Indeed, the question that arises is no less than the ultimate
distinction between poetry and prose, and "ultimates" may well have an
ugly sound to one who is content if he can comprehend what is concrete
and very near at hand. And, as for that, those who would care to hear
the matter debated in terms of _Idee_ and _Begriff_, _Objektivitaet_ and
_Subjektivitaet_, must already be familiar with those extraordinary
chapters in Schopenhauer wherein philosophy and literature are married
as they have seldom been elsewhere since the days of Plato. And yet
without any such formidable apparatus as that, it is not difficult to
see that the peculiar procedure of Browning's mind offers to the reader
a pleasure different more in kind than in degree from what is commonly
associated with the word poetry. His very manner of approaching the
passions obliquely, his habit of holding his portrayal of character in
suspense between direct exposition and dramatic reaction, tends to keep
the attention riveted on the individual speaker or problem, and prevents
that escape into the larger and more general vision which marks just the
transition from prose to poetry.
It is not always so. Into that cry "O lyric Love" there breaks the note
which from the beginning has made lovers forget themselves in their
song--the note that passes so easily from the lips of Persian Omar to
the mouth of British FitzGerald:
Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
Is it not clear how, in these direct and lyrical expressions, the
passion of the individual is carried up into some region where it is
blended with currents of emotion broader than any one man's loss or
gain? and how, reading these words, we, too, feel that sudden
enlargement of the heart which it is the special office of the poet to
bestow? But it is equally true that Browning's treatment of love, as in
_James Lee's Wife_ and _In a Balcony_, to name the poems nearest at
hand, is for the most part so involved in his peculiar psychological
method that we cannot for a moment forget ourselves in this freer
emotion.
And in his attitude towards nature it is the same thing. I have not read
Schopenhauer for many years, but I remember as if it were yesterday my
sensation of joy as in the course of his argument I came upon these two
lines quoted from Horace:
Nox erat et caelo fulgebat luna sereno
Inter minora sidera.
How perfectly simple the words, and yet it was as if the splendour of
the heavens had broken upon me--rather, in some strange way, within me.
And that, I suppose, is the real function of descriptive poetry--not to
present a detailed scene to the eye, but in its mysterious manner to
sink our sense of individual life in this larger sympathy with the
world. Now and then, no doubt, Browning, too, strikes this universal
note, as, for instance, in those lines from _Paracelsus_ already quoted.
But for the most part, his description, like his lyrical passion, is
adapted with remarkable skill towards individualising still further the
problem or character that he is analysing. Take that famous passage in
_Easter-Day_:
And as I said
This nonsense, throwing back my head
With light complacent laugh, I found
Suddenly all the midnight round
One fire. The dome of heaven had stood
As made up of a multitude
Of handbreadth cloudlets, one vast rack
Of ripples infinite and black,
From sky to sky. Sudden there went,
Like horror and astonishment,
A fierce vindictive scribble of red
Quick flame across, as if one said
(The angry scribe of Judgment), "There--
Burn it!" And straight I was aware
That the whole ribwork round, minute
Cloud touching cloud beyond compute,
Was tinted, each with its own spot
Of burning at the core, till clot
Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire
Over all heaven....
We are far enough from the "Nox erat" of Horace or even the "trunks that
glare like grates of hell"; we are seeing the world with the eye of a
man whose mind is perplexed and whose imagination is narrowed down by
terror to a single question: "How hard it is to be A Christian!"
And nothing, perhaps, confirms this impression of a body of writing
which is neither quite prose nor quite poetry more than the rhythm of
Browning's verse. Lady Burne-Jones in the Memorials of her husband tells
of meeting the poet at Denmark Hill, when some talk went on about the
rate at which the pulse of different people beat. Browning suddenly
leaned toward her, saying, "Do me the honour to feel my pulse"--but to
her surprise there was none to feel. His pulse was, in fact, never
perceptible to touch. The notion may seem fantastic, but, in view of
certain recent investigations of psychology into the relation between
our pulse and our sense of rhythm, I have wondered whether the lack of
any regular systole and diastole in Browning's verse may not rest on a
physical basis. There is undoubtedly a kind of proper motion in his
language, but it is neither the regular rise and fall of verse nor the
more loosely balanced cadences of prose; or, rather, it vacillates from
one movement to the other, in a way which keeps the rhythmically trained
ear in a state of acute tension. But it has at least the interest of
corresponding curiously to the writer's trick of steering between the
elevation of poetry and the analysis of prose. It rounds out completely
our impression of watching the most expert funambulist in English
letters. Nor is there anything strange in this intimate relation between
the content of his writing and the mechanism of his metre. "The purpose
of rhythm," says Mr. Yeats in a striking passage of one of his essays,
"it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation,
the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of
creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us
waking by variety." That is the neo-Celt's mystical way of putting a
truth that all have felt--the fact that the regular sing-song of verse
exerts a species of enchantment on the senses, lulling to sleep the
individual within us and translating our thoughts and emotions into
something significant of the larger experience of mankind.
