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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF BROWNING
by
ARTHUR SYMONS
New Edition Revised and Enlarged
First Edition, 1906. Reprinted, 1916
London, Paris and Toronto J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
10-13 Bedford Street, W.C. 1916
_" ... Browning, a great poet, a very great poet indeed, as
the world will have to agree with us in thinking."_--LANDOR.
TO
GEORGE MEREDITH
NOVELIST AND POET
THIS LITTLE BOOK ON AN ILLUSTRIOUS CONTEMPORARY
IS WITH DEEP RESPECT AND ADMIRATION
INSCRIBED.
PREFACE
This _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, which is now reprinted in
a new form, revised throughout, and with everything relating to facts
carefully brought up to date, has been for many years out of print. I
wrote it as an act of homage to the poet whom I had worshipped from my
boyhood; I meant it to be, in almost his own words, used of Shelley,
some approach to "the signal service it was the dream of my boyhood to
render to his fame and memory."
It was sufficiently rewarded by three things: first, by the generous
praise of Walter Pater, in the _Guardian_, which led to the beginning of
my friendship with him; then, by a single sentence from George Meredith,
"You have done knightly service to a brave leader"; lastly, by a letter
from Browning himself, in which he said: "How can I manage even to
thank--much more praise--what, in its generosity of appreciation, makes
the poorest recognition 'come too near the praising of myself'?"
I repeat these things now, because they seem to justify me in dragging
back into sight a book written when I was very young, and, as I am only
too conscious, lacking in many of the qualities which I have since
acquired or developed. But, on going over it, I have found, for the most
part, what seems to me a sound foundation, though little enough may be
built on that foundation. I have revised many sentences, and a few
opinions; but, while conscious that I should approach the whole subject
now in a different way, I have found surprisingly few occasions for any
fundamental or serious change of view. I am conscious how much I owed,
at that time, to the most helpful and judicious friend whom I could
possibly have had at my elbow, Dykes Campbell. There are few pages of my
manuscript which he did not read and criticise, and not a page of my
proofs which he did not labour over as if it had been his own. He forced
me to learn accuracy, he cut out my worst extravagances, he kept me
sternly to my task. It was in writing this book under his encouragement
and correction that I began to learn the first elements of literary
criticism.
This new edition, then, of my book is new and yet the same. I have
altered everything that seemed to require altering, and I have made the
style a little more equable; but I have not, I hope, broken anywhere
into a new key, or added any sort of decoration not in keeping with the
original plainness of the stuff. When Pater said: "His book is,
according to his intention, before all things a useful one," he
expressed my wish in the matter; and also when he said: "His aim is to
point his readers to the best, the indisputable, rather than to the
dubious portions of his author's work." In the letter from which I have
quoted, Browning said: "It does indeed strike me as wonderful that you
should have given such patient attention to all those poems, and (if I
dare say further) so thoroughly entered into--at any rate--the spirit in
which they were written and the purpose they hoped to serve." If
Browning really thought that, my purpose, certainly, had been
accomplished.
_April 1906_.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
I have ever held that the rod with which popular fancy invests criticism
is properly the rod of divination: a hazel-switch for the discovery of
buried treasure, not a birch-twig for the castigation of offenders. It
has therefore been my aim in the following pages to direct attention to
the best, not to forage for the worst--the small faults which acquire
prominence only by isolation--of the poet with whose writings I am
concerned. I wish also to give information, more or less detailed, about
each of Mr. Browning's works; information sufficient to the purpose I
have in view, which is to induce those who have hitherto deprived
themselves of a stimulating pleasure to deprive themselves of it no
longer. Further, my aim is in no sense controversial. In a book whose
sole purpose is to serve as an introduction to the study of a single one
of our contemporary poets, I have consciously and carefully refrained
from instituting comparisons--which I deprecate as, to say the least,
unnecessary--between the poet in question and any of the other eminent
poets in whose time we have the honour of living.
I have to thank Mr. Browning for permission to reprint the interesting
and now almost inaccessible prefaces to some of his earlier works, which
will be found in Appendix II. I have also to thank Dr. Furnivall for
permission to make use of his _Browning Bibliography_, and for other
kind help. I wish to acknowledge my obligation to Mrs. Orr's _Handbook
to Robert Browning's Works_, and to some of the Browning Society's
papers, for helpful information and welcome light. Finally, I would
tender my especial and grateful thanks to Mr. J. Dykes Campbell, who has
given me much kindly assistance.
_Sept. 15, 1886_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 1
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POEMS 33
APPENDIX:
I. A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BROWNING 241
II. REPRINT OF DISCARDED PREFACES TO THE FIRST
EDITIONS OF SOME OF BROWNING'S WORKS 255
INDEX TO POEMS 261
ROBERT BROWNING
BORN MAY 7, 1812.
