CHAPTER I

THE POETRY

OF

ROBERT BROWNING

BY

STOPFORD A. BROOKE

AUTHOR OF "TENNYSON: HIS ART AND RELATION TO MODERN LIFE"

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LONDON

ISBISTER AND COMPANY LIMITED

1903

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Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co. London & Edinburgh

_First Edition, September 1902_

_Reprinted, October 1902_

_Reprinted, January 1903_

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CONTENTS

I. BROWNING AND TENNYSON

II. THE TREATMENT OF NATURE

III. THE TREATMENT OF NATURE

IV. BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE--PAULINE AND PARACELSUS

V. THE POET OF ART

VI. SORDELLO

VII. BROWNING AND SORDELLO

VIII. THE DRAMAS

IX. POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE

X. THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE

XI. IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS

XII. IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS--RENAISSANCE

XIII. WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING

XIV. WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING--(THE DRAMATIC LYRICS AND POMPILIA)

XV. BALAUSTION

XVI. THE RING AND THE BOOK

XVII. LATER POEMS

XVIII. THE LAST POEMS

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The publishers are indebted to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. on behalf

of the owner of the copyright for their permission to make extracts

from copyright poems for use in this volume

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CHAPTER I

_BROWNING AND TENNYSON_

Parnassus, Apollo's mount, has two peaks, and on these, for sixty years,

from 1830 to 1890,[1] two poets sat, till their right to these lofty

peaks became unchallenged. Beneath them, during these years, on the

lower knolls of the mount of song, many new poets sang; with diverse

instruments, on various subjects, and in manifold ways. They had their

listeners; the Muses were also their visitants; but none of them

ventured seriously to dispute the royal summits where Browning and

Tennyson sat, and smiled at one another across the vale between.

Both began together; and the impulses which came to them from the new

and excited world which opened its fountains in and about 1832 continued

to impel them till the close of their lives. While the poetic world

altered around them, while two generations of poets made new schools of

poetry, they remained, for the most part, unaffected by these schools.

There is nothing of Arnold and Clough, of Swinburne, Rossetti or Morris,

or of any of the others, in Browning or Tennyson. There is nothing even

of Mrs. Browning in Browning. What changes took place in them were

wrought, first, by the natural growth of their own character; secondly,

by the natural development of their art-power; and thirdly, by the slow

decaying of that power. They were, in comparison with the rest,

curiously uninfluenced by the changes of the world around them. The main

themes, with which they began, they retained to the end. Their methods,

their instruments, their way of feeling into the world of man and of

nature, their relation to the doctrines of God and of Man, did not,

though on all these matters they held diverse views, alter with the

alteration of the world. But this is more true of Browning than of

Tennyson. The political and social events of those years touched

Tennyson, as we see from _Maud_ and the _Princess_, but his way of

looking at them was not the way of a contemporary. It might have been

predicted from his previous career and work. Then the new movements of

Science and Criticism which disturbed Clough and Arnold so deeply, also

troubled Tennyson, but not half so seriously. He staggered for a time

under the attack on his old conceptions, but he never yielded to it. He

was angry with himself for every doubt that beset him, and angry with

the Science and Criticism which disturbed the ancient ideas he was

determined not to change. Finally, he rested where he had been when he

wrote _In Memoriam_, nay more, where he had been when he began to write.

There were no such intervals in Browning's thought. One could scarcely

say from his poetry, except in a very few places, that he was aware of

the social changes of his time, or of the scientific and critical

movement which, while he lived, so profoundly modified both theology and

religion.[2] _Asolando_, in 1890, strikes the same chords, but more

feebly, which _Paracelsus_ struck in 1835.

But though, in this lofty apartness and self-unity, Browning and

Tennyson may fairly be said to be at one, in themselves and in their

song they were different. There could scarcely be two characters, two

musics, two minds, two methods in art, two imaginations, more distinct

and contrasted than those which lodged in these men--and the object of

this introduction is to bring out this contrast, with the purpose of

placing in a clearer light some of the peculiar elements in the poetry

of Browning, and in his position as a poet.

1. Their public fate was singularly different. In 1842 Tennyson, with

his two volumes of Collected Poems, made his position. The _Princess_,

in 1847, increased his reputation. In 1850, _In Memoriam_ raised him,

it was said, above all the poets of his time, and the book was

appreciated, read and loved by the greater part of the English-speaking

world. The success and popular fame which now followed were well

deserved and wisely borne. They have endured and will endure. A host of

imitators, who caught his music and his manner, filled the groves and

ledges which led up to the peak on which he lived. His side of Parnassus

was thronged.

It was quite otherwise with his brother-poet. Only a few clear-eyed

persons cared to read _Paracelsus_, which appeared in 1835. _Strafford_,

Browning's first drama, had a little more vogue; it was acted for a

while. When _Sordello_, that strange child of genius, was born in 1840,

those who tried to read its first pages declared they were

incomprehensible. It seems that critics in those days had either less

intelligence than we have, or were more impatient and less attentive,

for not only _Sordello_ but even _In Memoriam_ was said to be

exceedingly obscure.

Then, from 1841 to 1846, Browning published at intervals a series of

varied poems and dramas, under the title of _Bells and Pomegranates_.

These, one might imagine, would have grasped the heart of any public

which had a care for poetry. Among them were such diverse poems as

_Pippa Passes_; _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_; _Saul_; _The Pied Piper of

Hamelin_; _My Last Duchess_; _Waring_. I only mention a few (all different

in note, subject and manner from one another), in order to mark the

variety and range of imaginative power displayed in this wonderful set

of little books. The Bells of poetry's music, hung side by side with

the golden Pomegranates of thought, made the fringe of the robe of this

high priest of song. Rarely have imagination and intellect, ideal faith

and the sense which handles daily life, passion and quietude, the

impulse and self-mastery of an artist, the joy of nature and the fates

of men, grave tragedy and noble grotesque, been mingled together more

fully--bells for the pleasure and fruit for the food of man.

Yet, on the whole, they fell dead on the public. A few, however, loved

them, and all the poems were collected in 1849. _In Memoriam_ and this

Collected Edition of Browning issued almost together; but with how

different a fate and fame we see most plainly in the fact that Browning

can scarcely be said to have had any imitators. The groves and ledges of

his side of Apollo's mountain were empty, save for a few enchanted

listeners, who said: "This is our music, and here we build our tent."

As the years went on, these readers increased in number, but even when

the volumes entitled _Men and Women_ were published in 1855, and the

_Dramatis Personæ_ in 1864, his followers were but a little company. For

all this neglect Browning cared as a bird cares who sings for the love

of singing, and who never muses in himself whether the wood is full or

not of listeners. Being always a true artist, he could not stop versing

and playing; and not one grain of villain envy touched his happy heart

when he looked across the valley to Tennyson. He loved his mistress Art,

and his love made him always joyful in creating.

At last his time came, but it was not till nearly twenty years after

the Collected Poems of 1849 that _The Ring and the Book_ astonished the

reading public so much by its intellectual _tour de force_ that it was

felt to be unwise to ignore Browning any longer. His past work was now

discovered, read and praised. It was not great success or worldwide fame

that he attained, but it was pleasant to him, and those who already

loved his poems rejoiced with him. Before he died he was widely read,

never so much as Tennyson, but far more than he had ever expected. It

had become clear to all the world that he sat on a rival height with

Tennyson, above the rest of his fellow-poets.

Their public fate, then, was very different. Tennyson had fifty years of

recognition, Browning barely ten. And to us who now know Browning this

seems a strange thing. Had he been one of the smaller men, a modern

specialist like Arnold or Rossetti, we could better understand it. But

Browning's work was not limited to any particular or temporary phase of

human nature. He set himself to represent, as far as he could, all types

of human nature; and, more audacious still, types taken from many

diverse ages, nations and climates. He told us of times and folk as far

apart as Caliban and Cleon, as Karshish and Waring, as Balaustion and

Fifine, as St. John and Bishop Blougram. The range and the contrasts of

his subjects are equally great. And he did this work with a searching

analysis, a humorous keenness, a joyous boldness, and an opulent

imagination at once penetrative and passionate. When, then, we realise

this as we realise it now, we are the more astonished that appreciation

of him lingered so long. Why did it not come at first, and why did it

come in the end?

The first answer to that question is a general one. During the years

between 1860 and 1890, and especially during the latter half of these

years, science and criticism were predominant. Their determination to

penetrate to the roots of things made a change in the general direction

of thought and feeling on the main subjects of life. Analysis became

dearer to men than synthesis, reasoning than imagination. Doubtful

questions were submitted to intellectual decision alone. The

Understanding, to its great surprise, was employed on the investigation

of the emotions, and even the artists were drawn in this direction.

