Before entering upon a discussion of Browning's poetry it will be of
interest to note briefly some of the more striking general
characteristics of the English literature contemporary with his work.
From _Pauline_ to _Asolando_ is over half a century, but as a central
and especially significant portion of Browning's career we may take the
three decades from 1841, when he began the _Bells and Pomegranates_
series, to 1869, when _The Ring and the Book_ appeared, for these years
include all of his dramas and most of the poetry on which his fame
rests. A survey of this period at once reveals the predominance of
fiction. Within these years come nearly all the novels of Charles
Dickens, of William Makepeace Thackeray, of Charlotte Brontë, of Wilkie
Collins, of Charles Kingsley, of Mrs. Gaskell, of Anthony Trollope, of
George Macdonald, of Charles Reade, much of the work of Bulwer Lytton,
all the novels of George Eliot except _Middlemarch_ and _Daniel
Deronda_, and the earliest of George Meredith's books. This is a notable
showing. No previous period in English literature had presented anything
like so wide a range in fiction or had brought forward so large a number
of novels of the first rank. These years were equally rich in essays,
including much of Carlyle's work, all of Macaulay's except the early
"Essay on Milton," the religious polemics of Frederick Dennison Maurice
and John Henry Newman, nearly all of Ruskin's discussions of art and
social history, most of Leigh Hunt's literary criticism, and Matthew
Arnold's important early critical essays. This, too, is a notable
showing. But if we turn to the two realms in which Browning excelled,
poetry and drama, we find different conditions. During the central
period of his career, there was, aside from his own work, not a single
important drama published. The theaters were prosperous, but they
brought out only old plays or new ones of inferior rank. In poetry, too,
if we set aside the great names of Tennyson and Browning, the period was
neither rich nor varied. During Browning's first great productive
period, 1841-46, the only other poems of note were Tennyson's two
volumes in 1842. In the nine years from 1846 to _Men and Women_ in 1855,
the chief poems were Tennyson's _The Princess_, _In Memoriam_, and
_Maud_, for though Wordsworth's _Prelude_ was one of the greatest
publications of the mid-century, it was written years before, and can
hardly be counted as belonging to this era. There are, during the
decade, many poems of secondary rank, the most important of them being
Mrs. Browning's _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ and _Aurora Leigh_, but
besides Tennyson and Browning, the only poet of high rank is Matthew
Arnold, whose slender volumes voice the doubts and difficulties of the
age as Browning's poems voice its optimism. In the fourteen years
between _Men and Women_ and _The Ring and the Book_ poets of a new kind
appear; William Morris's _Defense of Guinevere_, _The Life and Death of
Jason_ and _The Earthly Paradise_, and Swinburne's early poems are alien
to the work of Browning in form, subject-matter, and ideals. The fact
is, the more definitely we try to place Browning in his literary
environment the more distinctly do we perceive that he was _sui generis_
among his contemporaries. He combined in striking fashion the intensity
of the poet and the strong social sense of the prose writer.
It seems also wise to glance at the outset at a few of the main
criticisms that have been made on Browning's poetry, for the result of
his marked originality is that no poet of the time has been so greatly
praised and blamed.
A natural first topic is his really famous "obscurity." This obscurity
is variously ascribed to a diction unduly learned, or almost
unintelligibly colloquial, or grotesquely inventive; to figures of
speech drawn from sources too unfamiliar or elaborated to the point of
confusion; to sentences complicated by startling inversions, by double
parentheses, by broken constructions, or by a grammatical structure
defying analysis. It would be quite possible to illustrate each of these
points from Browning's works, and it cannot be denied that his poetry is
sometimes needlessly and inexcusably hard reading. But in reality the
difficulties in his poems come less from stylistic defects than from the
subject matter. What Mr. Chesterton calls Browning's love for "the
holes and corners of history," leads him to the use of much unfamiliar
detail. A large part of the difficulty in reading _Sordello_ arises from
the fact that all Browning's accumulated knowledge of medieval Italy is
there poured forth in an allusive, taken-for-granted manner, till even
the practiced reader turns away perplexed and overwhelmed. So, too, "Old
Pictures in Florence," "Pictor Ignotus," and "Fra Lippo Lippi" assume on
the part of the reader a minute familiarity with early Florentine art.