DIED DECEMBER 12, 1889.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF BROWNING
The first and perhaps the final impression we receive from the work of
Robert Browning is that of a great nature, an immense personality. The
poet in him is made up of many men. He is dramatist, humorist, lyrist,
painter, musician, philosopher and scholar, each in full measure, and he
includes and dominates them all. In richness of nature, in scope and
penetration of mind and vision, in energy of passion and emotion, he is
probably second among English poets to Shakespeare alone. In art, in the
power or the patience of working his native ore, he is surpassed by
many; but few have ever held so rich a mine in fee. So large, indeed,
appear to be his natural endowments, that we cannot feel as if the whole
vast extent of his work has come near to exhausting them.
As it is, he has written more than any other English poet with the
exception of Shakespeare, and he comes very near the gigantic total of
Shakespeare. Mass of work is of course in itself worth nothing without
due quality; but there is no surer test nor any more fortunate
concomitant of greatness than the union of the two. The highest genius
is splendidly spendthrift; it is only the second order that needs to be
niggardly. Browning's works are not a mere collection of poems, they are
a literature. And his literature is the richest of modern times. If
"the best poetry is that which reproduces the most of life," his place
is among the great poets of the world. In the vast extent of his work he
has dealt with or touched on nearly every phase and feature of humanity,
and his scope is bounded only by the soul's limits and the last reaches
of life. But of all "Poetical Works," small or great, his is the most
consistent in its unity. The manner has varied not a little, the
comparative worth of individual poems is widely different, but from the
first word to the last the attitude is the same, the outlook on life the
same, the conception of God and man, of the world and nature, always the
same. This unity, though it may be deduced from, or at least
accommodated to, a system of philosophical thought, is much more the
outcome of a natural and inevitable bent. No great poet ever constructed
his poems upon a theory, but a theory may often be very legitimately
discovered in them. Browning, in his essay on Shelley, divides all poets
into two classes, subjective and objective, the Seer and the Maker. His
own genius includes a large measure of them both; for it is equally
strong on the dramatic and the metaphysical side. There are for him but
two realities; and but two subjects, Life and Thought. On these are
expended all his imagination and all his intellect, more consistently
and in a higher degree than can be said of any English poet since the
age of Elizabeth. Life and thought, the dramatic and the metaphysical,
are not considered apart, but woven into one seamless tissue; and in
regard to both he has one point of view and one manner of treatment. It
is this that causes the unity which subsists throughout his work; and it
is this, too, which distinguishes him among poets, and makes that
originality by virtue of which he has been described as the most
striking figure in our poetic literature.
Most poets endeavour to sink the individual in the universal; it is
Browning's special distinction that when he is most universal he is most
individual. As a thinker he conceives of humanity not as an aggregate,
but as a collection of units. Most thinkers write and speak of man;
Browning of men. With man as a species, with man as a society, he does
not concern himself, but with individual man and man. Every man is for
him an epitome of the universe, a centre of creation. Life exists for
each as completely and separately as if he were the only inhabitant of
our planet. In the religious sense this is the familiar Christian view;
but Browning, while accepting, does not confine himself to, the
religious sense. He conceives of each man as placed on the earth with a
purpose of probation. Life is given him as a test of his quality; he is
exposed to the chances and changes of existence, to the opposition and
entanglement of circumstances, to evil, to doubt, to the influence of
his fellow-men, and to the conflicting powers of his own soul; and he
succeeds or fails, toward God, or as regards his real end and aim,
according as he is true or false to his better nature, his conception of
right. He is not to be judged by the vulgar standards of worldly success
or unsuccess; not even by his actions, good or bad as they may seem to
us, for action can never fully translate the thought or motive which lay
at its root; success or unsuccess, the prime and final fact in life,
lies between his soul and God. The poet, in Browning's view of him, is
God's witness, and must see and speak for God. He must therefore
conceive of each individual separately and distinctively, and he must
see how each soul conceives of itself.
It is here that Browning parts company most decisively with all other
poets who concern themselves exclusively with life, dramatic poets, as
we call them; so that it seems almost necessary to invent some new term
to define precisely his special attitude. And hence it is that in his
drama thought plays comparatively so large, and action comparatively so
small, a part; hence, that action is valued only in so far as it reveals
thought or motive, not for its own sake, as the crown and flower of
these.
"To the motive, the endeavour, the heart's self
His quick sense looks: he crowns and calls aright
The soul o' the purpose, ere 'tis shaped as act,
Takes flesh i' the world, and clothes itself a king."[1]
For his endeavour is not to set men in action for the pleasure of seeing
them move; but to see and show, in their action and inaction alike, the
real impulses of their being: to see how each soul conceives of itself.