They, too, began to dissect the human heart. Poets and writers of

fiction, students of human nature, were keenly interested, not so much

in our thoughts and feelings as in exposing how and why we thought or

felt in this or that fashion. In such analysis they seemed to touch the

primal sources of life. They desired to dig about the tree of humanity

and to describe all the windings of its roots and fibres--not much

caring whether they withered the tree for a time--rather than to

describe and sing its outward beauty, its varied foliage, and its ruddy

fruit. And this liking to investigate the hidden inwardness of

motives--which many persons, weary of self-contemplation, wisely prefer

to keep hidden--ran through the practice of all the arts. They became,

on the whole, less emotional, more intellectual. The close marriage

between passion and thought, without whose cohabitation no work of

genius is born in the arts, was dissolved; and the intellect of the

artist often worked by itself, and his emotion by itself. Some of the

parthenogenetic children of these divorced powers were curious products,

freaks, even monsters of literature, in which the dry, cynical, or

vivisecting temper had full play, or the naked, lustful, or cruel

exposure of the emotions in ugly, unnatural, or morbid forms was

glorified. They made an impudent claim to the name of Art, but they were

nothing better than disagreeable Science. But this was an extreme

deviation of the tendency. The main line it took was not so detestable.

It was towards the ruthless analysis of life, and of the soul of man; a

part, in fact, of the general scientific movement. The outward forms of

things charmed writers less than the motives which led to their making.

The description of the tangled emotions and thoughts of the inner life,

before any action took place, was more pleasurable to the writer, and

easier, than any description of their final result in act. This was

borne to a wearisome extreme in fiction, and in these last days a

comfortable reaction from it has arisen. In poetry it did not last so

long. Morris carried us out of it. But long before it began, long before

its entrance into the arts, Browning, who on another side of his genius

delighted in the representation of action, anticipated in poetry, and

from the beginning of his career, twenty, even thirty years before it

became pronounced in literature, this tendency to the intellectual

analysis of human nature. When he began it, no one cared for it; and

_Paracelsus, Sordello_ and the soul-dissecting poems in _Bells and

Pomegranates_ fell on an unheeding world. But Browning did not heed the

unheeding of the world. He had the courage of his aims in art, and while

he frequently shaped in his verse the vigorous movement of life, even to

its moments of fierce activity, he went on quietly, amid the silence of

the world, to paint also the slowly interwoven and complex pattern of

the inner life of men. And then, when the tendency of which I speak had

collared the interest of society, society, with great and ludicrous

amazement, found him out. "Here is a man," it said, "who has been doing

in poetry for the last thirty years the very thing of which we are so

fond, and who is doing it with delightful and varied subtlety. We will

read him now." So Browning, anticipating by thirty years the drift of

the world, was not read at first; but, afterwards, the world having

reached him, he became a favoured poet.

However, fond as he was of metaphysical analysis, he did not fall into

the extremes into which other writers carried it, _Paracelsus_ is,

indeed, entirely concerned with the inner history of a soul, but

_Sordello_ combines with a similar history a tale of political and

warlike action in which men and women, like Salinguerra and Palma, who

live in outward work rather than in inward thought, are described; while

in poems like _Pippa Passes_ and some of the Dramas, emotion and

thought, intimately interwoven, are seen blazing, as it were, into a

lightning of swift deeds. Nor are other poems wanting, in which, not

long analysis, but short passion, fiery outbursts of thought, taking

immediate form, are represented with astonishing intensity.

2. This second remarkable power of his touches the transition which has

begun to carry us, in the last few years, from the subjective to the

objective in art. The time came, and quite lately, when art, weary of

intellectual and minute investigation, turned to realise, not the long

inward life of a soul with all its motives laid bare, but sudden moments

of human passion, swift and unoutlined impressions on the senses, the

moody aspects of things, flared-out concentrations of critical hours of

thought and feeling which years perhaps of action and emotion had

brought to the point of eruption. Impressionism was born in painting,

poetry, sculpture and music.

It was curious that, when we sought for a master who had done this in

the art of poetry, we found that Browning--who had in long poems done

the very opposite of impressionism--had also, in a number of short

poems, anticipated impressionist art by nearly forty years. _Porphyria's

Lover_, many a scene in _Sordello_, _My Last Duchess_, _The Laboratory_,

_Home Thoughts from Abroad_, are only a few out of many. It is pleasant

to think of the ultimate appearance of Waring, flashed out for a moment

on the sea, only to disappear. In method, swiftness and colour, but done

in verse, it is an impressionist picture, as vivid in transient scenery

as in colour. He did the same sort of work in poems of nature, of human

life, of moments of passion, of states of the soul. That is another

reason why he was not read at first, and why he is read now. He was

impressionist long before Impressionism arrived. When it arrived he was

found out. And he stood alone, for Tennyson is never impressionist, and

never could have been. Neither was Swinburne nor Arnold, Morris nor

Rossetti.

3. Again, in the leisured upper ranges of thought and emotion, and in

the extraordinary complexity of human life which arose, first, out of

the more intimate admixture of all classes in our society; and secondly,

out of the wider and more varied world-life which increased means of

travel and knowledge afforded to men, Tennyson's smooth, melodious,

simple development of art-subjects did not represent the clashing

complexity of human life, whether inward in the passions, the intellect

or the soul, or in the active movement of the world. And the other poets

were equally incapable of representing this complexity of which the

world became clearly conscious. Arnold tried to express its beginnings,

and failed, because he tried to explain instead of representing them. He

wrote about them; he did not write them down. Nor did he really belong

to this novel, quick, variegated, involved world which was so pleased

with its own excitement and entanglement. He was the child of a world

which was then passing away, out of which life was fading, which was

tired like Obermann, and sought peace in reflective solitudes. Sometimes

he felt, as in _The New Age_, the pleasure of the coming life of the

world, but he was too weary to share in it, and he claimed quiet. But

chiefly he saw the disturbance, the unregulated life; and, unable to

realise that it was the trouble and wildness of youth, he mistook it for

the trouble of decay. He painted it as such. But it was really young,

and out of it broke all kinds of experiments in social, religious,

philosophical and political thought, such as we have seen and read of

for the last thirty years. Art joined in the experiments of this

youthful time. It opened a new fountain and sent forth from it another

stream, to echo this attempting, clanging and complicated society; and

this stream did not flow like a full river, making large or sweet

melody, but like a mountain torrent thick with rocks, the thunderous

whirlpools of whose surface were white with foam. Changing and

sensational scenery haunted its lower banks where it became dangerously

navigable. Strange boats, filled with outlandish figures, who played on

unknown instruments, and sang of deeds and passions remote from common

life, sailed by on its stormy waters. Few were the concords, many the

discords, and some of the discords were never resolved. But in one case

at least--in the case of Browning's poetry, and in very many cases in

the art of music--out of the discords emerged at last a full melody of

steady thought and controlled emotion as (to recapture my original

metaphor) the rude, interrupted music of the mountain stream reaches

full and concordant harmony when it flows in peace through the meadows

of the valley.

These complex and intercleaving conditions of thought and passion into

which society had grown Browning represented from almost the beginning

of his work. When society became conscious of them--there it found him.

And, amazed, it said, "Here is a man who forty years ago lived in the

midst of our present life and wrote about it." They saw the wild, loud

complexity of their world expressed in his verse; and yet were dimly

conscious, to their consolation, that he was aware of a central peace

where the noise was quieted and the tangle unravelled.

For Browning not only represented this discordant, varied hurly-burly of

life, but also, out of all the discords which he described, and which,

when he chose, even his rhythms and word-arrangements realised in sound,

he drew a concordant melody at last, and gave to a world, troubled with

itself, the hope of a great concent into which all the discords ran, and

where they were resolved. And this hope for the individual and the race

was one of the deepest elements in Browning's religion. It was also the

hope of Tennyson, but Tennyson was often uncertain of it, and bewailed

the uncertainty. Browning was certain of his hope, and for the most part

resolved his discords. Even when he did not resolve them, he firmly

believed that they would be resolved. This, his essential difference

from the other poets of the last fifty years, marks not only his

apartness from the self-ignorance of English society, and the

self-sceptical scepticism which arises from that self-ignorance, but

also how steadily assured was the foundation of his spiritual life. In

the midst of the shifting storms of doubt and trouble, of mockery,

contradiction, and assertion on religious matters, he stood unremoved.

Whatever men may think of his faith and his certainties, they reveal the

strength of his character, the enduring courage of his soul, and the

inspiring joyousness that, born of his strength, characterised him to

the last poem he wrote. While the other poets were tossing on the sea of

unresolved Question, he rested, musing and creating, on a green island

whose rocks were rooted on the ocean-bed, and wondered, with the smiling

tolerance of his life-long charity, how his fellows were of so little

faith, and why the sceptics made so much noise. He would have reversed

the Psalmist's cry. He would have said, "Thou art not cast down, O my

soul; thou art not disquieted within me. Thou hast hoped in God, who is

the light of thy countenance, and thy God."

At first the world, enamoured of its own complex discords, and pleased,

like boys in the street, with the alarms it made, only cared for that

part of Browning which represented the tangle and the clash, and ignored

his final melody. But of late it has begun, tired of the restless

clatter of intellectual atoms, to desire to hear, if possible, the

majestic harmonies in which the discords are resolved. And at this point

many at present and many more in the future will find their poetic and

religious satisfaction in Browning. At the very end, then, of the

nineteenth century, in a movement which had only just begun, men said to

themselves, "Browning felt beforehand what we are beginning to hope for,

and wrote of it fifty, even sixty years ago. No one cared then for him,

but we care now."

