To call any of these plays unintelligible is ridiculous; and nobody
who has ever read them ever did, and why people who have not read them
should abuse them is hard to see. Were society put upon its oath, we
should be surprised to find how many people in high places have not read
'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Timon of Athens;' but they don't
go about saying these plays are unintelligible. Like wise folk, they
pretend to have read them, and say nothing. In Browning's case they
are spared the hypocrisy. No one need pretend to have read 'A Soul's
Tragedy;' and it seems, therefore, inexcusable for anyone to assert that
one of the plainest, most pointed, and piquant bits of writing in the
language is unintelligible. But surely something more may be truthfully
said of these plays than that they are comprehensible. First of all,
they are _plays_, and not _works_--like the dropsical dramas of Sir
Henry Taylor and Mr. Swinburne. Some of them have stood the ordeal of
actual representation; and though it would be absurd to pretend that
they met with that overwhelming measure of success our critical age
has reserved for such dramatists as the late Lord Lytton, the author of
'Money,' the late Tom Taylor, the author of 'The Overland Route,' the
late Mr. Robertson, the author of 'Caste,' Mr. H. Byron, the author
of 'Our Boys,' Mr. Wills, the author of 'Charles I.,' Mr. Burnand, the
author of 'The Colonel,' and Mr. Gilbert, the author of so much that
is great and glorious in our national drama; at all events they proved
themselves able to arrest and retain the attention of very ordinary
audiences. But who can deny dignity and even grandeur to 'Luria,' or
withhold the meed of a melodious tear from 'Mildred Tresham'? What
action of what play is more happily conceived or better rendered than
that of 'Pippa Passes'?--where innocence and its reverse, tender love
and violent passion, are presented with emphasis, and yet blended into a
dramatic unity and a poetic perfection, entitling the author to the very
first place amongst those dramatists of the century who have laboured
under the enormous disadvantage of being poets to start with.
Passing from the plays, we are next attracted by a number of splendid
poems, on whose base the structure of Mr. Browning's fame perhaps rests
most surely--his dramatic pieces--poems which give utterance to the
thoughts and feelings of persons other than himself, or, as he puts it,
when dedicating a number of them to his wife:
'Love, you saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead, or fashioned by my fancy,
Enter each and all, and use their service,
Speak from every mouth the speech--a poem;'
or, again, in 'Sordello':
'By making speak, myself kept out of view,
The very man, as he was wont to do.'
At a rough calculation, there must be at least sixty of these pieces.
Let me run over the names of a very few of them. 'Saul,' a poem beloved
by all true women; 'Caliban,' which the men, not unnaturally perhaps,
often prefer. The 'Two Bishops'; the sixteenth century one ordering his
tomb of jasper and basalt in St. Praxed's Church, and his nineteenth
century successor rolling out his post-prandial _Apologia_. 'My Last
Duchess,' the 'Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister,' 'Andrea del Sarto,'
'Fra Lippo Lippi,' 'Rabbi Ben Ezra,' 'Cleon,' 'A Death in the Desert,'
'The Italian in England,' and 'The Englishman in Italy.'
It is plain truth to say that no other English poet, living or dead,
Shakespeare excepted, has so heaped up human interest for his readers as
has Robert Browning.
Fancy stepping into a room and finding it full of Shakespeare's
principal characters! What a babel of tongues! What a jostling of
wits! How eagerly one's eye would go in search of Hamlet and Sir John
Falstaff, but droop shudderingly at the thought of encountering the
distraught gaze of Lady Macbeth! We should have no difficulty in
recognising Beatrice in the central figure of that lively group of
laughing courtiers; whilst did we seek Juliet, it would, of course,
be by appointment on the balcony. To fancy yourself in such company
is pleasant matter for a midsummer's night's dream. No poet has such a
gallery as Shakespeare, but of our modern poets Browning comes nearest
him.
Against these dramatic pieces the charge of unintelligibility fails
as completely as it does against the plays. They are all perfectly
intelligible; but--and here is the rub--they are not easy reading, like
the estimable writings of the late Mrs. Hemans. They require the same
honest attention as it is the fashion to give to a lecture of Professor
Huxley's or a sermon of Canon Liddon's: and this is just what too many
persons will not give to poetry. They
'Love to hear
A soft pulsation in their easy ear;
To turn the page, and let their senses drink
A lay that shall not trouble them to think.'