This individuality of presentment is carried out equally in the domain
of life and of thought; as each man lives, so he thinks and perceives,
so he apprehends God and truth, for himself only. It is evident that
this special standpoint will give not only a unity but an originality to
the work of which it may be called the root; equally evident that it
will demand a special method and a special instrument.
The dramatic poet, in the ordinary sense, in the sense in which we apply
it to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, aims at showing, by means of
action, the development of character as it manifests itself to the world
in deeds. His study is character, but it is character in action,
considered only in connection with a particular grouping of events, and
only so far as it produces or operates upon these. The processes are
concealed from us, we see the result. In the very highest realisations
of this dramatic power, and always in intention, we are presented with a
perfect picture, in which every actor lives, and every word is audible;
perfect, complete in itself, without explanation, without comment; a
dogma incarnate, which we must accept as it is given us, and explain and
illustrate for ourselves. If we wish to know what this character or that
thought or felt in his very soul, we may perhaps have data from which to
construct a more or less probable hypothesis; but that is all. We are
told nothing, we care to know nothing of what is going on in the
thought; of the infinitely subtle meshes of motive or emotion which will
perhaps find no direct outcome in speech, no direct manifestation in
action, but by which the soul's life in reality subsists. This is not
the intention: it is a spectacle of life we are beholding; and life is
action.
But is there no other sense in which a poet may be dramatic, besides
this sense of the acting drama? no new form possible, which
"Peradventure may outgrow,
The simulation of the painted scene,
Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume,
And take for a nobler stage the soul itself,
In shifting fancies and celestial lights,
With all its grand orchestral silences,
To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds."[2]
This new form of drama is the drama as we see it in Browning, a drama
of the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul. Instead of a grouping
of characters which shall act on one another to produce a certain result
in action, we have a grouping of events useful or important only as they
influence the character or the mind. This is very clearly explained in
the original Advertisement to _Paracelsus_, where Browning tells us that
his poem is an attempt
"to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim
it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the
passions, by the operation of persons and events; and that,
instead of having recourse to an external machinery of
incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to
produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the
mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the
agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be
generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate
throughout, if not altogether excluded."
In this way, by making the soul the centre of action, he is enabled
(thinking himself into it, as all dramatists must do) to bring out its
characteristics, to reveal its very nature. Suppose him to be attracted
by some particular soul or by some particular act. The problem occupies
him: the more abstruse and entangled the more attractive to him it is;
he winds his way into the heart of it, or, we might better say, he picks
to pieces the machinery. Presently he begins to reconstruct, before our
eyes, the whole series of events, the whole substance of the soul, but,
so to speak, turned inside out. We watch the workings of the mental
machinery as it is slowly disclosed before us; we note the specialties
of construction, its individual character, the interaction of parts,
every secret of it. We thus come to see that, considered from the
proper point of view, everything is clear, regular and explicable in
however entangled an action, however obscure a soul; we see that what is
external is perfectly natural when we can view its evolution from what
is internal. It must not be supposed that Browning explains this to us
in the manner of an anatomical lecturer; he makes every character
explain itself by its own speech, and very often by speech that is or
seems false and sophistical, so only that it is personal and individual,
and explains, perhaps by exposing, its speaker.
This, then, is Browning's consistent mental attitude, and his special
method. But he has also a special instrument, the monologue. The drama
of action demands a concurrence of several distinct personalities,
influencing one another rapidly by word or deed, so as to bring about
the catastrophe; hence the propriety of the dialogue. But the
introspective drama, in which the design is to represent and reveal the
individual, requires a concentration of interest, a focussing of light
on one point, to the exclusion or subordination of surroundings; hence
the propriety of the monologue, in which a single speaker or thinker can
consciously or unconsciously exhibit his own soul. This form of
monologue, learnt perhaps from Landor, who used it with little
psychological intention, appears in almost the earliest of Browning's
poems, and he has developed it more skilfully and employed it more
consistently than any other writer. Even in works like _Sordello_ and
_Red Cotton Night-cap Country_, which are thrown into the narrative
form, many of the finest and most characteristic parts are in monologue;
and _The Inn Album_ is a series of slightly-linked dialogues which are
only monologues in disguise. Nearly all the lyrics, romances, idyls,
nearly all the miscellaneous poems, long and short, are monologues. And
even in the dramas, as will be seen later, there is visible a growing
tendency toward the monologue with its mental and individual, in place
of the dialogue with its active and outer interest.
Browning's aim, then, being to see how each soul conceives of itself,
and to exhibit its essential qualities, yet without complication of
incident, it is his frequent practice to reveal the soul to itself by
the application of a sudden test, which shall condense the long trial of
years into a single moment, and so "flash the truth out by one blow." To
this practice we owe his most vivid and notable work. "The poetry of
Robert Browning," says Pater, "is pre-eminently the poetry of
situations." He selects a character, no matter how uninteresting in
itself, and places it in some situation where its vital essence may
become apparent, in some crisis of conflict or opportunity. The choice
of good or evil is open to it, and in perhaps a single moment its fate
will be decided. When a soul plays dice with the devil there is only a
second in which to win or lose; but the second may be worth an eternity.
These moments of intense significance, these tremendous spiritual
crises, are struck out in Browning's poetry with a clearness and
sharpness of outline that no other poet has achieved. "To realise such a
situation, to define in a chill and empty atmosphere the focus where
rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the
artist has to employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine
upon thought and passion a thousand fold.... Yet, in spite of this
intricacy, the poem has the clear ring of a central motive; we receive
from it the impression of one imaginative tone, of a single creative
act."[3]
It is as a result of this purpose, in consonance with this practice,
that we get in Browning's works so large a number of distinct human
types, and so great a variety of surroundings in which they are placed.
Only in Shakespeare can we find anything like the same variety of
distinct human characters, vital creations endowed with thoughtful life;
and not even, perhaps, in Shakespeare, such novelty and variety of
_milieu_. There is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern
world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and
instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge. Passing
by the legendary and remote ages and civilisations of East and West, he
has painted the first dawn of the modern spirit in the Athens of
Socrates and Euripides, revealed the whole temper and tendency of the
twilight age between Paganism and Christianity, and recorded the last
utterance of the last apostle of the now-conquering creed; he has
distilled the very essence of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the
very essence of the modern world. The men and women who live and move in
that new world of his creation are as varied as life itself; they are
kings and beggars, saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters,
musicians, priests and popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls,
princesses, dancers with the wicked witchery of the daughter of
Herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls
and malevolent greybeards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity,
tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics,
scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of
low estate, men and women as multiform as nature or society has made
them. He has found and studied humanity, not only in English towns and
villages, in the glare of gaslight and under the open sky, but on the
Roman Campagna, in Venetian gondolas, in Florentine streets, on the
Boulevards of Paris and in the Prado of Madrid, in the snow-bound
forests of Russia, beneath the palms of Persia and upon Egyptian sands,
on the coasts of Normandy and the salt plains of Brittany, among Druses
and Arabs and Syrians, in brand-new Boston and amidst the ruins of
Thebes. But this infinite variety has little in it of mere historic or
social curiosity. I do not think Browning has ever set himself the task
of recording the legend of the ages, though to some extent he has done
it. The instinct of the poet seizes on a type of character, the eye of
the painter perceives the shades and shapes of line and colour and form
required to give it picturesque prominence, and the learning of the
scholar then sets up a fragment of the broken past, or re-fashions a
portion of the living present, as an appropriate and harmonious scene or
background. The statue is never dwarfed by the pedestal.
The characteristic of which I have been speaking (the persistent care
for the individual and personal, as distinguished from the universal and
general) while it is the secret of his finest achievements, and rightly
his special charm, is of all things the most alien to the ordinary
conceptions of poetry, and the usual preferences for it. The popularity
of rare and delicate poetry, which condescends to no cheap bids for it,
poetry like Tennyson's, for instance, is largely due to the very quality
which Browning's finest characteristic excludes from his. Compare,
altogether apart from the worth and workmanship, one of Tennyson's with
one of Browning's best lyrics. The perfection of the former consists in
the exquisite way in which it expresses feelings common to all. The
perfection of the latter consists in the intensity of its expression of
a single moment of passion or emotion, one peculiar to a single
personality, and to that personality only at a single moment. To
appreciate it we must enter keenly and instantaneously into the
imaginary character at its imagined crisis; and, even when this is
easiest to do, it is evident that there must be more difficulty in doing
it (for it requires a certain exertion) than in merely letting the mind
lie at rest, accepting and absorbing. And the difficulty is increased
when we remember another of Browning's characteristics, closely allied
to this, and, indeed, resulting from it: his preference for the unusual
and complex rather than the simple and ordinary. People prefer to read
about characters which they can understand at first sight, with which
they can easily sympathise. A dramatist, who insists on presenting them
with complex and exceptional characters, studies of the good in evil and
the evil in good, representations of states of mind which are not
habitual to them, or which they find it difficult to realise in certain
lights, can never obtain so quick or so hearty a recognition as one who
deals with great actions, large and clear characters, familiar motives.