Again, though he thus anticipated the movements of the world, he did

not, like the other poets, change his view about Nature, Man and God. He

conceived that view when he was young, and he did not alter it. Hence,

he did not follow or reflect from year to year the opinions of his time

on these great matters. When _Paracelsus_ was published in 1835 Browning

had fully thought out, and in that poem fully expressed, his theory of

God's relation to man, and of man's relation to the universe around him,

to his fellow men, and to the world beyond. It was a theory which was

original, if any theory can be so called. At least, its form, as he

expressed it, was clearly original. Roughly sketched in _Pauline_, fully

rounded in _Paracelsus_, it held and satisfied his mind till the day of

his death. But Tennyson had no clear theory about Man or Nature or God

when he began, nor was he afterwards, save perhaps when he wrote the

last stanzas of _In Memoriam_, a fully satisfied citizen of the city

that has foundations. He believed in that city, but he could not always

live in it. He grew into this or that opinion about the relations of God

and man, and then grew out of it. He held now this, now that view of

nature, and of man in contact with nature. There was always battle in

his soul; although he won his brittle in the end, he had sixty years of

war. Browning was at peace, firm-fixed. It is true the inward struggle

of Tennyson enabled him to image from year to year his own time better

than Browning did. It is true this struggle enabled him to have great

variety in his art-work when it was engaged with the emotions which

belong to doubt and faith; but it also made him unable to give to his

readers that sense of things which cannot be shaken, of faith in God and

in humanity wholly independent, in its depths, of storms on the surface

of this mortal life, which was one of Browning's noblest legacies to

that wavering, faithless, pessimistic, analysis-tormented world through

which we have fought our way, and out of which we are emerging.

4. The danger in art, or for an artist, of so settled a theory is that

in expression it tends to monotony; and sometimes, when we find almost

every poem of Browning's running up into his theory, we arrive at the

borders of the Land of Weary-men. But he seems to have been aware of

this danger, and to have conquered it. He meets it by the immense

variety of the subjects he chooses, and of the scenery in which he

places them. I do not think he ever repeats any one of his examples,

though he always repeats his theory. And the pleasant result is that we

can either ignore the theory if we like, or rejoice over its universal

application, or, beyond it altogether, be charmed and excited by the

fresh examples alone. And they are likely to charm, at least by variety,

for they are taken from all ages of history; from as many diverse phases

of human act, character and passion as there are poems which concern

them; from many periods of the arts; from most of the countries of

Europe, from France, Germany, Spain, Italy, (rarely from England,) with

their specialised types of race and of landscape; and from almost every

class of educated modern society. Moreover, he had a guard within his

own nature against the danger of this monotony. It was the youthful

freshness with which, even in advanced age, he followed his rapid

impulses to art-creation. No one was a greater child than he in the

quickness with which he received a sudden call to poetry from passing

events or scenes, and in the eagerness with which he seized them as

subjects. He took the big subjects now and then which the world expects

to be taken, and treated them with elaborate thought and steadfast

feeling, but he was more often like the girl in his half-dramatic poem,

whom the transient occurrences and sights of the day touched into song.

He picked up his subjects as a man culls flowers in a mountain walk,

moved by an ever-recurring joy and fancy in them--a book on a stall, a

bust in an Italian garden, a face seen at the opera, the market chatter

of a Tuscan town, a story told by the roadside in Brittany, a picture in

some Accademia--so that, though the ground-thought might incur the

danger of dulness through repetition, the joy of the artist so filled

the illustration, and his freshness of invention was so delighted with

itself, that even to the reader the theory seemed like a new star.

In this way he kept the use of having an unwavering basis of thought

which gave unity to his sixty years of work, and yet avoided the peril

of monotony. An immense diversity animated his unity, filled it with

gaiety and brightness, and secured impulsiveness of fancy. This also

differentiates him from Tennyson, who often wanted freshness; who very

rarely wrote on a sudden impulse, but after long and careful thought; to

whose seriousness we cannot always climb with pleasure; who played so

little with the world. These defects in Tennyson had the excellences

which belong to them in art, just as these excellences in Browning had,

in art, their own defects. We should be grateful for the excellences,

and not trouble ourselves about the defects. However, neither the

excellences nor the defects concern us in the present discussion. It is

the contrast between the two men on which we dwell.

5. The next point of contrast, which will further illustrate why

Browning was not read of old but is now read, has to do with historical

criticism. There arose, some time ago, as part of the scientific and

critical movement of the last forty years, a desire to know and record

accurately the early life of peoples, pastoral, agricultural and in

towns, and the beginning of their arts and knowledges; and not only

their origins, but the whole history of their development. A close,

critical investigation was made of the origins of each people; accurate

knowledge, derived from contemporary documents, of their life, laws,

customs and language was attained; the facts of their history were

separated from their mythical and legendary elements; the dress, the

looks of men, the climate of the time, the physical aspects of their

country--all the skeleton of things was fitted together, bone to bone.

And for a good while this merely critical school held the field. It did

admirable and necessary work.

But when it was done, art claimed its place in this work. The desire

sprang up among historians to conceive all this history in the

imagination, to shape vividly its scenery, to animate and individualise

its men and women, to paint the life of the human soul in it, to clothe

it in flesh and blood, to make its feet move and its eyes flash--but to

do all these things within the limits of the accurate knowledge which

historical criticism had defined. "Let us saturate ourselves," said the

historians, "with clear knowledge of the needful facts, and then,

without violation of our knowledge, imagine the human life, the

landscape, the thinking and feeling of a primæval man, of his early

religion, of his passions; of Athens when the Persian came, of Rome when

the Republic was passing into the Empire, of a Provincial in Spain or

Britain, of a German town in the woods by the river. Let us see in

imagination as well as in knowledge an English settlement on the Welsh

border, an Italian mediæval town when its art was being born, a Jewish

village when Christ wandered into its streets, a musician or a painter's

life at a time when Greek art was decaying, or when a new impulse like

the Renaissance or the French Revolution came upon the world." When that

effort of the historians had established itself, and we have seen it

from blossoming to fruitage, people began to wonder that no poet had

ever tried to do this kind of work. It seemed eminently fitted for a

poet's hand, full of subjects alluring to the penetrative imagination.

It needed, of course, some scholarship, for it demanded accuracy in its

grasp of the main ideas of the time to be represented; but that being

given, immense opportunities remained for pictures of human life, full

of colour, thought and passions; for subtle and brilliant

representations of the eternal desires and thinkings of human nature as

they were governed by the special circumstances of the time in which the

poem was placed; and for the concentration into a single poem, gathered

round one person, of the ideas whose new arrival formed a crisis in the

history of art.

Men looked for this in Tennyson and did not find it. His Greek and

mediæval poems were modernised. Their imaginative work was uncritical.

But when the historians and the critics of art and of religious

movements happened at last to look into Browning, they discovered, to

their delight and wonder, that he had been doing, with a curious

knowledge, this kind of work for many years. He had anticipated the

results of that movement of the imagination in historical work which did

not exist when he began to write; he had worked that mine, and the

discovery of this made another host of people readers of his poetry.

We need scarcely give examples of this. _Sordello_, in 1840 (long before

the effort of which we speak began), was such a poem--the history of a

specialised soul, with all its scenery and history vividly mediæval.

Think of the _Spanish Cloister_, _The Laboratory_, _A Grammarian's

Funeral_, the _Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church_, poems,

each of which paints an historical period or a vivid piece of its life.

Think of _The Ring and the Book_, with all the world of Rome painted to

the life, and all the soul of the time!

The same kind of work was done for phases and periods of the arts from

Greek times to the Renaissance, I may even say, from the Renaissance to

the present day. _Balaustion's Prologue_ concentrates the passage of

dramatic poetry from Sophocles to Euripides. _Aristophanes' Apology_

realises the wild licence in which art and freedom died in Athens--their

greatness in their ruin--and the passionate sorrow of those who loved

what had been so beautiful. _Cleon_ takes us into a later time when men

had ceased to be original, and life and art had become darkened by the

pain of the soul. We pass on to two different periods of the

Renaissance in _Fra Lippo Lippi_ and in _Andrea del Sarto_, and are

carried further through the centuries of art when we read _Abt Vogler_

and _A Toccata of Galuppi's_. Each of these poems is a concentrated,

accurate piece of art-history, with the addition to it of the human

soul.

Periods and phases of religious history are equally realised. _Caliban

upon Setebos_ begins the record--that philosophic savage who makes his

God out of himself. Then follows study after study, from _A Death in the

Desert_ to _Bishop Blougram's Apology_. Some carry us from early

Christianity through the mediæval faith; others lead us through the

Paganism of the Renaissance and strange shows of Judaism to Browning's

own conception of religion in the present day contrasted with those of

the popular religion in _Christmas-Day and Easter-Day_.

Never, in poetry, was the desire of the historical critic for accuracy

of fact and portraiture, combined with vivid presentation of life, so

fully satisfied. No wonder Browning was not read of old; but it is no

wonder, when the new History was made, when he was once found out, that

he passed from a few to a multitude of readers.