But I would not leave this aspect of Browning's work without making a
reservation which may seem to some (though wrongly, I think) to
invalidate all that has been said. For it does happen now and again that
he somehow produces the unmistakable exaltation of poetry through the
very exaggeration of his unpoetical method. Nothing could be more
indirect, more oblique, than his way of approaching the climax in
_Cleon_. The ancient Greek poet, writing "from the sprinkled isles, Lily
on lily, that o'erlace the sea," answers certain queries of Protus the
Tyrant. He contrasts the insufficiency of the artistic life with that of
his master, and laments bitterly the vanity of pursuing ideal beauty
when the goal at the end is only death:
It is so horrible,
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy.
............................... But no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!
The poem, one begins to suspect, is a specimen of Browning's peculiar
manner of indirection; in reality, through this monologue, suspended
delicately between self-examination and dramatic confession, he is
focussing in one individual heart the doom of the great civilisation
that is passing away and the splendid triumph of the new. And then
follows the climax, as it were an accidental afterthought:
And for the rest,
I cannot tell thy messenger aright
Where to deliver what he bears of thine
To one called Paulus; we have heard his fame
Indeed, if Christus be not one with him--
_I know not, nor am troubled much to know._
Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O King,
In stooping to inquire of such an one,
As if his answer could impose at all!
_He writeth, doth he? well, and he may write._
Oh, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slaves
Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ;
And (as I gathered from a bystander)
Their doctrine could be held by no sane man.
It is not revoking what has been said to admit that the superb audacity
of the indirection in these underscored lines touches on the sublime;
the individual is involuntarily rapt into communion with the great
currents that sweep through human affairs, and the interest of
psychology is lost in the elevation of poetry. At the same time it ought
to be added that this effect would scarcely have been possible were not
the rhythm and the mechanism of the verse unusually free of Browning's
prosaic mannerism.
It might seem that enough had been said to explain why Browning is
popular. The attitude of the ordinary intelligent reader toward him is,
I presume, easily stated. A good many of Browning's mystifications,
_Sordello_, for one, he simply refuses to bother himself with. _Le jeu_,
he says candidly, _ne vaut pas les chandelles_. Other works he goes
through with some impatience, but with an amount of exhilarating
surprise sufficient to compensate for the annoyances. If he is trained
in literary distinctions, he will be likely to lay down the book with
the exclamation: _C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la poesie!_ And
probably such a distinction will not lessen his admiration; for it
cannot be asserted too often that the reading public to-day is ready to
accede to any legitimate demand on its analytical understanding, but
that it responds sluggishly, or only spasmodically, to that readjustment
of the emotions necessary for the sustained enjoyment of such a poem as
_Paradise Lost_. But I suspect that we have not yet touched the real
heart of the problem. All this does not explain that other phase of
Browning's popularity, which depends upon anything but the common sense
of the average reader; and, least of all, does it account for the
library of books, of which Professor Herford's is the latest example.
There is another public which craves a different food from the mere
display of human nature; it is recruited largely by the women's clubs
and by men who are unwilling or afraid to hold their minds in a state of
self-centred expectancy toward the meaning of a civilisation shot
through by threads of many ages and confused colours; it is kept in a
state of excitation by critics who write lengthily and systematically of
"joy in soul." Now there is a certain philosophy which is in a
particular way adapted to such readers and writers. Its beginnings, no
doubt, are rooted in the naturalism of Rousseau and the eighteenth
century, but the flower of it belongs wholly to our own age. It is the
philosophy whose purest essence may be found distilled in Browning's
magical alembic, and a single drop of it will affect the brain of some
people with a strange giddiness.
And here again I am tempted to abscond behind those blessed words
_Platonische Ideen_ and _Begriffe, universalia ante rem_ and
_universalia post rem_, which offer so convenient an escape from the
difficulty of meaning what one says. It would be so easy with those
counters of German metaphysicians and the schoolmen to explain how it is
that Browning has a philosophy of generalised notions, and yet so often
misses the form of generalisation special to the poet. The fact is his
philosophy is not so much inherent in his writing as imposed on it from
the outside. His theory of love does not expand like Dante's into a
great vision of life wherein symbol and reality are fused together, but
is added as a commentary on the action or situation. And on the other
hand he does not accept the simple and pathetic incompleteness of life
as a humbler poet might, but must try with his reason to reconcile it
with an ideal system:
Over the ball of it,
Peering and prying,
How I see all of it,
Life there, outlying!