It is no great wonder it should be so. After dinner, when disposed to
sleep, but afraid of spoiling our night's rest, behold the witching
hour reserved by the nineteenth century for the study of poetry! This
treatment of the muse deserves to be held up to everlasting scorn and
infamy in a passage of Miltonic strength and splendour. We, alas! must
be content with the observation, that such an opinion of the true
place of poetry in the life of a man excites, in the breasts of the
rightminded, feelings akin to those which Charles Lamb ascribes to the
immortal Sarah Battle, when a young gentleman of a literary turn, on
taking a hand in her favourite game of whist, declared that he saw no
harm in unbending the mind, now and then, after serious studies, in
recreations of that kind. She could not bear, so Elia proceeds, 'to have
her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in
that light. It was her business, her duty--the thing she came into the
world to do--and she did it: she unbent her mind, afterwards, over a
book!' And so the lover of poetry and Browning, after winding-up
his faculties over 'Comus' or 'Paracelsus,' over 'Julius Caesar' or
'Strafford,' may afterwards, if he is so minded, unbend himself over the
'Origin of Species,' or that still more fascinating record which tells
us how little curly worms, only give them time enough, will cover with
earth even the larger kind of stones.
Next to these dramatic pieces come what we may be content to call simply
poems: some lyrical, some narrative. The latter are straightforward
enough, and, as a rule, full of spirit and humour; but this is more than
can always be said of the lyrical pieces. Now, for the first time,
in dealing with this first period, excluding 'Sordello,' we strike
difficulty. The Chinese puzzle comes in. We wonder whether it all turns
on the punctuation. And the awkward thing for Mr. Browning's reputation
is this, that these bewildering poems are, for the most part, very
short. We say awkward, for it is not more certain that Sarah Gamp liked
her beer drawn mild, than it is that your Englishman likes his poetry
cut short; and so, accordingly, it often happens that some estimable
paterfamilias takes up an odd volume of Browning his volatile son or
moonstruck daughter has left lying about, pishes and pshaws! and then,
with an air of much condescension and amazing candour, remarks that
he will give the fellow another chance, and not condemn him unread. So
saying, he opens the book, and carefully selects the very shortest poem
he can find; and in a moment, without sign or signal, note or warning,
the unhappy man is floundering up to his neck in lines like these, which
are the third and final stanza of a poem called 'Another Way of Love':
'And after, for pastime,
If June be refulgent
With flowers in completeness,
All petals, no prickles,
Delicious as trickles
Of wine poured at mass-time,
And choose One indulgent
To redness and sweetness;
Or if with experience of man and of spider,
She use my June lightning, the strong insect-ridder
To stop the fresh spinning,--why June will consider.'
He comes up gasping, and more than ever persuaded that Browning's poetry
is a mass of inconglomerate nonsense, which nobody understands--least of
all members of the Browning Society.
We need be at no pains to find a meaning for everything Mr. Browning
has written. But when all is said and done--when these few freaks of a
crowded brain are thrown overboard to the sharks of verbal criticism
who feed on such things--Mr. Browning and his great poetical achievement
remain behind to be dealt with and accounted for. We do not get rid of
the Laureate by quoting:
'O darling room, my heart's delight,
Dear room, the apple of my sight,
With thy two couches soft and white
There is no room so exquisite--
No little room so warm and bright
Wherein to read, wherein to write;'
or of Wordsworth by quoting:
'At this, my boy hung down his head:
He blushed with shame, nor made reply,
And five times to the child I said,
"Why, Edward? tell me why?"'--
or of Keats by remembering that he once addressed a young lady as
follows:
'O come, Georgiana! the rose is full blown,
The riches of Flora are lavishly strown:
The air is all softness and crystal the streams,
The west is resplendently clothed in beams.'
The strength of a rope may be but the strength of its weakest part; but
poets are to be judged in their happiest hours, and in their greatest
works.