Occasionally the poems demand an exceptional technical knowledge of some
sort, as in "Abt Vogler," where only a trained musician can fully
understand the terminology. Many even of the minor poems belong to
realms of thought and experience so remote that only by distinct effort
do we transport ourselves thither. It would, for instance, be absurd to
call "Two in the Campagna" difficult in form or phrasing, yet it
narrates an experience intelligible only to those who have loved deeply
but have found in the very heart of that love a baffling sense of
inevitable personal isolation. Sometimes the difficulty arises from the
extreme subtlety of the thought. "Evelyn Hope," the simplest of poems in
expression, presents novel and elusive ideas. Mr. Chesterton ingeniously
ascribes Browning's obscurity to "intellectual humility," to an
assumption that his readers were in possession of a native endowment and
an acquired intellectual wealth on a par with his own; but the defense
seems rather forced. Mrs. Browning gave one of the best brief analyses
of Mr. Browning's obscurity. He had been attacked as being "misty" and
she wrote to him, "You never _are_ misty, not even in 'Sordello'--never
vague. Your graver cuts deep, sharp lines, always--and there is an extra
distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which,
crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to
escape." But the classic defense of Browning from this point of view
may be found in Swinburne's Introduction to Chapman's _Poems_:
"The difficulty found by many in certain of Mr. Browning's works arises
from a quality the very reverse of that which produces obscurity,
properly so-called. Obscurity is the natural product of turbid forces
and confused ideas; of a feeble and clouded or of a vigorous but unfixed
and chaotic intellect.... Now if there is any great quality more
perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect it is his decisive
and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of
perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim.... The very
essence of Mr. Browning's aim and method, as exhibited in the ripest
fruits of his intelligence, is such as implies above all other things
the possession of a quality the very opposite of obscurity--a faculty of
spiritual illumination rapid and intense and subtle as lightning, which
brings to bear upon its object by way of direct and vivid illustration
every symbol and every detail on which its light is flashed in passing."
Browning has himself a word to say on this topic. He wrote to a friend:
"I can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main too hard
for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never
designedly tried to puzzle people as some of my critics have supposed.
On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should
be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man. So,
perhaps, on the whole, I get my deserts, and something over--not a crowd
but a few I value more."
A second charge not infrequently brought against Browning's verse is
that it is harsh, and at times even ugly. This charge, like that of
obscurity, cannot be wholly denied. The harshness results from incorrect
rhymes, from irregular movement of the verse, or from difficult
combinations of vowels and consonants. No reader of Browning's poems can
fail to have been impressed by his intellectual agility in matching odd
rhymes. In dash and originality his rhymes out-rank even those in
Butler's _Hudibras_ and Lowell's _Fable for Critics_. We find in
_Pacchiarotto_, for instance, many rhymes of the gayest, most freakish,
most grotesque character--"monkey, one key," "prelude, hell-hued,"
"stubborn, cub-born," "_was_ hard, hazard," all occur in a single
stanza. An example of exceptional facility in rhyming is found in
"Through the Metidja," where, without repetition of words and without
forcing of the sense thirty-six words rhyme with "ride." It cannot be
denied that this remarkable facility led Browning occasionally into the
use of odd rhymes in poems where no light or comic effect was intended;
but a detailed study of his rhymes[7] shows that the proportion of
incorrect rhymes is really small, that the grotesque rhymes are more
striking than numerous, and that they are usually in places where they
are dramatically appropriate. His use of harsh words and sound-blendings
is also often to be justified on the ground of their appropriateness to
the idea. Compare, for instance, the flowing, easy words, the musical
linking of sounds, in the first stanza of "Love Among the Ruins" with
the harsh words, harshly combined, in the twelfth and thirteenth stanzas
of "Childe Roland." Both effects are artistic because each sort of
combination is in response to the nature of the thought. It is true that
sometimes, perhaps not infrequently, the verse is rugged or uncouth
where the sense does not call for such form, and there are lines that
not only remind us of De Quincey's dictum that certain words should be
"boiled before they are eaten," but which have no metrical flow at all;
they defy any sort of scansion and read like rough prose. But a poet
has a right of appeal to the sum of his manifest excellencies rather
than to his defects, and if we take Browning's best work we find a
harmony of movement superior in musical effect to a more technically
regular meter. In many poems the meter is indissolubly fused with the
pictures, the ideas, the events. Take, for instance, "The Pied Piper of
Hamelin," where the hurry-skurry of the verse is in complete harmony