Roughness and smoothness,
Shine and defilement,
Grace and uncouthness:
One reconcilement.
Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcely the words; for Browning's
philosophy, when detached, as it may be, from its context, teaches just
the acceptance of life in itself as needing no conversion into something
beyond its own impulsive desires:
Let us not always say,
"Spite of this flesh to-day
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!"
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry, "All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!"
Passion to Shakespeare was the source of tragedy; there is no tragedy,
properly speaking, in Browning, for the reason that passion is to him
essentially good. By sheer bravado of human emotion we justify our
existence, nay--
We have to live alone to set forth well
God's praise.
His notion of "moral strength," as Professor Santayana so forcibly says,
"is a blind and miscellaneous vehemence."
But if all the passions have their own validity, one of them in
particular is the power that moves through all and renders them all
good:
In my own heart love had not been made wise
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's.
It is the power that reaches up from earth to heaven, and the divine
nature is no more than a higher, more vehement manifestation of its
energy:
For the loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless god.
And in the closing vision of _Saul_ this thought of the identity of
man's love and God's love is uttered by David in a kind of delirious
ecstasy:
'T is the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me,
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!
But there is no need to multiply quotations. The point is that in all
Browning's rhapsody there is nowhere a hint of any break between the
lower and the higher nature of man, or between the human and the
celestial character. Not that his philosophy is pantheistic, for it is
Hebraic in its vivid sense of God's distinct personality; but that man's
love is itself divine, only lesser in degree. There is nothing that
corresponds to the tremendous words of Beatrice to Dante when he meets
her face to face in the Terrestrial Paradise:
Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice.
Come degnasti d' accedere al monte?
Non sapei to the qui e l'uom felice?
(Behold me well: lo, Beatrice am I.
And thou, how daredst thou to this mount draw nigh?
Knew'st thou not here was man's felicity?)--
nothing that corresponds to the "scot of penitence," the tears, and the
plunge into the river of Lethe before the new, transcendent love begins.
Indeed, the point of the matter is not that Browning magnifies human
love in its own sphere of beauty, but that he speaks of it with the
voice of a prophet of spiritual things and proclaims it as a complete
doctrine of salvation. Often, as I read the books on Browning's gospel
of human passion, my mind recurs to that scene in the Gospel of St.
John, wherein it is told how a certain Nicodemus of the Pharisees came
to Jesus by night and was puzzled by the hard saying: "Except a man be
born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." There is no lack of
confessions from that day to this of men to whom it has seemed that they
were born again, and always, I believe, the new birth, like the birth of
the body, was consummated with wailing and anguish, and afterwards the
great peace. This is a mystery into which it is no business of mine to
enter, but with the singularly uniform record of these confessions in my
memory, I cannot but wonder at the light message of the new prophet: "If
you desire faith--then you've faith enough," and "For God is glorified
in man." I am even sceptical enough to believe that the vaunted
conclusion of _Fifine at the Fair_, "I end with--Love is all and Death
is naught," sounds like the wisdom of a schoolgirl. There is an element
in Browning's popularity which springs from those readers who are
content to look upon the world as it is; they feel the power of his
lyric song when at rare intervals it flows in pure and untroubled grace,
and they enjoy the intellectual legerdemain of his suspended psychology.
But there is another element in that popularity (and this, unhappily, is
the inspiration of the clubs and of the formulating critics) which is
concerned too much with this flattering substitute for spirituality.
Undoubtedly, a good deal of restiveness exists under what is called the
materialism of modern life, and many are looking in this way and that
for an escape into the purer joy which they hear has passed from the
world. It used to be believed that Calderon was a bearer of the
message, Calderon who expressed the doctrine of the saints and the
poets:
Pues el delito mayor
Del hombre es haber nacido--
(since the greatest transgression of man is to have been born). It was
believed that the spiritual life was bought with a price, and that the
desires of this world must first suffer permutation into something not
themselves. I am not holding a brief for that austere doctrine; I am not
even sure that I quite understand it, although it is written at large in
many books. But I do know that those who think they have found its
equivalent in the poetry of Browning are misled by wandering and futile
lights. The secret of his more esoteric fame is just this, that he
dresses a worldly and easy philosophy in the forms of spiritual faith
and so deceives the troubled seekers after the higher life.
It is not pleasant to be convicted of throwing stones at the prophets,
as I shall appear to many to have done. My only consolation is that, if
the prophet is a true teacher, these stones of the casual passer-by
merely raise a more conspicuous monument to his honour; but if he turns
out in the end to be a false prophet (as I believe Browning to have
been)--why, then, let his disciples look to it.