6. Another contrast appears at the very beginning of their career.

Tennyson, in his two earliest books in 1830 and 1833, though clearly

original in some poems, had clinging round his singing robes some of the

rags of the past. He wrote partly in the weak and sentimental strain of

the poets between 1822 and 1832. Browning, on the contrary, sprang at

once into an original poetic life of his own. _Pauline_ was unfinished,

irregular in form, harsh, abrupt, and overloaded, but it was also

entirely fresh and distinct. The influence of Shelley echoes in it, but

much more in admiration than in imitation of him. The matter, the spirit

of the poem were his own, and the verse-movement was his own. Had

Browning been an imitator, the first thing he would have imitated would

have been the sweet and rippling movement of Shelley's melodies. But the

form of his verse, such as it was, arose directly out of his own nature

and was as original as his matter. Tennyson grew into originality,

Browning leaped into it; born, not of other poets, but of his own will.

He begat himself. It had been better for his art, so far as technical

excellence is concerned, had he studied and imitated at first the

previous masters. But he did not; and his dominant individuality, whole

in itself and creating its own powers, separates him at the very

beginning from Tennyson.

7. Tennyson became fully original, but he always admitted, and sometimes

encouraged in himself, a certain vein of conventionality. He kept the

opinions of the past in the matter of caste. He clung to certain

political and social maxims, and could not see beyond them. He sometimes

expressed them as if they were freshly discovered truths or direct

emanations from the Deity of England. He belonged to a certain type of

English society, and he rarely got out of it in his poetry. He inhabited

a certain Park of morals, and he had no sympathy with any self-ethical

life beyond its palings. What had been, what was proper and recognised,

somewhat enslaved in Tennyson that distinctiveness and freedom of

personality which is of so much importance in poetry, and which, had it

had more liberty in Tennyson, would have made him a still greater poet

than he was.

Browning, on the other hand--much more a person in society than

Tennyson, much more a man of the world, and obeying in society its

social conventions more than Tennyson--never allowed this to touch his

poems. As the artist, he was quite free from the opinions, maxims, and

class conventions of the past or the present. His poetry belongs to no

special type of society, to no special nationality, to no separate creed

or church, to no settled standard of social morality. What his own

thought and emotion urged him to say, he said with an absolute

carelessness of what the world would say. And in this freedom he

preceded and prophesied the reaction of the last years of the nineteenth

century against the tyranny of maxims and conventions in society, in

morals, and in religion. That reaction has in many ways been carried

beyond the proper limits of what is just and beautiful. But these

excesses had to be, and the world is beginning to avoid them. What

remains is the blessing of life set free, not altogether from the use of

conventions, but from their tyranny and oppression, and lifted to a

higher level, where the test of what is right and fitting in act, and

just in thought, is not the opinion of society, but that Law of Love

which gives us full liberty to develop our own nature and lead our own

life in the way we think best independent of all conventions, provided

we do not injure the life of others, or violate any of the great moral

and spiritual truths by obedience to which the progress of mankind is

promoted and secured. Into that high and free region of thought and

action Browning brought us long ago. Tennyson did not, save at intervals

when the poet over-rode the man. This differentiates the men. But it

also tells us why Browning was not read fifty years ago, when social

conventions were tyrannous and respectability a despot, and why he has

been read for the last fifteen years and is read now.

8. There is another contrast between these poets. It is quite clear that

Tennyson was a distinctively English poet and a patriotic poet; at times

too much of a patriot to judge tolerantly, or to write fairly, about

other countries. He had, at least, a touch of national contempts, even

of national hatreds. His position towards France was much that of the

British sailor of Nelson's time. His position towards Ireland was that

of the bishop, who has been a schoolmaster, to the naughty curate who

has a will of his own. His position towards Scotland was that of one who

was aware that it had a geographical existence, and that a regiment in

the English army which had a genius for fighting was drawn from its

Highlands. He condescends to write a poem at Edinburgh, but then

Edinburgh was of English origin and name. Even with that help he cannot

be patient of the place. The poem is a recollection of an Italian

journey, and he forgets in memories of the South--though surely

Edinburgh might have awakened some romantic associations--

the clouded Forth,

The gloom which saddens Heaven and Earth,

The bitter East, the misty summer

And gray metropolis of the North.

Edinburgh is English in origin, but Tennyson did not feel England beyond

the Border. There the Celt intruded, and he looked askance upon the

Celt. The Celtic spirit smiled, and took its vengeance on him in its own

way. It imposed on him, as his chief subject, a Celtic tale and a Celtic

hero; and though he did his best to de-celticise the story, the

vengeance lasts, for the more he did this the more he injured his work.

However, being always a noble artist, he made a good fight for his

insularity, and the expression of it harmonised with the pride of

England in herself, alike with that which is just and noble in it, and

with that which is neither the one nor the other.

Then, too, his scenery (with some exceptions, and those invented) was of

his own land, and chiefly of the places where he lived. It was quite

excellent, but it was limited. But, within the limit of England, it was

steeped in the love of England; and so sweet and full is this love, and

so lovely are its results in song, that every Englishman has, for this

reason if for no other, a deep and just affection for Tennyson.

Nevertheless, in that point also his poetry was insular. A fault in the

poet, not in the poetry. Perhaps, from this passionate concentration,

the poetry was all the lovelier.

Again, when Tennyson took a great gest of war as his subject, he took it

exclusively from the history of his own land. No one would know from his

writings that high deeds of sacrifice in battle had been done by other

nations. He knew of them, but he did not care to write about them. Nor

can we trace in his work any care for national struggles or national

life beyond this island--except in a few sonnets and short pieces

concerning Poland and Montenegro--an isolation of interests which cannot

be imputed to any other great poet of the first part of the nineteenth

century, excepting Keats, who had no British or foreign interests. Keats

had no country save the country of Beauty.

At all these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He never displayed

a special patriotism. On the contrary, he is more Italian than English,

and he is more quick to see and sympathise with the national

characteristics of Spain or France or Germany, than he is with those of

England. No insular feeling prevented him from being just to foreigners,

or from having a keen pleasure in writing about them. _Strafford_ is the

only play he wrote on an English subject, and it is rather a study of a

character which might find its place in any aristocracy than of an

English character. Even Pym and Hampden fail to be truly English, and it

would have been difficult for any one but Browning to take their eminent

English elements out of them. _Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_ belong to

Germany and Italy, and there are scarcely three poems in the whole of

the seven numbers of the _Bells and Pomegranates_ which even refer to

England. Italy is there, and chiefly Italy. In _De Gustibus_ he

contrasts himself with his friend who loves England:

Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,

(If our loves remain)

In an English lane

By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.

* * *

What I love best in all the world

Is a castle, precipice-encurled,

In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.

"Look for me, old fellow of mine, if I get out of the grave, in a

seaside house in South Italy," and he describes the place and folk he

loves, and ends:

Open my heart and you will see

Graved inside of it, "Italy."

Such lovers old are I and she:

So it always was, so shall ever be!

It is a poem written out of his very heart.

And then, the scenery? It is not of our country at all. It is of many

lands, but, above all, it is vividly Italian. There is no more minute

and subtly-felt description of the scenery of a piece of village country

between the mountains and the sea, with all its life, than in the poem

called _The Englishman in Italy_. The very title is an outline of

Browning's position in this matter. We find this English poet in France,

in Syria, in Greece, in Spain, but not in England. We find Rome,

Florence, Venice, Mantua, Verona, and forgotten towns among the

Apennines painted with happy love in verse, but not an English town nor

an English village. The flowers, the hills, the ways of the streams, the

talk of the woods, the doings of the sea and the clouds in tempest and

in peace, the aspects of the sky at noon, at sunrise and sunset, are all

foreign, not English. The one little poem which is of English landscape

is written by him in Italy (in a momentary weariness with his daily

adoration), and under a green impulse. Delightful as it is, he would not

have remained faithful to it for a day. Every one knows it, but that we

may realise how quick he was to remember and to touch a corner of early

Spring in England, on a soft and windy day--for all the blossoms are

scattered--I quote it here. It is well to read his sole contribution

(except in _Pauline_ and a few scattered illustrations) to the scenery

of his own country:

Oh, to be in England

Now that April's there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree hole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England--now!

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!

Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge

Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge--

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

All will be gay, when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children's dower;

--Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

So it runs; but it is only a momentary memory; and he knew, when he had

done it, and to his great comfort, that he was far away from England.

But when Tennyson writes of Italy--as, for instance, in _Mariana in the

South_--how apart he is! How great is his joy when he gets back to

England!

Then, again, when Browning was touched by the impulse to write about a

great deed in war, he does not choose, like Tennyson, English subjects.