with the quaint, rapid tale. The hoof-beats of galloping horses is heard
all through "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." The slow
march, the stately chant, are rhythmically present throughout "A
Grammarian's Funeral." In "The Flight of the Duchess" the change from
the rough servitor's narrative to the incantation of the gypsy-queen is
as exquisitely marked in the metrical movement and in the rhymes as it
is in the diction and tone of thought. Many other examples might be
cited. Mr. Brinton, who has made a detailed and competent study of
Browning's verse, gives his final opinion in these words: "In the
volumes of Browning I maintain that we find so many instances of
profound insight into verbal harmonies, such singular strength of poetic
grouping, and such a marvelous grasp of the rhythmic properties of the
English language that we must assign to him a rank second to no English
poet of this century."[8]
A third charge brought against Browning's art is that he makes all his
characters talk "Browningese"; that is, that he endows all of them with
the power to use such words and sentences and thought processes as are
natural to him and to him only. Mr. Stedman in emphasizing this
characteristic of the poet says of _Pippa Passes_: "The usual fault is
present--the characters, whether students, peasants, or soldiers, all
talk like sages; Pippa reasons like a Paracelsus in pantalettes." It is,
of course, obvious at the first glance that there is a lack of
verisimilitude in Pippa's rich and beautiful soliloquies. Certainly no
fourteen-year-old mill girl could so describe a sunrise, or play so
brilliantly with a sunbeam in a water-basin, or outline so cleverly the
stories of the happiest four in Asolo. The same is true of Phene's long
speech to Jules; no untutored girl brought up in degradation, could
present such thoughts in such words. When we analyze Browning's way of
presenting a character, however, we find that the lack of verisimilitude
is usually external and has to do chiefly with expression. Browning
works on the fundamental assumption that he has a poetic right to make
all sorts of people articulate. He lends his mind out in the service of
their thoughts and feelings. He makes people reveal themselves by
putting into words their elusive, dim, tangled, and even unrecognized
motives and hopes and joys and despairs. He sums up in the speeches all
the potentialities of the situation. All the significance latent in the
type of character and environment is somehow heightened and symbolized.
All this is put in his own highly individual diction. Yet it can hardly
be said that he violates poetic realism in the deeper sense, for he
never puts a halo around a situation, never goes counter to its
potentialities. Instead he strikes fire from it. He shows what is
actually in the situation, but at white heat and laid bare to its
center. When this method has once been recognized, discomfort on the
score of lack of verisimilitude practically disappears, and the reader
yields himself to the joy of the rich, subtle, and stimulating analysis.
We may now turn to a consideration of the subject-matter and the main
ideas of Browning's poetry. From whatever point of view we regard his
work, we find that ultimately the emphasis rests on the same great
central fact, the supremacy of his interest in human nature. This
dominating interest is shown, for instance, by a study of his treatment
of physical nature. To be sure, no one can read his poems without
recognizing the truth that his use of natural facts is distinctive in
kind and very stimulating. A mere reference to the pictures of the sky
in _Pippa Passes_, the vivid descriptions of fruits and flowers in "An
Englishman in Italy," the remarkable studies of small animal life in
"Saul" and "Caliban upon Setebos," of birds in "Home-Thoughts, from
Abroad," of insects in the first part of _Paracelsus_ and in many later
poems, suffices to show that in mature life he did not lose the keenness
of observation and interest characteristic of his youth. Yet it is also
evident that his use of nature by way of direct description, or even as
illustrative material, is far less in amount than that of other notable
nineteenth century poets. He cares much less for "the river's line, the
mountains round it and the sky above" than for the "figures of man,
woman, and child these are frame to." Where nature is drawn upon, it is
almost invariably in complete subordination to some human interest, and
its literary form is almost always that of casual mention, background,
or similitude, and the first of these is the most frequent. Furthermore,
nearly all these passages are a mere statement of observed fact without
comment or interpretation. There is one great passage in _Paracelsus_
where the joy of God in the act of creation is depicted; there are
occasional references to the delight of man in the external world; and
now and then, as in "By the Fireside," man and nature are intimately
fused; but such conceptions rarely occur. In Browning's poetry the
boundary lines between man and nature are clearly marked. In
_Paracelsus_ he definitely protests against man's way of reading his own
moods into nature, and of attributing to her his own qualities and
emotions. He also always accounts man, if he has truly entered into his
spiritual heritage, as consciously superior to nature. The troubadour
Eglamour, in _Sordello_, says that man shrinks to naught if matched with
a quiet sea or sky, but Browning calls that Eglamour's "false thought."