When the head has to be exercised before the heart, there is chilling of
sympathy.
Allied to Browning's originality in temper, topic, treatment and form,
is his originality in style; an originality which is again due, in large
measure, to the same prevailing cause. His style is vital, his verse
moves to the throbbing of an inner organism, not to the pulsations of a
machine. He prefers, as indeed all true poets do, but more exclusively
than any other poet, sense to sound, thought to expression. In his
desire of condensation he employs as few words as are consistent with
the right expression of his thought; he rejects superfluous adjectives,
and all stop-gap words. He refuses to use words for words' sake: he
declines to interrupt conversation with a display of fireworks: and as a
result it will be found that his finest effects of versification
correspond with his highest achievements in imagination and passion. As
a dramatic poet he is obliged to modulate and moderate, sometimes almost
to vulgarise, his style and diction for the proper expression of some
particular character, in whose mouth exquisite turns of phrase and
delicate felicities of rhythm would be inappropriate. He will not _let
himself go_ in the way of easy floridity, as writers may whose themes
are more "ideal." And where many writers would attempt merely to
simplify and sweeten verse, he endeavours to give it fuller
expressiveness, to give it strength and newness. It follows that
Browning's verse is not so uniformly melodious as that of many other
poets. Where it seems to him necessary to sacrifice one of the two,
sense or sound, he has never hesitated which to sacrifice. But while he
has certainly failed in some of his works, or in some passages of them,
to preserve the due balance, while he has at times undoubtedly
sacrificed sound too liberally to the claims of sense, the extent of
this sacrifice is very much less than is generally supposed. The notion,
only too general, expressed by such a phrase as "his habitual rudeness
of versification" (used by no unfavourable _Edinburgh_ reviewer in 1869)
is one of the most singularly erroneous perversions of popular prejudice
that have ever called for correction at the hands of serious criticism.
Browning is far indeed from paying no attention, or little, to metre and
versification. Except in some of his later blank verse, and in a few
other cases, his very errors are just as often the result of hazardous
experiments as of carelessness and inattention. In one very important
matter, that of rhyme, he is perhaps the greatest master in our
language; in single and double, in simple and grotesque alike, his
rhymes are as accurate as they are ingenious. His lyrical poems contain
more structural varieties of form than those of any preceding English
poet, not excepting Shelley. His blank verse at its best is more vital
in quality than that of any modern poet. And both in rhymed and in blank
verse he has written passages which for almost every technical quality
are hardly to be surpassed in the language.
That Browning's style should have changed in the course of years is only
natural, and its development has been in the natural (if not always in
the best) direction. "The later manner of a painter or poet," says
F.W.H. Myers in his essay on Virgil, "generally differs from his earlier
manner in much the same way. We observe in him a certain impatience of
the rules which have guided him to excellence, a certain desire to use
his materials more freely, to obtain bolder and newer effects." These
tendencies and others of the kind are specially manifest in Browning, as
they must be in a writer of strongly marked originality; for originality
always strengthens with use, and often hardens to eccentricity, as we
may observe in the somewhat parallel case of Carlyle. We find as a
consequence that a great deal of his later poetry is much less
attractive and much less artistically perfect than his earlier work,
while just those failings to which his principles of poetic art rendered
him liable become more and more frequent and prominent. But, good or
bad, it has grown with his growth, and we can conceive him saying, with
Aurora Leigh,
"So life, in deepening with me, deepened all
The course I took, the work I did. Indeed
The academic law convinced of sin;
The critics cried out on the falling off,
Regretting the first manner. But I felt
My heart's life throbbing in my verse to show
It lived, it also--certes incomplete,
Disordered with all Adam in the blood,
But even its very tumours, warts and wens,
Still organised by and implying life."[4]
It has been, as a rule, strangely overlooked, though it is a matter of
the first moment, that Browning's poems are in the most precise sense
_works of art_, and this in a very high degree, positive and relative,
if we understand by a "work of art" a poem which attains its end and
fulfils its purpose completely, and which has a worthy end and plain
purpose to attain.
Surely this is of far more vital importance than the mere melodiousness
of single lines, or a metre of unvarying sweetness bearing gently along
in its placid course (as a stream the leaf or twig fallen into it from
above) some tiny thought or finikin fragment of emotion. Matthew Arnold,
who was both poet and critic, has told us with emphasis of "the
necessity of accurate construction, and the subordinate character of
expression."[5] His next words, though bearing a slightly different
signification, may very legitimately be applied to Browning. Arnold
tells us "how unspeakably superior is the effect of the one moral
impression left by a great action treated as a whole, to the effect
produced by the most striking single thought or by the happiest image."