The _Cavalier Tunes_ have no importance as patriot songs. They are mere

experiments. The poem, _How They brought the Good News from Ghent to

Aix_, has twice their vigour. His most intense war-incident is taken

from the history of the French wars under Napoleon. The most ringing and

swiftest poem of personal dash and daring--and at sea, as if he was

tired of England's mistress-ship of the waves--a poem one may set side

by side with the fight of _The Revenge_, is _Hervé Riel_. It is a tale

of a Breton sailor saving the French fleet from the English, with the

sailor's mockery of England embedded in it; and Browning sent the

hundred pounds he got for it to the French, after the siege of Paris.

It was not that he did not honour his country, but that, as an artist,

he loved more the foreign lands; and that in his deepest life he

belonged less to England than to the world of man. The great deeds of

England did not prevent him from feeling, with as much keenness as

Tennyson felt those of England, the great deeds of France and Italy.

National self-sacrifice in critical hours, splendid courage in love and

war, belonged, he thought, to all peoples. Perhaps he felt, with

Tennyson's insularity dominating his ears, that it was as well to put

the other side. I think he might have done a little more for England.

There is only one poem, out of all his huge production, which recognises

the great deeds of our Empire in war; and this did not come of a

life-long feeling, such as he had for Italy, but from a sudden impulse

which arose in him, as sailing by, he saw Trafalgar and Gibraltar,

glorified and incarnadined by a battle-sunset:

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away;

Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;

Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;

In the dimmest North-east distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;

"Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?"--say.

Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,

While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

It is a little thing, and when it leaves the sunset it is poor. And

there is twice the fervour of its sunset in the description of the

sunrise at Asolo in _Pippa Passes_.

Again, there is scarcely a trace in his work of any vital interest in

the changes of thought and feeling in England during the sixty years of

his life, such as appear everywhere in Tennyson. No one would know from

his poetry (at least until the very end of his life, when he wrote

_Francis Furini_) that the science of life and its origins had been

revolutionised in the midst of his career, or, save in _A Death in the

Desert_, that the whole aspect of theology had been altered, or that the

democratic movement had taken so many new forms. He showed to these

English struggles neither attraction nor repulsion. They scarcely

existed for him--transient elements of the world, merely national, not

universal. Nor did the literature or art of his own country engage him

half so much as the literature and art of Italy. He loved both. Few were

better acquainted with English poetry, or reverenced it more; but he

loved it, not because it was English, but of that world of imagination

which has no special country. He cared also for English art, but he gave

all his personal love to the art of Italy. Nor does he write, as

Tennyson loved to do, of the daily life of the English farmer, squire,

miller and sailor, and of English sweet-hearting, nor of the English

park and brook and village-green and their indwellers, but of the

work-girl at Asolo, and the Spanish monk in his garden, and the Arab

riding through the desert, and of the Duchess and her servant flying

through the mountains of Moldavia, and of the poor painters at Fano and

Florence, and of the threadbare poet at Valladolid, and of the

peasant-girl who fed the Tuscan outlaw, and of the poor grammarian who

died somewhere in Germany (as I think Browning meant it), and of the

Jews at Rome, and of the girl at Pornic with the gold hair and the

peasant's hand, and of a hundred others, none of whom are English. All

his common life, all his love-making, sorrow and joy among the poor, are

outside this country, with perhaps two exceptions; and neither of these

has the English note which sounds so soft and clear in Tennyson. This is

curious enough, and it is probably one of the reasons why English people

for a long time would have so little to do with him. All the same, he

was himself woven of England even more than of Italy. The English

elements in his character and work are more than the Italian. His

intellect was English, and had the English faults as well as the English

excellences. His optimism was English; his steadfast fighting quality,

his unyielding energy, his directness, his desire to get to the root of

things, were English. His religion was the excellent English compromise

or rather balance of dogma, practice and spirituality which laymen make

for their own life. His bold sense of personal freedom was English. His

constancy to his theories, whether of faith or art, was English; his

roughness of form was positively early Teutonic.

Then his wit, his _esprit_,[3] his capacity for induing he skin and the

soul of other persons at remote times of history; his amazing

inventiveness and the ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out

of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the

way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary

self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of

reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to

one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the ardour

of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his

impulse towards the infinite and the constant rush he made into its

indefinite realms; the special set of his imagination towards the

fulfillment of perfection in Love; his vision of Nature as in colour,

rather than in light and shade; his love of beauty and the kind of

beauty that he loved; his extraordinary delight in all kinds of art as

the passionate shaping of part of the unapproachable Beauty--these were

all old Italian.

Then I do not know whether Browning had any Jewish blood in his body by

descent, but he certainly had Jewish elements in his intellect, spirit

and character. His sense of an ever-victorious Righteousness at the

centre of the universe, whom one might always trust and be untroubled,

was Jewish, but he carried it forward with the New Testament and made

the Righteousness identical with absolute Love. Yet, even in this, the

Old Testament elements were more plainly seen than is usual among

Christians. The appearance of Christ as all-conquering love in

_Easter-Day_ and the scenery which surrounds him are such as Ezekiel

might have conceived and written. Then his intellectual subtlety, the

metaphysical minuteness of his arguments, his fondness for parenthesis,

the way in which he pursued the absolute while he loaded it with a host

of relatives, and conceived the universal through a multitude of

particulars, the love he had for remote and unexpected analogies, the

craft with which his intellect persuaded him that he could insert into

his poems thoughts, illustrations, legends, and twisted knots of

reasoning which a fine artistic sense would have omitted, were all as

Jewish as the Talmud. There was also a Jewish quality in his natural

description, in the way he invented diverse phrases to express different

aspects of the same phenomenon, a thing for which the Jews were famous;

and in the way in which he peopled what he described with animal life of

all kinds, another remarkable habit of the Jewish poets. Moreover, his

pleasure in intense colour, in splashes and blots of scarlet and crimson

and deep blue and glowing green; in precious stones for the sake of

their colour--sapphire, ruby, emerald, chrysolite, pearl, onyx,

chalcedony (he does not care for the diamond); in the flame of gold, in

the crimson of blood, is Jewish. So also is his love of music, of music

especially as bringing us nearest to what is ineffable in God, of music

with human aspiration in its heart and sounding in its phrases. It was

this Jewish element in Browning, in all its many forms, which caused him

to feel with and to write so much about the Jews in his poetry. The two

poems in which he most fully enshrines his view of human life, as it may

be in the thought of God and as it ought to be conceived by us, are both

in the mouth of Jews, of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ and _Jochanan Hakkadosh_. In

_Filippo Baldinucci_ the Jew has the best of the battle; his courtesy,

intelligence and physical power are contrasted with the coarseness,

feeble brains and body of the Christians. In _Holy-Cross Day_, the Jew,

forced to listen to a Christian sermon, begins with coarse and angry

mockery, but passes into solemn thought and dignified phrase. No English

poet, save perhaps Shakespeare, whose exquisite sympathy could not leave

even Shylock unpitied, has spoken of the Jew with compassion, knowledge

and admiration, till Browning wrote of him. The Jew lay deep in

Browning. He was a complex creature; and who would understand or rather

feel him rightly, must be able to feel something of the nature of all

these races in himself. But Tennyson was not complex. He was English and

only English.

But to return from this digression. Browning does not stand alone among

the poets in the apartness from his own land of which I have written.

Byron is partly with him. Where Byron differs from him is, first, in

this--that Byron had no poetic love for any special country as Browning

had for Italy; and, secondly, that his country was, alas, himself, until

at the end, sick of his self-patriotism, he gave himself to Greece.

Keats, on the other hand, had no country except, as I have said, the

country of Loveliness. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley were not

exclusively English. Shelley belonged partly to Italy, but chiefly to

that future of mankind in which separate nationalities and divided

patriotisms are absorbed. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their early days,

were patriots of humanity; they actually for a time abjured their

country. Even in his later days Wordsworth's sympathies reach far beyond

England. But none of these were so distinctively English as Tennyson,

and none of them were so outside of England as Browning. Interesting as

it is, the _completeness_ of this isolation from England was a

misfortune, not a strength, in his poetry.

There is another thing to say in this connection. The expansion of the

interests of the English poets beyond England was due in Wordsworth,

Coleridge, Shelley, and partly in Byron, to the great tidal-wave of

feeling for man as man, which, rising long before the French Revolution,

was lifted into twice its height and dashed on the shore of the world

with overwhelming volume, by the earthquake in France of 1789. Special

national sentiments were drowned in its waters. Patriotism was the duty

of man, not to any one nation but to the whole of humanity, conceived of

as the only nation.

In 1832 there was little left of that influence in England among the

educated classes, and Tennyson's insular patriotism represented their

feeling for many years, and partly represents it now. But the ideas of

the Revolution were at the same time taking a wiser and more practical

form among the English democracy than they even had at their first

outburst in France, and this emerged, on one side of it, in the idea of

internationalism. It grew among the propertied classes from the greater

facilities of travel, from the wide extension of commercial, and

especially of literary, intercommunication. Literature, even more than

commerce, diminishes the oppositions and increases the amalgamation of

nations. On her lofty plane nations breathe an air in which their

quarrels die. The same idea grew up of itself among the working classes,

not only in England, but in Germany, Italy, France, America. They began,

and have continued, to lose their old belief in distinct and warring

nationalities. To denationalise the nations into one nation only--the

nation of mankind--is too vast an idea to grow quickly, but in all

classes, and perhaps most in the working class, there are an increasing

number of thinking men who say to the varied nations, "We are all one;

our interests, duties, rights, nature and aims are one." And, for my

part, I believe that in the full development of that conception the

progress of mankind is most deeply concerned, and will be best secured.