Taking, then, this first period of Mr. Browning's poetry as a whole, and
asking ourselves if we are the richer for it, how can there be any doubt
as to the reply? What points of human interest has he left untouched?
With what phase of life, character, or study does he fail to sympathize?
So far from being the rough-hewn block 'dull fools' have supposed him,
he is the most dilettante of great poets. Do you dabble in art and
perambulate picture-galleries? Browning must be your favourite poet: he
is art's historian. Are you devoted to music? So is he: and alone of our
poets has sought to fathom in verse the deep mysteries of sound. Do you
find it impossible to keep off theology? Browning has more theology
than most bishops--could puzzle Gamaliel and delight Aquinas. Are you
in love? Read 'A Last Ride Together,' 'Youth and Art,' 'A Portrait,'
'Christine,' 'In a Gondola,' 'By the Fireside,' 'Love amongst the
Ruins,' 'Time's Revenges,' 'The Worst of It,' and a host of others,
being careful always to end with 'A Madhouse Cell'; and we are much
mistaken if you do not put Browning at the very head and front of the
interpreters of passion. The many moods of sorrow are reflected in
his verse, whilst mirth, movement, and a rollicking humour abound
everywhere.
I will venture upon but three quotations, for it is late in the day to
be quoting Browning. The first shall be a well-known bit of blank verse
about art from 'Fra Lippo Lippi':
'For, don't you mark, we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see:
And so they are better painted--better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that--
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. Have you noticed now
Your cullion's hanging face? A bit of chalk,
And, trust me, but you should though. How much more
If I drew higher things with the same truth!
That were to take the prior's pulpit-place--
Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh!
It makes me mad to see what men shall do,
And we in our graves! This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank: it means intensely, and means good.
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.'
The second is some rhymed rhetoric from 'Holy Cross Day'--the testimony
of the dying Jew in Rome:
'This world has been harsh and strange,
Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
But what or where? at the last or first?
In one point only we sinned at worst.
'The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
And again in his border see Israel set.
When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
The stranger seed shall be joined to them:
To Jacob's house shall the Gentiles cleave:
So the prophet saith, and his sons believe.
'Ay, the children of the chosen race
Shall carry and bring them to their place;
In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame
When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o'er
The oppressor triumph for evermore?
'God spoke, and gave us the word to keep:
Bade never fold the hands, nor sleep
'Mid a faithless world, at watch and ward,
Till the Christ at the end relieve our guard.
By His servant Moses the watch was set:
Though near upon cockcrow, we keep it yet.
'Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,
By the starlight naming a dubious Name;
And if we were too heavy with sleep, too rash
With fear--O Thou, if that martyr-gash
Fell on Thee, coming to take Thine own,
And we gave the Cross, when we owed the throne;
'Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
But, the Judgment over, join sides with us!
Thine, too, is the cause! and not more Thine
Than ours is the work of these dogs and swine,
Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed.
'We withstood Christ then? Be mindful how
At least we withstand Barabbas now!
Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
To have called these--Christians--had we dared!
Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,
And Rome make amends for Calvary!
'By the torture, prolonged from age to age;
By the infamy, Israel's heritage;
By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace,
By the badge of shame, by the felon's place,
By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship,
'We boast our proof, that at least the Jew
Would wrest Christ's name from the devil's crew.'
The last quotation shall be from the veritable Browning--of one of those
poetical audacities none ever dared but the Danton of modern poetry.
Audacious in its familiar realism, in its total disregard of poetical
environment, in its rugged abruptness: but supremely successful, and
alive with emotion:
'What is he buzzing in my ears?
Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
Ah, reverend sir, not I.
'What I viewed there once, what I view again,
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table's edge, is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.
'That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry
O'er the garden-wall. Is the curtain blue
Or green to a healthy eye?
'To mine, it serves for the old June weather,
Blue above lane and wall;
And that farthest bottle, labelled "Ether,"
Is the house o'ertopping all.
'At a terrace somewhat near its stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl--I know, sir, it's improper:
My poor mind's out of tune.
'Only there was a way--you crept
Close by the side, to dodge
Eyes in the house--two eyes except.
They styled their house "The Lodge."
'What right had a lounger up their lane?