For "a great action," read "an adequate subject," and the words define
and defend Browning's principle and practice exactly. There is no
characteristic of his work more evident, none more admirable or more
rare, than the unity, the compactness and completeness, the skill and
care in construction and definiteness in impression, of each poem. I do
not know any contemporary of whom this may more truly be said. The
assertion will be startling, no doubt, to those who are accustomed to
think of Browning (as people once thought of Shakespeare) as a poet of
great gifts but little skill; as a giant, but a clumsy giant; as what
the French call a _nature_, an almost unconscious force, expending
itself at random, without rule or measure. But take, for example, the
series of _Men and Women_, as originally published, read poem after poem
(there are fifty to choose from) and scrutinise each separately; see
what was the writer's intention, and observe how far he has fulfilled
it, how far he has succeeded in conveying to your mind a distinct and
sharply-cut impression. You will find that whatever be the subject,
whatever the style, whether in your eyes the former be mistaken, the
latter perverse, the poem itself, within its recognised limits, is
designed, constructed and finished with the finest skill of the
draughtsman or the architect. You will find that the impression you have
received from the whole is single and vivid, and, while you may not
perceive it, it will generally be the case that certain details at which
your fastidiousness cries out, certain uncouthnesses, as you fancy, are
perfectly appropriate and in their place, and have contributed to the
perfection of the _ensemble_.
A word may here be said in reference to the charge of "obscurity,"
which, from the time when Browning's earliest poem was disposed of by a
complacent critic in the single phrase, "A piece of pure bewilderment,"
has been hurled at each succeeding poem with re-iterate vigour of
virulence. The charge of "pure bewilderment" is about as reasonable as
the charge of "habitual rudeness of versification." It is a fashion.
People abuse their "Browning" as they abuse their "Bradshaw," though all
that is wanting, in either case, is a little patience and a little
common sense. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface,
"I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for
the hour of the poet;" as indeed he has himself said, to much the same
effect, in a letter printed many years ago: "I never pretended to offer
such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at
dominoes to an idle man." But he has not made anything like such a
demand on the reader's faculties as people, _not_ readers, seem to
suppose. _Sordello_ is difficult, _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ is
difficult, so, perhaps, in parts, is _Fifine at the Fair_; so, too, on
account of its unfamiliar allusions, is _Aristophanes' Apology_; and a
few smaller poems, here and there, remotely argumentative or specially
complex in psychology, are difficult. But really these are about all to
which such a term as "unintelligible," so freely and recklessly flung
about, could with the faintest show of reason be applied by any
reasonable being. In the 21,116 lines which form Browning's longest work
and masterpiece, the "psychological epic" of _The Ring and the Book_, I
am inclined to think it possible that a careful scrutiny might reveal
116 which an ordinary reader would require to read twice. Anything more
clear than the work as a whole it would be difficult to find. It is much
easier to follow than _Paradise Lost_; the _Agamemnon_ is rather less
easy to follow than _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_.
That there is some excuse for the accusation, no one would or could
deny. But it is only the excuse of a misconception. Browning is a
thinker of extraordinary depth and subtlety; his themes are seldom
superficial, often very remote, and his thought is, moreover, as swift
as it is subtle. To a dull reader there is little difference between
cloudy and fiery thought; the one is as much too bright for him as the
other is too dense. Of all thinkers in poetry, Browning is the most
swift and fiery. "If there is any great quality," says Mr. Swinburne, in
those noble pages in which he has so generously and triumphantly
vindicated his brother-poet from this very charge of obscurity--
"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. To charge him with
obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind,
or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire.
He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too
brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer
to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence
which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise
with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building
spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and
forward, as it lives along the animated line of its labour,
springs from thread to thread, and darts from centre to
circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living
thought, woven from the inexhaustible stores of his
perception, and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his
imagination. He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate
of his thought is to that of another man's as the speed of a
railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to
that of a railway."[6]
Moreover, while a writer who deals with easy themes has no excuse if he
is not pellucid at a glance, one who employs his intellect and
imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a
corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say, with Bishop
Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: "It must be acknowledged that
some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult; or, if
you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone are
judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges
whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided--those only who
will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how
far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have been
put in a plainer manner."[7]
There is another popular misconception to which also a word in passing
may as well be devoted. This is the idea that Browning's personality is
apt to get confused with his characters', that his men and women are not
separate creations, projected from his brain into an independent
existence, but mere masks or puppets through whose mouths he speaks.