Now, when all these classes in England, brought to much the same point

by different paths, seek for a poetry which is international rather than

national, and which recognises no special country as its own, they do

not find it in Tennyson, but they do find Browning writing, and quite

naturally, as if he belonged to other peoples as much as to his own,

even more than to his own. And they also find that he had been doing

this for many years before their own international interests had been

awakened. That, then, differentiates him completely from Tennyson, and

is another reason why he was not read in the past but is read in the

present.

9. Again, with regard to politics and social questions, Tennyson made us

know what his general politics were, and he has always pleased or

displeased men by his political position. The British Constitution

appears throughout his work seated like Zeus on Olympus, with all the

world awaiting its nod. Then, also, social problems raise their

storm-awakening heads in his poetry: the Woman's Question; War;

Competition; the State of the Poor; Education; a State without Religion;

the Marriage Question; where Freedom lies; and others. These are brought

by Tennyson, though tentatively, into the palace of poetry and given

rooms in it.

At both these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He was not the

politician, not the sociologist, only the poet. No trace of the British

Constitution is to be found in his poetry; no one could tell from it

that he had any social views or politics at all. Sixty years in close

contact with this country and its movements, and not a line about them!

He records the politics of the place and people of whom or of which he

is for the moment writing, but he takes no side. We know what they

thought at Rome or among the Druses of these matters, but we do not know

what Browning thought. The art-representation, the _Vorstellung_ of the

thing, is all; the personal view of the poet is nothing. It is the same

in social matters. What he says as a poet concerning the ideas which

should rule the temper of the soul and human life in relation to our

fellow men may be applied to our social questions, and usefully; but

Browning is not on that plane. There are no poems directly applied to

them. This means that he kept himself outside the realm of political and

social discussions and in the realm of those high emotions and ideas out

of which imagination in lonely creation draws her work to light. With

steady purpose he refused to make his poetry the servant of the

transient, of the changing elements of the world. He avoided the

contemporary. For this high reserve we and the future of art will owe

him gratitude.

On the contrast between the theology we find in Tennyson and Browning,

and on the contrast between their ethical positions, it will be wiser

not to speak in this introduction. These two contrasts would lead me too

far afield, and they have little or nothing to do with poetry. Moreover,

Browning's theology and ethics, as they are called, have been discussed

at wearying length for the last ten years, and especially by persons who

use his poetry to illustrate from it their own systems of theology,

philosophy and ethics.

10. I will pass, therefore, to another contrast--the contrast between

them as Artists.

A great number of persons who write about the poets think, when they

have said the sort of things I have been saying, that they have said

either enough, or the most important things. The things are, indeed,

useful to say; they enable us to realise the poet and his character, and

the elements of which his poetry is made. They place him in a clear

relation to his time; they distinguish him from other poets, and, taken

all together, they throw light upon his work. But they are not half

enough, nor are they the most important. They leave out the essence of

the whole matter; they leave out the poetry. They illuminate the surface

of his poetry, but they do not penetrate into his interpretation, by

means of his special art, and under the influence of high emotion, of

the beautiful and sublime Matter of thought and feeling which arises out

of Nature and Human Nature, the two great subjects of song; which Matter

the poets represent in a form so noble and so lovely in itself that,

when it is received into a heart prepared for it, it kindles in the

receiver a love of beauty and sublimity similar to that which the poet

felt before he formed, and while he formed, his poem. Such a receiver,

reading the poem, makes the poem, with an individual difference, in

himself. And this is the main thing; the eternal, not the temporary

thing.

Almost all I have already discussed with regard to Tennyson and Browning

belongs to the temporary; and the varying judgments which their public

have formed of them, chiefly based on their appeal to the tendencies of

the time, do not at all predict what the final judgment on these men as

poets is likely to be. That will depend, not on feelings which belong to

the temporary elements of the passing day, but on how far the eternal

and unchanging elements of art appear in their work. The things which

fitted the poetry of Tennyson to the years between 1840 and 1870 have

already passed away; the things which, as I have explained, fitted the

poetry of Browning to the tendencies of the years after 1870 will also

disappear, and are already disappearing. Indeed, the excessive

transiency of nearly all the interests of cultivated society during the

last ten years is that in them which most deeply impresses any man who

sits somewhat apart from them. And, at any rate, none of these merely

contemporary elements, which often seem to men the most important, will

count a hundred years hence in the estimate of the poetry either of

Tennyson or Browning. They will be of historical interest, and no more.

Matters in their poetry, now the subjects of warm discussion among their

critics, will be laid aside as materials for judgment; and justly, for

they are of quite impermanent value.

Whenever, then, we try to judge them as poets, we must do our best to

discharge these temporary things, and consider their poetry as it will

seem a hundred years hence to men who will think seriously and feel

sensitively, even passionately, towards great and noble Matter of

imaginative thought and emotion concerning human life and the natural

world, and towards lovely creation of such matter into Form. Their

judgment will be made apart from the natural prejudices that arise from

contemporary movements. They will not be wiser in their judgment of

their own poets than we are about ours, but they will be wiser in their

judgment of our poets, because, though they will have their own

prejudices, they will not have ours. Moreover, the long, growing, and

incessantly corrected judgment of those best fitted to feel what is most

beautiful in shaping and most enduring in thought and feeling

penetrated and made infinite by imagination, will, by that time, have

separated the permanent from the impermanent in the work of Browning and

Tennyson.

That judgment will partly depend on the answers, slowly, as it were

unconsciously, given by the world to two questions. First, how far does

their poetry represent truly and passionately what is natural and most

widely felt in loving human nature, whether terrible or joyful, simple

or complex, tragic or humorous? Secondly, how far is the representation

beautiful and noble in form, and true to the laws of their art. That

poetry which is nearest to the most natural, the most universal elements

of human life when they are suffused with love--in some at least of its

various moods--and at the same time the most beautiful in form, is the

best. It wins most affection from mankind, for it is about noble matters

of thought which the greater number of men and women desire to

contemplate, and about noble matters of passion which the greater number

love and therefore enjoy. This poetry lasts from generation to

generation, is independent of differences made by climate, by caste, by

nationality, by religion, by politics, by knowledge, custom, tradition

or morals. These universal, natural elements of human nature are, in all

their infinite variety and striving, beloved by men, of undying interest

in action, and of immortal pleasure in thought. The nearer a poet is to

them, especially to what is lovable, and therefore beautiful in them,

the greater and the more enduring is his work. It follows that this

greater work will also be simple, that is, easy to feel with the heart

though it may be difficult to grasp by the intelligence. Were it not

simple in feeling, the general answer of mankind to the call of love, in

all its forms, for sympathy would be unheard. And if it be simple in

feeling, it does not much matter if the deep waters of its thought are

difficult for the understanding to fathom.

It would be ridiculous to dogmatise on a matter which can only be fully

answered a century hence, but this much is plain. Of these two poets,

taking into consideration the whole of their work, Tennyson is the

closest to human nature in its noble, common and loving forms, as

Browning is the closest to what is complex, subtle and uncommon in human

nature. The representation both of the simple and of the complex is a

good thing, and both poets have their place and honour. But the

representation of the complex is plainly the more limited in range of

influence, and appeals to a special class of minds rather than to

mankind at large. There are some, indeed, who think that the appeal to

the few, to thinkers alone or high-wrought specialists in various forms

of culture, marks out the greater poet. It is the tendency of literary

castes to think that specialised work is the greatest. "This man," they

say, "is our poet, not the mob's. He stands apart, and his apartness

marks his greatness." These are amusing persons, who practically say,

"We alone understand him, therefore he is great."

Yet a phrase like "apartness makes greatness," when justly applied to a

poet, marks, not his superiority of rank, but his inferiority. It

relegates him at once to a lower place. The greatest poets are loved by

all, and understood by all who think and feel naturally. Homer was

loved by Pericles and by the sausage-seller. Vergil was read with joy by

Mæcenas and Augustus, and by the vine-dressers of Mantua. Dante drew

after him the greatest minds in Italy, and yet is sung to-day by the

shepherds and peasants of the hill-villages of Tuscany. Shakespeare

pleases the most selected spirits of the world and the galleries of the

strolling theatres.

And though Tennyson and Browning are far below these mightier poets, yet

when we apply to them this rule, drawn from what we know to be true of

the greatest, Tennyson answers its demand more closely than Browning.

The highest work which poetry can do is to glorify what is most natural

and simple in the whole of loving human nature, and to show the

excelling beauty, not so much of the stranger and wilder doings of the

natural world, but of its everyday doings and their common changes. In

doing these two things with simplicity, passion and beauty is the finest

work of the arts, the eternal youth, the illimitable material of poetry,

and it will endure while humanity endures in this world, and in that

which is to come. Among all our cultivated love of the uncommon, the

remote, the subtle, the involved, the metaphysical and the terrible--the

representation of which things has its due place, even its necessity--it

is well to think of that quiet truth, and to keep it as a first

principle in the judgment of the arts. Indeed, the recovery of the

natural, simple and universal ways of acting and feeling in men and

women who love as the finest subjects of the arts has always regenerated

them whenever, in pursuit of the unnatural, the complicated, the

analytic, and the sensational, they have fallen into decay.

Browning did not like this view, being conscious that his poetry did not

answer its demand. Not only in early but also in later poems, he

pictured his critics stating it, and his picture is scornful enough.

There is an entertaining sketch of Naddo, the Philistine critic, in the

second book of _Sordello_; and the view I speak of is expressed by him

among a huddle of criticisms--

"Would you have your songs endure?

Build on the human heart!--why, to be sure

Yours is one sort of heart.--But I mean theirs,

Ours, every one's, the healthy heart one cares

To build on! Central peace, mother of strength,

That's father of...."

This is good fooling, and Naddo is an ass. Nevertheless, though Naddo

makes nonsense of the truth, he was right in the main, and Browning as

well as Sordello suffered when they forgot or ignored that truth. And,

of course, Browning did not forget or ignore it in more than half his

work. Even in _Sordello_ he tells us how he gave himself up to recording

with pity and love the doings of the universal soul. He strove to paint

the whole. It was a bold ambition. Few have fulfilled it so well. None,

since Shakespeare, have had a wider range. His portraiture of life was

so much more varied than that of Tennyson, so much more extensive and

detailed, that on this side he excels Tennyson; but such portraiture is

not necessarily poetic, and when it is fond of the complex, it is always

in danger of tending to prose. And Browning, picturing human life,

deviated too much into the delineation of its more obscure and complex

forms. It was in his nature to do and love this kind of work; and indeed

it has to be done, if human life is to be painted fully. Only, it is not

to be done too much, if one desires to be always the poet. For the

representation of the complex and obscure is chiefly done by the

analysing understanding, and its work and pleasure in it lures the poet

away from art. He loses the poetic turn of the thing of which he writes,

and what he produces is not better than rhythmical prose. Again and

again Browning fell into that misfortune; and it is a strange problem

how a man, who was in one part of his nature a great poet, could, under

the sway of another, cease to be a poet. At this point his inferiority

to Tennyson as a poet is plain. Tennyson scarcely ever wrote a line

which was not unmistakably poetry, while Browning could write pages

which were unmistakably not poetry.

I do not mean, in saying all this, that Browning did not appeal to that

which is deepest and universal in nature and human nature, but only that

he did not appeal to it as much as Tennyson. Browning is often simple,

lovely and universal. And when he speaks out of that emotional

imagination wherein is the hiding of a poet's power, and which is the

legitimate sovereign of his intellectual work, he will win and keep the

delight and love of the centuries to come. By work of this type he will

be finally judged and finally endure; and, even now, every one who loves

great poetry knows what these master-poems are. As to the others, the

merely subtle, analytic poems in which intellect, not imagination, is

supreme, especially those into which he drifted in his later life when

the ardour of his poetic youth glowed less warmly--they will always

appeal to a certain class of persons who would like to persuade

themselves that they like poetry but to whom its book is sealed; and

who, in finding out what Browning means, imagine to their great surprise

that they find out that they care for poetry. What they really care for

is their own cleverness in discovering riddles, and they are as far away

from poetry as Sirius is from the Sun.

There are, however, many true lovers of poetry who are enthusiastic

about these poems. And parts of them deserve this enthusiasm, for they

have been conceived and made in a wild borderland between analysis and

imagination. They occupy a place apart, a backwater in the noble stream

of English poetry, filled with strange plants; and the final judgment of

Browning's rank as an artist will not depend on them but on the earlier

poems, which, being more "simple, sensuous and passionate," are nearer

to the common love and life of man. When, then, we apply this test, the

difference of rank between him and Tennyson is not great, but it is

plain. Yet comparison, on this point, is difficult. Both drew mankind.

Tennyson is closer to that which is most universal in the human heart,

Browning to the vast variety within it; and men in the future will find

their poetic wants best satisfied by reading the work of both these

poets. Let us say then that in this matter they are equal. Each has done

a different part of that portraiture of human nature which is the chief

work of a poet.

But this is not the only test we may apply to these men as poets. The

second question which tries the endurance and greatness of poetic work

is this: "How far is any poet's representation of what is true and

loving in itself lovely?" Their stuff may be equally good. Is their form

equally good? Is it as beautiful as an artist, whose first duty is to be

true to beauty as the shape of love and truth, ought to make it? The

judgment of the future will also be formed on that ground, and

inevitably.

What we call form in poetry may be said to consist of, or to depend on,

three things: (1) on a noble style; (2) on a harmonious composition,

varied but at unity; (3) on a clear, sweet melody of lawful movement in

verse. These are not everything in poetry, but they are the half of its

whole. The other half is that the "matter"--that is, the deep substance

of amalgamated Thought and Emotion--should be great, vital and fair. But

both halves are necessary, and when the half which regards form is weak

or unbeautiful, the judgment of the future drops the poems which are

faulty in form out of memory, just as it drops out of its affections

poems which are excellent in form, but of ignoble, unimpassioned, feeble

or thoughtless matter. There was, for example, a whole set of poets

towards the end of the Elizabethan period who were close and weighty

thinkers, whose poetry is full of intellectual surprises and

difficulties, who were capable of subtlety of expression and even of

lovely turns and phantasies of feeling; whom students read to-day, but

whom the poetical world does not read at all. And the reason is that

their style, their melody, and their composition do not match in

excellence their matter. Their stuff is good, their form is bad. The

judgment of the future gives them no high rank. They do not answer well

to the test of which I speak.

I do not mean to apply that analogy altogether, only partly, to

Browning. He rises far above these poets in style, composition and

melody, but he skirts their faults. And if we are asked to compare him

to Tennyson, he is inferior to Tennyson at all these points of Form.

(1) His composition was rarely sufficiently careful. It was broken up,

overcrowded; minor objects of thought or feeling are made too remarkable

for the whole; there is far too little of poetical perspective; the

variety of the poem does not always grow out of the subject itself, but

out of the external play of Browning's mind upon things remotely

connected with the subject; too many side-issues are introduced;

everything he imagined is cast upon the canvas, too little is laid

aside, so that the poems run to a length which weakens instead of

strengthening the main impression. A number of the poems have, that is,

the faults of a composer whose fancy runs away with him, who does not

ride it as a master; and in whom therefore, for a time, imagination has

gone to sleep. Moreover, only too often, they have those faults of

composition which naturally belong to a poet when he writes as if

intellect rather than passion were the ultimate umpire of the work of

his art. Of course, there are many exceptions; and the study of those

exceptions, as exceptions, would make an interesting essay. On the other

hand, Tennyson's composition was for the most part excellent, and

always careful.

(2) Then as to style. Browning had a style of his own, wholly devoid of

imitation, perfectly individual, and this is one of the marks of a good

artist. It was the outcome of his poetic character, and represented it.

At this point his style is more interesting than Tennyson's. Tennyson's

style was often too much worked, too consciously subjected to the rules

of his art, too worn down to smoothness of texture. Moreover, the

natural surprises of an unchartered individuality do not sufficiently

appear in it (Tennyson repressed the fantastic), though the whole weight

of his character does magnificently appear. But if Tennyson was too

conscious of his style--a great misfortune especially in passionate

song--Browning did not take any deliberate pains with his style, and

that is a greater misfortune. His freedom ran into undue licence; and he

seems to be over-conscious, even proud, of his fantastical way of

writing. His individuality runs riot in his style. He paid little

attention to the well-established rules of his art, in a revulsion,

perhaps, from any imitation of the great models. He had not enough

reverence for his art, and little for the public. He flung his diction

at our heads and said: "This is myself; take it or leave it."

None of the greater artists of the world have ever done this. They have

not cared for what the world said, but they have cared for their art.

There are certain limits to individual capriciousness in style, long

since laid down, as it were, by Beauty herself; which, transgressed,

lessen, injure or lose beauty; and Browning continually transgressed

those limits.

Again, clearness is one of the first elements in style, and on poetry

attaining clearness, depends, in great measure, its enduringness in the

future. So far as clearness carries him, Tennyson's poetry is sure to

last. So far as Browning's obscurity goes, his poetry will not last like

Tennyson's. It is all very well for his students to say that he is not

obscure; he is. Nor is it by any exceptional depth of thought or by any

specially profound analysis of the soul that Browning is obscure. It is

by his style. By that he makes what is easy difficult. The reader does

not get at what he means as he gets at what Homer, Dante, and

Shakespeare mean. Dante and Shakespeare are often difficult through the

depth and difficulty of their matter; they are not difficult, except

Shakespeare when he was learning his art, by obscurity or carelessness

of style. But Browning is difficult not by his thoughts, but by his

expression of them. A poet has no right to be so indifferent, so

careless of clearness in his art, I might almost say, so lazy. Browning

is negligent to a fault, almost to impertinence. The great poets put the

right words in the right places, and Tennyson is with them in that.

