of the hero; the
narrative is in reality a long confession of Sordello to himself who is
conscious of a hostile power without. In Goethe this hostile power
stands out as distinctly as Tasso himself, and they act side by side
each to his own end.
There is even a certain significance in what is perhaps the most
immediately personal poem Browning ever wrote, that _One Word More_
which he appended to his _Men and Women_. Did he himself quite
understand this lament for Raphael's lost sonnets and Dante's
interrupted angel, this desire to find his love a language,
Fit and fair and simple and sufficient--
Using nature that's an art to others,
Not, this one time, art that's turned his nature?
It would seem rather the uneasiness of his own mind when brought face to
face with strong feeling where no escape remains into his oblique mode
of expression. And the man Browning of real life, with his training in a
dissenting Camberwell home and later his somewhat dapper acceptance of
the London social season, accords with such a view of the writer. It is,
too, worthy of note that almost invariably he impressed those who first
met him as being a successful merchant, a banker, a diplomat--anything
but a poet. There was passion enough below the surface, as his outburst
of rage against FitzGerald and other incidents of the kind declare; but
the direct exhibition of it was painful if not grotesque.
Yet in this matter, as in everything that touches Browning's psychology,
it is well to proceed cautiously. Because he approached the emotions
thus obliquely, as it were in a style hybrid between the lyric and the
drama, it does not follow that his work is void of emotion or that he
questioned the validity of human passion. The very contrary is true. I
remember, indeed, once hearing a lady, whose taste was as frank as it
was modern, say that she liked Browning better than Shakespeare because
he was more emotional and less intellectual than the older dramatist.
Her distinction was somewhat confused, but it leads to an important
consideration; I do not know but it points to the very heart of the
question of Browning's popularity. He is not in reality more emotional
than Shakespeare, but his emotion is of a kind more readily felt by the
reader of to-day; nor does he require less use of the intellect, but he
does demand less of that peculiar translation of the intellect from the
particular to the general point of view which is necessary to raise the
reader into what may be called the poetical mood. In one sense Browning
is nearly the most intellectual poet in the language. The action of his
brain was so nimble, his seizure of every associated idea was so quick
and subtile, his elliptical style is so supercilious of the reader's
needs, that often to understand him is like following a long
mathematical demonstration in which many of the intermediate equations
are omitted. And then his very trick of approaching the emotions
indirectly, his suspended psychology as I have called it, requires a
peculiar flexibility of the reader's mind. But in a way these
roughnesses of the shell possess an attraction for the educated public
which has been sated with what lies too accessibly on the surface. They
hold out the flattering promise of an initiation into mysteries not open
to all the world. Our wits have become pretty well sharpened by the
complexities of modern life, and we are ready enough to prove our
analytical powers on any riddle of poetry or economics. And once we have
penetrated to the heart of these enigmas we are quite at our ease. His
emotional content is of a sort that requires no further adjustment; it
demands none of that poetical displacement of the person which is so
uncomfortable to the keen but prosaic intelligence.
And here that tenth Muse, who has been added to the Pantheon for the
guidance of the critical writer, trembles and starts back. She beholds
to the right and the left a quaking bog of abstractions and metaphysical
definitions, whereon if a critic so much as set his foot he is sucked
down into the bottomless mire. She plucks me by the ear and bids me keep
to the strait and beaten path, whispering the self-admonition of one who
was the darling of her sisters: