There is a period in the advance of any great man's influence between
the moment when he appears and the moment when he has become historical,
during which it is difficult to give any succinct account of him. We are
ourselves a part of the thing we would describe. The element which we
attempt to isolate for purposes of study is still living within us. Our
science becomes tinged with autobiography. Such must be the fate of any
essay on Browning written at the present time.
The generation to whom his works were unmeaning has hardly passed away.
The generation he spoke for still lives. His influence seems still to be
expanding. The literature of Browning dictionaries, phrase-books,
treatises, and philosophical studies grows daily. Mr. Cooke in his Guide
to Browning (1893) gives a condensed catalogue of the best books and
essays on Browning, which covers many finely printed pages. This class
of book--the text-book--is not the product of impulse. The text-book is
a commercial article and follows the demand as closely as the reaper
follows the crop. We can tell the acreage under cultivation by looking
over the account books of the makers of farm implements. Thousands of
people are now studying Browning, following in his footsteps, reading
lives of his heroes, and hunting up the subjects he treated.
This Browningism which we are disposed to laugh at is a most interesting
secondary outcome of his influence. It has its roots in natural piety,
and the educational value of it is very great.
Browning's individuality created for him a personal following, and he
was able to respond to the call to leadership. Unlike Carlyle, he had
something to give his disciples beside the immediate satisfaction of a
spiritual need. He gave them not only meal but seed. In this he was like
Emerson; but Emerson's little store of finest grain is of a different
soil. Emerson lived in a cottage and saw the stars over his head through
his skylight. Browning, on the other hand, loved pictures, places,
music, men and women, and his works are like the house of a rich man,--a
treasury of plunder from many provinces and many ages, whose manners
and passions are vividly recalled to us. In Emerson's house there was
not a peg to hang a note upon,--"this is his bookshelf, this his bed."
But Browning's palace craves a catalogue. And a proper catalogue to such
a palace becomes a liberal education.
Robert Browning was a strong, glowing, whole-souled human being, who
enjoyed life more intensely than any Englishman since Walter Scott. He
was born among books; and circumstances enabled him to follow his
inclinations and become a writer,--a poet by profession. He was, from
early youth to venerable age, a centre of bounding vitality, the very
embodiment of spontaneous life; and the forms of poetry in which he so
fully and so accurately expressed himself enable us to know him well.
Indeed, only great poets are known so intimately as we know Robert
Browning.
Religion was at the basis of his character, and it was the function of
religious poetry that his work fulfilled. Inasmuch as no man invents his
own theology, but takes it from the current world and moulds it to his
needs, it was inevitable that Robert Browning should find and seize upon
as his own all that was optimistic in Christian theology. Everything
that was hopeful his spirit accepted; everything that was sunny and
joyful and good for the brave soul he embraced. What was distressing he
rejected or explained away. In the world of Robert Browning _everything_
was right.
The range of subject covered by his poems is wider than that of any
other poet that ever lived; but the range of his ideas is exceedingly
small. We need not apologize for treating Browning as a theologian and a
doctor of philosophy, for he spent a long life in trying to show that a
poet is always really both--and he has almost convinced us. The
expositors and writers of text-books have had no difficulty in
formulating his theology, for it is of the simplest kind; and his views
on morality and art are logically a part of it. The "message" which
poets are conventionally presumed to deliver, was, in Browning's case, a
very definite creed, which may be found fully set forth in any one of
twenty poems. Every line of his poetry is logically dedicated to it.
He believes that the development of the individual soul is the main end
of existence. The strain and stress of life are incidental to growth,
and therefore desirable. Development and growth mean a closer union with
God. In fact, God is of not so much importance in Himself, but as the
end towards which man tends. That irreverent person who said that
Browning uses "God" as a pigment made an accurate criticism of his
theology. In Browning, God is adjective to man. Browning believes that
all conventional morality must be reviewed from the standpoint of how
conduct affects the actor himself, and what effect it has on his
individual growth. The province of art and of all thinking and working
is to make these truths clear and to grapple with the problems they give
rise to.
The first two fundamental beliefs of Browning--namely: (1) that,
ultimately speaking, the most important matter in the world is the soul
of a man; and (2) that a sense of effort is coincident with
development--are probably true. We instinctively feel them to be true,
and they seem to be receiving support from those quarters of research to
which we look for light, however dim. In the application of his dogmas
to specific cases in the field of ethics, Browning often reaches
conclusions which are fair subjects for disagreement. Since most of our
conventional morality is framed to repress the individual, he finds
himself at war with it--in revolt against it. He is habitually pitted
against it, and thus acquires modes of thought which sometimes lead him
into paradox--at least, to conclusions at odds with his premises. It is
in the course of exposition, and incidentally to his main purpose as a
teacher of a few fundamental ideas, that Browning has created his
masterpieces of poetry.
Never was there a man who in the course of a long life changed less.
What as a boy he dreamed of doing, that he did. The thoughts of his
earliest poems are the thoughts of his latest. His tales, his songs, his
monologues, his dramas, his jests, his sermons, his rage, his prayer,
are all upon the same theme: whatever fed his mind nourished these
beliefs. His interest in the world was solely an interest in them. He
saw them in history and in music; his travels and studies brought him
back nothing else but proofs of them; the universe in each of its
manifestations was a commentary upon them. His nature was the simplest,
the most positive, the least given to abstract speculation, which
England can show in his time. He was not a thinker, for he was never in
doubt. He had recourse to disputation as a means of inculcating truth,
but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case. His conclusions are fixed
from the start. Standing, from his infancy, upon a faith as absolute as
that of a martyr, he has never for one instant undergone the experience
of doubt, and only knows that there is such a thing because he has met
with it in other people. The force of his feelings is so much greater
than his intellect that his mind serves his soul like a valet. Out of
the whole cosmos he takes what belongs to him and sustains him, leaving
the rest, or not noting it.
There never was a great poet whose scope was so definite. That is the
reason why the world is so cleanly divided into people who do and who do
not care for Browning. One real glimpse into him gives you the whole of
him. The public which loves him is made up of people who have been
through certain spiritual experiences to which he is the antidote. The
public which loves him not consists of people who have escaped these
experiences. To some he is a strong, rare, and precious elixir, which
nothing else will replace. To others, who do not need him, he is a
boisterous and eccentric person,--a Heracles in the house of mourning.
Let us remember his main belief,--the value of the individual. The needs
of society constantly require that the individual be suppressed. They
hold him down and punish him at every point. The tyranny of order and
organization--of monarch or public opinion--weights him and presses him
down. This is the inevitable tendency of all stable social arrangements.
Now and again there arises some strong nature that revolts against the
influence of conformity which is becoming intolerable,--against the
atmosphere of caste or theory; of Egyptian priest or Manchester
economist; of absolutism or of democracy.
And this strong nature cries out that the souls of men are being
injured, and that they are important; that your soul and my soul are
more important than Cæsar--or than the survival of the fittest. Such a
voice was the voice of Christ, and the lesser saviors of the world bring
always a like message of revolt: they arise to fulfil the same
fundamental need of the world.
Carlyle, Emerson, Victor Hugo, Browning, were prophets to a generation
oppressed in spirit, whose education had oppressed them with a Jewish
law of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham and Malthus, of Clarkson and
Cobden,--of thought for the million, and for man in the aggregate. "To
what end is all this beneficence, all this conscience, all this theory?"
some one at length cries out. "For whom is it in the last analysis that
you legislate? You talk _of man_, I see only _men_."
To men suffering from an age of devotion to humanity came Robert
Browning as a liberator. Like Carlyle, he was understood first in this
country because we had begun earlier with our theoretical and practical
philanthropies, and had taken them more seriously. We had suffered more.