Browning continually puts his words into the wrong places. He leaves out

words necessary for the easy understanding of the passage, and for no

reason except his fancy. He leaves his sentences half-finished and his

meaning half-expressed. He begins a sentence, and having begun it, three

or four thoughts connected with it slide into his mind, and instead of

putting them aside or using them in another place, he jerks them into

the middle of his sentence in a series of parentheses, and then inserts

the end of the original sentence, or does not insert it at all. This is

irritating except to folk who like discovery of the twisted rather than

poetry; and it is quite needless. It is worse than needless, for it

lowers the charm and the dignity of the poetry.

Yet, there is something to say on the other side. It is said, and with a

certain justice, that "the style is the man. Strip his style away, and

where is the man? Where is the real Browning if we get him to change a

way of writing in which he naturally shaped his thought?" Well, no one

would ask him to impose on himself a style which did not fit his nature.

That would be fatal. When he has sometimes tried to do so, as in a few

of the dramas, we scarcely recognise our poet, and we lose half of his

intellectual and poetic charm. Just as Carlyle when he wrote away from

his natural style, as in the life of Sterling and Schiller, is not the

great writer he is elsewhere, so was it with Browning. Were we savage

satirists, blinded by our savagery, we might then say both of Browning

and Carlyle that half their power lay in their fantastic, rocky style.

We should be quite wrong. Their style was the exact clothing of their

thought. They wrote exactly as they thought; and when they put their

thought into other clothing, when they doctored their style, they did

not represent what they really thought. No sensible person then would

have asked Browning to change his style, but would have asked him not to

exaggerate it into its defects. It is plain he could have kept it within

bounds. He has done so frequently. But as frequently he has allowed it

to leap about as wildly as a young colt. He should have submitted it to

the _manège_, and ridden it then where he pleased. A very little

trouble on his part, a very little sacrifice of his unbridled

fancifulness, would have spared us a great deal of unnecessary trouble,

and made his poetry better and more enduring.

Another excuse may be made for his faults of style. It may be said that

in one sense the faults are excellences. When a poet has to represent

excessively subtle phases of thought and feeling, with a crowd of

side-thoughts and side-feelings intruding on them; when he has to

describe the excessive oddities, the curious turns of human emotion in

strange inward conditions or outward circumstances or when he has to

deal with rugged or even savage characters under the sway of the

passions; he cannot, we are told, do it otherwise than Browning did it,

and, instead of being lazy, he used these quips and cranks of style

deliberately.

The excuse has something in it. But, all the same, an artist should have

managed it otherwise. Shakespeare was far more subtle in thought than

Browning, and he had to deal with every kind of strange circumstance and

characters; but his composition and his style illuminate the characters,

order the circumstances, and render clear, as, for example, in the

Sonnets, the subtleties of his thought. A great artist, by his

comprehensive grasp of the main issue of his work, even in a short lyric

or a small picture, and by his luminous representation of it, suggests,

without direct expression of them, all the strange psychology, and the

play of character in the situations. And such an artist does this

excellent thing by his noble composition, and by his lofty, clear, and

melodious style. The excuse is, then, of some weight, but it does not

relieve Browning of the charge. Had he been a greater artist, he would

have been a greater master of the right way of saying things and a

greater pleasurer of the future. Had he taken more pains with his style,

but without losing its individual elements, he might have had as high a

poetic place as Tennyson in the judgment of posterity.

(3) In one thing more--in this matter of form--the beauty of poetry

lies. It is in sweetness of melody and its charm; in exquisite fitness

of its music to its thought and its emotion; in lawful change of harmony

making enchanting variety to the ear; in the obedience of the melodies

to the laws of the different kinds of poetry; and in the lovely conduct

of the harmonies, through all their changes, to that finished close

which throws back its own beauty on all that has preceded it. This part

of the loveliness of form in poetry, along with composition and

style--for without these and without noble matter of thought poetry is

nothing but pleasant noise--secures also the continuous delight of men

and the approving judgment of the future; and in this also Tennyson, who

gave to it the steady work of a lifetime, stands above his brother-poet.

Browning was far too careless of his melody. He frequently sacrificed

it, and needlessly, to his thought. He may have imagined that he

strengthened the thing he thought by breaking the melody. He did not, he

injured it. He injured the melody also by casting into the middle of it,

like stones into a clear water, rough parenthetic sounds to suit his

parenthetic phrases. He breaks it sometimes into two with violent

clanging words, with discords which he does not resolve, but forgets.

And in the pleasure he took in quaint oddities of sound, in jarring

tricks with his metre, in fantastic and difficult arrangements of rhyme,

in scientific displays of double rhymes, he, only too often, immolates

melody on the altar of his own cleverness.

A great many of the poems in which the natural loveliness of melody is

thus sacrificed or maimed will last, on account of the closely-woven

work of the intellect in them, and on account of their vivid

presentation of the travail of the soul; that is, they will last for

qualities which might belong to prose; but they will not last as poetry.

And other poems, in which the melody is only interrupted here and there,

will lose a great deal of the continuity of pleasure they would have

given to man had they been more careful to obey those laws of fine

melody which Tennyson never disobeys.

It is fortunate that neither of these injuries can be attributed to the

whole of his work; and I am equally far from saying that his faults of

style and composition belong to all his poetry.

There are a number of poems the melody of which is beautiful, in which,

if there are discords, they are resolved into a happy concord at their

close. There are others the melody of which is so strange, brilliant,

and capturing that their sound is never forgotten. There are others the

subtle, minor harmonies of which belong to and represent remote pathetic

phases of human passion, and they, too, are heard by us in lonely hours

of pitiful feeling, and enchant the ear and heart. And these will endure

for the noble pleasure of man.

There are also poems the style of which is fitted most happily to the

subject, like the Letter of Karshish to his Friend, in which Browning

has been so seized by his subject, and yet has so mastered it, that he

has forgotten to intercalate his own fancies; and in which, if the style

is broken, it is broken in full harmony with the situation, and in

obedience to the unity of impression he desired to make. There are

others, like _Abt Vogler_, in which the style is extraordinarily noble,

clear, and uplifted; and there are long passages in the more important

poems, like _Paracelsus_, where the joy and glory of the thought and

passion of Browning inform the verse with dignity, and make its march

stately with solemn and beautiful music. Where the style and melody are

thus fine the composition is also good. The parts, in their variety,

belong to one another and to the unity of the whole. Style, melody and

composition are always in the closest relation. And this nobleness of

composition, style, and melody is chiefly found in those poems of his

which have to do with the great matter of poetry--the representation of

the universal and simple passions of human nature with their attendant

and necessary thoughts. And there, in that part of his work, not in that

other part for which he is unduly praised, and which belongs to the

over-subtilised and over-intellectual time in which our self-conscious

culture now is striving to resist its decay, and to prove that its

disease is health, is the lasting power of Browning.

And then, beyond all these matters of form, there is the poet himself,

alone among his fellows in his unique and individual power, who has

fastened himself into our hearts, added a new world to our perceptions,

developed our lives and enlarged our interests. And there are the

separate and distinguished excellences of his work--the virtues which

have no defects, the virtues, too, of his defects, all the new wonders

of his realm--the many originalities which have justly earned for him

that high and lonely seat on Parnassus on which his noble Shadow sits

to-day, unchallenged in our time save by that other Shadow with whom, in

reverence and love, we have been perhaps too bold to contrast him.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I state it roughly. The _Poems of Two Brothers_ appeared in 1826,

Tennyson's first single volume in 1830, his second in 1833, his last in

1892. Browning's first poem was issued in 1833, his last in 1890.

_Paracelsus_, in which his genius clearly disclosed itself, was

published in 1835, while Tennyson, seven years later, proved his

mastership in the two volumes of 1842.

[2] _A Death in the Desert_ touches on the doubts which, when it was

written, had gathered from historical criticism round the subject matter

of the Gospels, but the prophetic answer of St. John is not critical. It

is Browning's personal reply to the critics, and is based on his own

religious philosophy. The critical part of the argument is left

untouched, and the answer is given from the poet's plane. It is the same

when in the _Parleyings with Certain People_ Furini is made to embody

Browning's belief in a personal God in contradistinction with the mere

evolutionist. He does not argue the points. He places one doctrine over

against the other and bids the reader choose. Moreover, he claims his

view as his own alone. He seeks to impose it on no one.

[3] Much has been said of the humour of Browning. But it is rather wit

than humour which we perceive. The gentle pathos which belongs to

humour, the pitiful turn of the humourist upon himself, his smile at his

own follies and those of mankind, the half light, like that of evening,

in which humour dwells, are wanting in Browning. It is true he has the

charity of humour, though not its pathetic power. But, all the same, he

is too keen, too brilliant, too fierce at times for a humourist. The

light in which we see the foolish, fantastic, amusing or contemptible

things of life is too bright for humour. He is a Wit--with charity--not

a humourist. As for Tennyson, save in his Lincolnshire poems and _Will

Waterproof's Soliloquy_, he was strangely devoid either of humour or of

wit.

* * * * *