To Browning, nature was to be studied, enjoyed, and used, but it was not
as to Keats a realm of enchantment; or as to Wordsworth the realm where
alone the divine and the human could pass the boundaries of sense and
meet; or as to Matthew Arnold a refuge from pain and disillusionment.
Browning regards the world about him more in the sane, unsentimental,
straightforward, intelligible way of Chaucer or of Shakespeare. The
mystical elements in Wordsworth's feeling for nature were foreign to
Browning's mind. An instructive comparison might be made between
Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" and Browning's
"Prologue to Asolando." The poems have the same starting point. Each one
attributes sadness to the poet's old age, and each gives as a cause of
the sadness the inevitable fading of the glory with which all nature was
invested to the eye of his youth. But here the resemblance ends.
Wordsworth believes that the youthful vision was a divine revelation to
be regained when the round of existence should be completed by a return
to his immortal home, and on the memory of that vision he founded his
faith in a future life. But Browning welcomed the loss of the vision.
Objects had been to him "palpably fire-clothed"; but with the loss of
"flame" there was a gain in reality. The vision had enthralled and
subjugated him; but with the sight of "a naked world" he had become
conscious of things as they are, and he rejoiced in a justness of
perception that declared what were to him the two great facts of life,
the power and beauty of God, and the glory of the human soul. On these,
not on nature, he put his stress.
Browning's paramount interest in human nature is further illustrated by
his poems on the various arts. Of music, painting, and sculpture he has
written with the intimate and minute knowledge of a specialist in each
art. He is familiar with implements and materials, with the tricks of
the trade, the talk of the studios; but, after all, the art as an art is
of much less interest to him than is the worker. The process and even
the completed product are in Browning's view important only in so far as
they reveal or affect the artist, the musician, the sculptor, or some
phase of life. In such poems as "Abt Vogler," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea
del Sarto," we are conscious not so much of music and pictures as of the
secret springs of failure, the divine despairs and discontents, the
aspirations, the creative ecstasies, of the men who wrought in these
realms. Andrea del Sarto's art is not the real theme of the poem bearing
his name. It is, rather, his character, of which his art is an
expression. The central fact of the poem is the recognition that a soul
morally impoverished cannot, even with well-nigh perfect technique,
produce great work, while, even with faulty technique, a setting of the
soul to grand issues will secure transcendent meanings. So, too, with
Abt Vogler. His music is not of the greatest, but our concern is with
the musician who, through the completeness of his spiritual absorption
in music, is conducted into a realm of experience beyond that of speech
or even of articulate thought.
Another distinctly human aspect of art interests Browning, and that is
its power to represent and so to recall a vanished civilization. Greek
statues, the devotional pictures of the early Florentines, the work of
the later Italian realists, stand, in "Old Pictures in Florence," as
representatives of the life and thought that produced them. In "A
Toccata of Galuppi's" the music revivifies the superficial gaiety, the
undertone of fear, in the life of eighteenth century Venice. Highly
significant in this connection are the poems in which he traces the
evolution of art. Running through "Old Pictures in Florence" and "Fra
Lippo Lippi" we find an ordered statement of the chief changes in the
ideals of art as Browning saw them. The Greeks, we are told, had
produced in sculpture the most beautiful representations of the human
body. But if their successors had been content merely to admire this
perfect achievement, they would have purchased satisfaction at the price
of their own arrested development. Progress came only when, in the dawn
of Italian art, men turned from Greek perfection, from the supremely
beautiful but limited representations of the human body, to an attempt
to paint the invisible, the spiritual side of man's nature. The work of
these artists was great because it was not imitative and because it
stretched toward an unending and ideal future. But the idealistic and
aspiring temper of early Tuscan art had the defects of its qualities.
Its spiritual ecstasy once conventionalized and reduced to a formula led
to unreality, and, if not to untruth, at least to an unwholesome
ignoring of a part of truth. There was, therefore, an inevitable
reaction to the naturalism described with such verve and gusto by Fra
Lippo Lippi. But this is, after all, social history in terms of art, and
to Browning what has happened in painting is of value chiefly as showing
concretely what has happened in the mind of man.
From the instances already cited it is apparent that Browning's interest
centered, not in abstract or theoretical discussions of human problems,
but in the individuals who face the problems. In this point Browning is
sharply distinguished from his poetic contemporaries as a class. They
felt deeply "all the weary weight of this unintelligible world," so
deeply that while they gave much thought to ideals of social
amelioration, few of them presented individuals with any dramatic
distinctness. Browning stands practically by himself in the nineteenth
century as the poet who gives us both the "doubter and the doubt," who
is able to join with an impressive statement of the hopes and fears of
man, an equally impressive sequence of individual men and women. In this
he harks back to the broad inclusiveness of the Elizabethan dramatists.
In contemporary literature, his nearest congeners are in fiction, not in
poetry.
The great number and variety of Browning's characters can be illustrated
in different ways. We might, for instance, note how many nationalities
are represented. The personages in "Stafford" and the "Cavalier Tunes"
are Englishmen from the time of the Civil War. "Clive" is a true story
of the Indian Empire. We have from Italian life the numerous characters
in _Sordello_, "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Pictor Ignotus," "The Bishop Orders
His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church," "My Last Duchess," _The Ring and the
Book_, "A Grammarian's Funeral," "Up at a Villa--Down in the City," "In
a Gondola," and many more. "Count Gismond" and "Hervé Riel" are French
stories. _Paracelsus_ and "Abt Vogler" are of German origin.
_Balaustion's Adventure_, _Aristophanes' Apology_, "Pheidippides," and
"Echetlos" celebrate Greek thought and adventure. Very important poems
such as "Saul" and "Rabbi Ben Ezra," have to do with Jewish life. And
unlike Shakespeare, who is not concerned with making Julius Cæsar a
Roman or Duke Theseus a Greek, Browning brings to the creation of each
of these widely divergent characters, a detailed knowledge of the
special habits of life and thought of the nation or race concerned. He
represents also many kinds of human interest. We find in his poems
seekers after knowledge such as Paracelsus, who takes all thought and
fact as his domain; or such as the Grammarian, who found Greek particles
too wide a realm; or such as the pedant Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis,
whose learned rubbish cumbers the land. There are likewise those who
grope after the truths of religion from Caliban on his island to the
learned physician Karshish and the highly cultured Cleon; those who have
the full vision from John to Rabbi Ben Ezra; those who juggle with terms
and creeds as does Bishop Blougram; and out and out frauds like Sludge
the Medium. The church is represented by many men dissimilar in
endowments, tastes, spiritual experiences, and aims. There are Italian
prelates of every sort, from the worldly-minded Bishop of St. Praxed's,
occupied in death with vain thoughts of lapis-lazuli and pure Latin, to
the "soldier-saint," Caponsacchi, who saved Pompilia, and the wise old
Pope who pronounced Guido's doom; from the unworthy priest in the
Spanish Cloister to the very human, kindly Pope in "The Bean Feast." And
from all these it is far down the ages to the evangelical parish priest
of _The Inn Album_, that "purblind honest drudge," who, the deeper to
impress his flock, painted heaven dimly but "made hell distinct." There
are many artists, many musicians. There are poets from Aprile in
_Paracelsus_, and the troubadours Eglamour and Sordello, to Keats and
Shelley. The extremes of social life are given. There are the
street-girls in _Pippa Passes_ and there are kings and queens with royal
retinues. There are statesmen, and warriors, and seekers after romantic
adventure. There are haughty aristocrats of cold and cruel natures, and
there are obscure but high-hearted doers of heroic deeds. Browning's
dictum, "Study man, man, whatever the issue," led him into a world wider
than that known by any other poet of his time, and akin, as has been
pointed out, to that of the great writers of fiction. As an observer of
human life he was not unlike his poor poet of Valladolid who, with his
"scrutinizing hat," went about the streets, absorbed in watching all
kinds of people, all sorts of occupations, "scenting the world, looking
it full in the face." He chose to set forth "the wants and ways" of
actual life. He summed up his work in the "Epilogue to Pacchiarotto":
Man's thoughts and loves and hates!