But by creeping very close,
With the good wall's help their eyes might strain
And stretch themselves to oes,
'Yet never catch her and me together,
As she left the attic--there,
By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether"--
And stole from stair to stair,
'And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas!
We loved, sir; used to meet.
How sad and bad and mad it was!
But then, how it was sweet!'
The second period of Mr. Browning's poetry demands a different line of
argument; for it is, in my judgment, folly to deny that he has of late
years written a great deal which makes very difficult reading indeed. No
doubt you may meet people who tell you that they read 'The Ring and the
Book' for the first time without much mental effort; but you will do
well not to believe them. These poems are difficult--they cannot help
being so. What is 'The Ring and the Book'? A huge novel in 20,000
lines--told after the method not of Scott but of Balzac; it tears the
hearts out of a dozen characters; it tells the same story from ten
different points of view. It is loaded with detail of every kind and
description: you are let off nothing. As with a schoolboy's life at a
large school, if he is to enjoy it at all, he must fling himself into
it, and care intensely about everything--so the reader of 'The Ring and
the Book' must be interested in everybody and everything, down to the
fact that the eldest daughter of the counsel for the prosecution of
Guido is eight years old on the very day he is writing his speech, and
that he is going to have fried liver and parsley for his supper.
If you are prepared for this, you will have your reward; for the
_style_, though rugged and involved, is throughout, with the exception
of the speeches of counsel, eloquent, and at times superb; and as for
the _matter_, if your interest in human nature is keen, curious,
almost professional--if nothing man, woman, or child has been, done, or
suffered, or conceivably can be, do, or suffer, is without interest for
you; if you are fond of analysis, and do not shrink from dissection--you
will prize 'The Ring and the Book' as the surgeon prizes the last great
contribution to comparative anatomy or pathology.
But this sort of work tells upon style. Browning has, I think, fared
better than some writers. To me, at all events, the step from 'A Blot
in the 'Scutcheon' to 'The Ring and the Book' is not so marked as is the
_mauvais pas_ that lies between 'Amos Barton' and 'Daniel Deronda.' But
difficulty is not obscurity. One task is more difficult than another.
The angles at the base of the isosceles triangles are apt to get
mixed, and to confuse us all--man and woman alike. 'Prince Hohenstiel'
something or another is a very difficult poem, not only to pronounce but
to read; but if a poet chooses as his subject Napoleon III.--in whom
the cad, the coward, the idealist, and the sensualist were inextricably
mixed--and purports to make him unbosom himself over a bottle of
Gladstone claret in a tavern in Leicester Square, you cannot expect that
the product should belong to the same class of poetry as Mr. Coventry
Patmore's admirable 'Angel in the House.'
It is the method that is difficult. Take the husband in 'The Ring and
the Book.' Mr. Browning remorselessly hunts him down, tracks him to
the last recesses of his mind, and there bids him stand and deliver. He
describes love, not only broken but breaking; hate in its germ; doubt at
its birth. These are difficult things to do either in poetry or prose,
and people with easy, flowing Addisonian or Tennysonian styles cannot do
them.
I seem to overhear a still, small voice asking, But are they worth
doing? or at all events is it the province of art to do them? The
question ought not to be asked. It is heretical, being contrary to the
whole direction of the latter half of this century. The chains binding
us to the rocks of realism are faster riveted every day; and the Perseus
who is destined to cut them is, I expect, some mischievous little boy
at a Board-school. But as the question has been asked, I will own that
sometimes, even when deepest in works of this, the now orthodox school,
I have been harassed by distressing doubts whether, after all, this
enormous labour is not in vain; and, wearied by the effort, overloaded
by the detail, bewildered by the argument, and sickened by the pitiless
dissection of character and motive, have been tempted to cry aloud,
quoting--or rather, in the agony of the moment, misquoting--Coleridge:
'Simplicity--
Thou better name than all the family of Fame.'
But this ebullition of feeling is childish and even sinful. We must take
our poets as we do our meals--as they are served up to us. Indeed, you
may, if full of courage, give a cook notice, but not the time-spirit who
makes our poets. We may be sure--to appropriate an idea of the late
Sir James Stephen--that if Robert Browning had lived in the sixteenth
century, he would not have written a poem like 'The Ring and the Book';
and if Edmund Spenser had lived in the nineteenth century he would not
have written a poem like the 'Faerie Queen.'