This fallacy arises from the fact that not a few of his imaginary
persons express themselves in a somewhat similar fashion; or, as people
too rashly say, "talk like Browning." The explanation of this apparent
paradox, so far as it exists, is not far to seek. All art is a
compromise, and all dramatic speech is in fact impossible. No persons in
real life would talk as Shakespeare or any other great dramatist makes
them talk. Nor do the characters of Shakespeare talk like those of any
other great dramatist, except in so far as later playwrights have
consciously imitated Shakespeare. Every dramatic writer has his own
style, and in this style, subject to modification, all his characters
speak. Just as a soul, born out of eternity into time, takes on itself
the impress of earth and the manners of human life, so a dramatic
creation, pure essence in the shaping imagination of the poet, takes on
itself, in its passage into life, something of the impress of its abode.
"The poet, in short, endows his creations with his own attributes; he
enables them to utter their feelings as if they themselves were poets,
thus giving a true voice even to that intensity of passion which in real
life often hinders expression."[8] If this fact is recognised (that
dramatic speech is not real speech, but poetical speech, and poetical
speech infused with the individual style of each individual dramatist,
modulated, indeed, but true to one keynote) then it must be granted that
Browning has as much right to his own style as other dramatists have to
theirs, and as little right as they to be accused on that account of
putting his personality into his work. But as Browning's style is very
pronounced and original, it is more easily recognisable than that of
most dramatists (so far, no doubt, a defect[9]) and for this reason it
has come to seem relatively more prominent than it really is. This
consideration, and not any confusion of identity, is the cause of
whatever similarity of speech exists between Browning and his
characters, or between individual characters. The similarity is only
skin-deep. Take a convenient instance, _The Ring and the Book_. I have
often seen it stated that the nine tellings of the story are all told in
the same style, that all the speakers, Guido and Pompilia, the Pope and
Tertium Quid alike, speak like Browning. I cannot see it. On the
contrary, I have been astonished, in reading and re-reading the poem, at
the variety, the difference, the wonderful individuality in each
speaker's way of telling the same story; at the profound art with which
the rhythm, the metaphors, the very details of language, no less than
the broad distinctions of character and the subtle indications of bias,
are adapted and converted into harmony. A certain general style, a
certain general manner of expression, are common to all, as is also the
case in, let us say, _The Tempest_. But what distinction, what variation
of tone, what delicacy and expressiveness of modulation! As a simple
matter of fact, few writers have ever had a greater flexibility of style
than Browning.
I am doubtful whether full justice has been done to one section of
Browning's dramatic work, his portraits of women. The presence of woman
is not perhaps relatively so prominent in his work as it is in the work
of some other poets; woman is to him neither an exclusive preoccupation,
nor a continual unrest; but as faithful and vital representations, I do
not hesitate to put his portraits of women quite on a level with his
portraits of men, and far beyond those of any other English poet of the
last three centuries. In some of them, notably in Pompilia, there is a
something which always seems to me almost incredible in a man: an
instinct that one would have thought only a woman could have for women.
And his women, good or bad, are always real women, and they are
represented without bias. Browning is one of the very few men (Mr.
Meredith, whose women are, perhaps, the consummate flower of his work,
is his only other English contemporary) who can paint women without
idealisation or degradation, not from the man's side, but from their
own; as living equals, not as goddesses or as toys. His women live, act,
and suffer, even think; not assertively, mannishly (for the loveliest of
them have a very delicate charm of girlishness) but with natural
volition, on equal rights with men. Any one who has thought at all on
the matter will acknowledge that this is the highest praise that could
be given to a poet, and the rarest. Browning's women are not perhaps as
various as his men; but from Ottima to Pompilia (from the "great white
queen, magnificent in sin," to the "lily of a maiden, white with intact
leaf") what a range and gradation of character! These are the two
extremes; between them, as earth lies between heaven and hell, are
stationed all the others, from the faint and delicate dawn in Pauline,
Michal and Palma, through Pippa and Mildred and Colombe and Constance
and the Queen, to Balaustion and Elvire, Fifine and Clara and the
heroine of the _Inn Album_, and the lurid close in Cristina. I have
named only a few, and how many there are to name! Someone has written a
book on _Shakespeare's Women_: whoever writes a book on _Browning's
Women_ will have a task only less delightful, a subject only less rich,
than that.
When Browning was a boy, it is recorded that he debated within himself
whether he should not become a painter or a musician as well as a poet.
Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many years, he decided in the
negative. But the latent qualities of painter and musician have
developed themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest and very much
of his most original verse is that which speaks the language of painter
and musician as it had never before been spoken. No English poet before
him has ever excelled his utterances on music, none has so much as
rivalled his utterances on art. _Abt Vogler_ is the richest, deepest,
fullest poem on music in the language. It is not the theories of the
poet, but the instincts of the musician, that it speaks. _Master Hugues
of Saxe-Gotha_ is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical
interpretation; _A Toccata of Galuppi's_ is as rare a rendering as can
anywhere be found of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical
piece; but _Abt Vogler_ is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is
born. In his poems on the arts of painting and sculpture (not in
themselves more perfect in sympathy, though larger in number, than those
on music) he is simply the first to write of these arts as an artist
might, if an artist could express his soul in words or rhythm. It has
always been a fashion among poets to write about music, though scarcely
anyone but Shakespeare and Milton has done so to much purpose; it is
now, owing to the influence of Rossetti (whose magic, however, was all
his own, and whose mantle went down into the grave with him) a fashion
to write about pictures. But indiscriminate sonneteering about pictures
is one thing: Browning's attitude and insight into the plastic arts
quite another. Poems like _Andrea del Sarto_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_, _Pictor
Ignotus_, have a revealing quality which is unique; tragedies or
comedies of art, in a more personal and dramatic way than the musical
poems, they are like these in touching the springs of art itself. They
may be compared with _Abt Vogler_. Poems of the order of _The Guardian
Angel_ are more comparable with _A Toccata of Galuppi's_, the rendering
of the impressions and sensations caused by a particular picture. _Old
Pictures in Florence_ is not unsimilar to _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_,
critical, technical, lovingly learned, sympathetically quizzical. But
Browning's artistic instinct and knowledge are manifested not only in
special poems of this sort, but everywhere throughout his works. He
writes of painters because he has a kinship with them. "Their pictures
are windows through which he sees into their souls."
It is only natural that a poet with the instincts of a painter should be
capable of superb landscape-painting in verse; and we find in Browning
this power. It is further evident that such a poet, a man who has chosen
poetry instead of painting, must consider the latter art subordinate to
the former, and it is only natural that we should find Browning
subordinating the pictorial to the poetic capacity, and this more
carefully than most other poets. His best landscapes are as brief as
they are brilliant. They are like sabre-strokes, swift, sudden, flashing
the light from their sweep, and striking straight to the heart. And they
are never pushed into prominence for an effect of idle beauty, nor
strewn about in the way of thoughtful or passionate utterance, like
roses in a runner's path. They are subordinated always to the human
interest; blended, fused with it, so that a landscape in a poem of
Browning's is literally a part of the emotion. All poetry which
describes in detail, however magnificent, palls on us when persisted in.
"The art of the pen (we write on darkness) is to rouse the inward
vision, instead of labouring with a Drop-scene brush, as if it were to
the eye; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted
description. That is why the poets who spring imagination with a word or
a phrase paint lasting pictures. The Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are
in a line, two at most."[10] It is to this, the finest essence of
landscape-painting, that most of Browning's landscapes belong. Yet he
can be as explicit as any one when he sees fit. Look at the poem of _The
Englishman in Italy_. The whole piece is one long description, minute,
careful and elaborated. Perhaps it is worth observing that the
description is addressed to a child.
In the exercise of his power of placing a character or incident in a
sympathetic setting, Browning shows himself, as I have pointed out,
singularly skilful. He never avails himself of the dramatic poet's
licence of vagueness as to surroundings: he sees them himself with
instant and intense clearness, and stamps them as clearly on our brain.
The picture calls up the mood. Here is the opening of one of his very
earliest poems, _Porphyria's Lover_:--
"The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake,
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria."
There, in five lines, is the scene and the mood, and in the sixth line
Porphyria may enter. Take a middle-period poem, _A Serenade at the
Villa_, for an instance of more deliberate description, flashed by the
same fiery art:--
"That was I, you heard last night
When there rose no moon at all,
Nor, to pierce the strained and tight
Tent of heaven, a planet small:
Life was dead and so was light.
Not a twinkle from the fly,
Not a glimmer from the worm.
When the crickets stopped their cry,
When the owls forebore a term,
You heard music; that was I.
Earth turned in her sleep with pain,
Sultrily suspired for proof:
_In at heaven and out again,
Lightning!--where it broke the roof,
Bloodlike, some few drops of rain_.
What they could my words expressed,
O my love, my all, my one!
Singing helped the verses best,
And when singing's best was done,
To my lute I left the rest.
So wore night; the East was gray,
White the broad-faced hemlock flowers;
There would be another day;
Ere its first of heavy hours
Found me, I had passed away."
This tells enough to be an entire poem. It is not a description of
the night and the lover: we are made to see them. The lines I have
italicised are of the school of Dante or of Rembrandt. Their vividness
overwhelms. In the latest poems, as in _Ivân Ivânovitch_ or _Ned
Bratts_, we find the same swift sureness of touch. It is only natural
that most of Browning's finest landscapes are Italian.[11]