Earth is my vineyard, these grew there:
From grape of the ground I made or marred
My vintage.
It is further apparent that Browning's characters are never merely
types, but must always be reckoned with as individuals. It was his
belief that no two beings were ever made similar in head and heart;
hence, even where there are external similarities the essential elements
are strongly differentiated. Take, for instance, three poems in which
the situations are not unlike. In "My Last Duchess," "The Flight of the
Duchess," and _The Ring and the Book_, we have a portrayal of three men
of high lineage, but cold, egotistic, cruel, who have married very young
and lovely women over whom the custom of the times gives them absolute
power. But there the likeness ends. We cannot for a moment class
together the polished, aesthetic, well-bred aristocrat of the first
poem, the absurd little popinjay of the second, and the "tiger-cat" of
the third. Less strongly, but as clearly are the wives differentiated.
To the innocent gaiety of heart, the bright, sweet friendliness of the
hapless lady in "My Last Duchess" must be added for the lady in "The
Flight of the Duchess" a native force of character which, when roused by
the call of the gypsy-queen, enables her to break the yoke imposed on
her by the Duke and his mother and go forth into a life of adventure,
freedom, and love. The delicate, flower-like Pompilia in _The Ring and
the Book_ has also power to initiate and carry through a plan of escape,
but her incentive is no call to romantic freedom. Her passive endurance
changes to active revolt only when motive and energy are supplied by her
love for her child. Or take Pippa and Phene in _Pippa Passes_, two
beautiful young girls brought up in dangerous and evil surroundings, but
both innately pure. In character and experience they are, however, as
unlike as two girls could be. Phene, undeveloped in mind and heart, the
easily duped agent of a cruel trick, appeals to us by her slow,
incredulous, but eager response to goodness and aspiration, the
tremulous opening of her soul to love. But Pippa, with her observant
love of nature, her gay, sportive, winsome fancies, her imaginative
sympathy with the lives of others, her knowledge of good and evil, her
poise, her bright steadiness of soul, carries us into a different and
much more highly evolved world of thought and feeling. So we might go
through the great assemblage of Browning's characters to find that each
one stands out by himself as a person with his own qualities,
possibilities, and problems.
In all this portrayal of individuals the emphasis is on things of the
mind and heart. In these realms Browning found nothing alien or
uninteresting. From point to point his poetry illustrates what he said
in his comment on _Sordello_, "My stress lay on the incidents in the
development of a human soul; little else is worth study." In all his
poetry environment is of importance only in so far as it is the stuff on
which the soul works. It is "the subtle thing called spirit," it is "the
soul's world" to which he devotes himself.
It is only from a study of Browning's many characters that we may arrive
at a statement of some of the distinguishing features of his philosophy
of life. And any such statements must be made with extreme caution
because of his dramatic method. He utters this caution himself when he
says of his poems, "Their contents are always dramatic in principle, and
so many utterances of so many imaginary people." Yet it is possible, by
taking the general trend and scope of his work, to make justifiable
deductions concerning the dominant ideas in the rich field of his poetry
and drama.
In Browning's philosophy of life, words of especial significance are
"growth" and "progress." Domizia in _Luria_ says:
How inexhaustibly the spirit grows!
One object, she seemed erewhile born to reach
With her whole energies and die content--
So like a wall at the world's edge is stood,
With naught beyond to live for--is that reached?--
Already are new undreamed energies
Outgrowing under, and extending farther
To a new object.
So, too, John in "A Death in the Desert" sums up his belief in the line,