It is therefore idle to arraign Mr. Browning's later method and style
for possessing difficulties and intricacies which are inherent to it.
The method, at all events, has an interest of its own, a strength of
its own, a grandeur of its own. If you do not like it, you must leave it
alone. You are fond, you say, of romantic poetry; well, then, take down
your Spenser and qualify yourself to join 'the small transfigured band'
of those who are able to take their Bible-oaths they have read their
'Faerie Queen' all through. The company, though small, is delightful,
and you will have plenty to talk about without abusing Browning, who
probably knows his Spenser better than you do. Realism will not for ever
dominate the world of letters and art--the fashion of all things passeth
away--but it has already earned a great place: it has written books,
composed poems, painted pictures, all stamped with that 'greatness'
which, despite fluctuations, nay, even reversals of taste and opinion,
means immortality.
But against Mr. Browning's later poems it is sometimes alleged that
their meaning is obscure because their grammar is bad. A cynic was once
heard to observe with reference to that noble poem 'The Grammarian's
Funeral,' that it was a pity the talented author had ever since allowed
himself to remain under the delusion that he had not only buried the
grammarian, but his grammar also. It is doubtless true that Mr. Browning
has some provoking ways, and is something too much of a verbal acrobat.
Also, as his witty parodist, the pet poet of six generations of
Cambridge undergraduates, reminds us:
'He loves to dock the smaller parts of speech,
As we curtail the already curtailed cur.'
It is perhaps permissible to weary a little of his _i_'s and _o_'s, but
we believe we cannot be corrected when we say that Browning is a poet
whose grammar will bear scholastic investigation better than that of
most of Apollo's children.
A word about 'Sordello.' One half of 'Sordello,' and that, with Mr.
Browning's usual ill-luck, the first half, is undoubtedly obscure. It is
as difficult to read as 'Endymion' or the 'Revolt of Islam,' and for the
same reason--the author's lack of experience in the art of composition.
We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase
in his house, which contained fine rooms, but no way of getting into
them. 'Sordello' is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his
twenties, essayed a high thing. For his subject--
'He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years.'
He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed
generosity, and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never
ceased girding at him, because forty-two years ago he published, at his
own charges, a little book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even
such of them as were then able to read could not understand.
Poetry should be vital--either stirring our blood by its divine
movement, or snatching our breath by its divine perfection. To do both
is supreme glory; to do either is enduring fame.
There is a great deal of beautiful poetical writing to be had nowadays
from the booksellers. It is interesting reading, but as one reads one
trembles. It smells of mortality. It would seem as if, at the very birth
of most of our modern poems,
'The conscious Parcae threw
Upon their roseate lips a Stygian hue.'
That their lives may be prolonged is my pious prayer. In these bad days,
when it is thought more educationally useful to know the principle of
the common pump than Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' one cannot afford
to let any good poetry die.
But when we take down Browning, we cannot think of him and the 'wormy
bed' together. He is so unmistakably and deliciously alive. Die, indeed!
when one recalls the ideal characters he has invested with reality; how
he has described love and joy, pain and sorrow, art and music; as poems
like 'Childe Roland,' 'Abt Vogler,' 'Evelyn Hope,' 'The Worst of It,'
'Pictor Ignotus,' 'The Lost Leader,' 'Home Thoughts from Abroad,'
'Old Pictures in Florence,' 'Hervé Riel,' 'A Householder,' 'Fears and
Scruples,' come tumbling into one's memory, one over another--we are
tempted to employ the language of hyperbole, and to answer the question
'Will Browning die?' by exclaiming, 'Yes; when Niagara stops.' In him
indeed we can
'Discern
Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.'
But love of Mr. Browning's poetry is no exclusive cult.
Of Lord Tennyson it is needless to speak. Certainly amongst his Peers
there is no such Poet.
Mr. Arnold may have a limited poetical range and a restricted style, but
within that range and in that style, surely we must exclaim:
'Whence that completed form of all completeness?
Whence came that high perfection of all sweetness?'