We needed to be told that it was right to love, hate, and be angry, to
sin and repent. It was a revelation to us to think that we had some
inheritance in the joys and passions of mankind. We needed to be told
these things as a tired child needs to be comforted. Browning gave them
to us in the form of a religion. There was no one else sane or deep or
wise or strong enough to know what we lacked.
If ever a generation had need of a poet,--of some one to tell them they
might cry and not be ashamed, rejoice and not find the reason in John
Stuart Mill; some one who should justify the claims of the spirit which
was starving on the religion of humanity,--it was the generation for
whom Browning wrote.
Carlyle had seized upon the French Revolution, which served his ends
because it was filled with striking, with powerful, with grotesque
examples of individual force. In his Hero Worship he gives his
countrymen a philosophy of history based on nothing but worship of the
individual. Browning with the same end in view gave us pictures of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in France and Italy. He glorified what
we had thought crime and error, and made men of us. He was the apostle
to the educated of a most complex period, but such as he was, he was
complete. Those people to whom he has been a poet know what it is for
the heart to receive full expression from the lips of another.
The second thesis which Browning insists on--the identity of spiritual
suffering with spiritual growth--is the one balm of the world. It is
said that recent physiological experiment shows that muscles do not
develop unless exercised up to what is called the "distress point." If
this shall prove to be an instance of a general law,--if the struggles
and agony of the spirit are really signs of an increase of that
spiritual life which is the only sort of life we can conceive of now or
hereafter,--then the truth-to-feeling of much of Browning's poetry has a
scientific basis. It cannot be denied that Browning held firmly two of
the most moving and far-reaching ideas of the world, and he expanded
them in the root, leaf, flower, and fruit of a whole world of poetic
disquisition.
It is unnecessary at this day to point out the beauties of Browning or
the sagacity with which he chose his effects. He gives us the sallow
wife of James Lee, whose soul is known to him, Pippa the silk-spinning
girl, two men found in the morgue, persons lost, forgotten, or
misunderstood. He searches the world till he finds the man whom
everybody will concur in despising, the mediæval grammarian, and he
writes to him the most powerful ode in English, the mightiest tribute
ever paid to a man. His culture and his learning are all subdued to what
he works in; they are all in harness to draw his thought. He mines in
antiquity or drags his net over German philosophy or modern
drawing-rooms,--all to the same end.
In that miracle of power and beauty--The Flight of the Duchess--he has
improvised a whole civilization in order to make the setting of contrast
which shall cause the soul of the little duchess to shine clearly. In
Childe Roland he creates a cycle, an epoch of romance and mysticism,
because he requires it as a stage property. In A Death in the Desert you
have the East in the first century--so vividly given that you wish
instantly to travel there, Bible in hand, to feel the atmosphere with
which your Bible ought always to have been filled. His reading brings
him to Euripides. He sees that Alcestis can be set to his theme; and
with a week or two of labor, while staying in a country house, he draws
out of the Greek fable the world of his own meaning and shows it shining
forth in a living picture of the Greek theatre which has no counterpart
for vitality in any modern tongue.
The descriptive and narrative powers of Browning are above, beyond, and
outside of all that has been done in English in our time, as the odd
moments prove which he gave to the Pied Piper, The Ride from Ghent to
Aix, Incident in the French Camp. These chips from his workshop passed
instantly into popular favor because they were written in familiar
forms.
How powerfully his gifts of utterance were brought to bear upon the
souls of men will be recorded, even if never understood, by literary
historians. It is idle to look to the present generation for an
intelligible account of One Word More, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Prospice, Saul,
The Blot on the 'Scutcheon. They must be judged by the future and by men
who can speak of them with a steady lip.
It must be conceded that the conventional judgments of society are
sometimes right, and Browning's mission led him occasionally into
paradox and _jeux d'esprit_. Bishop Blougram is an attempt to discover
whether a good case cannot be made out for the individual hypocrite. The
Statue and the Bust is frankly a _reductio ad absurdum_, and ends with a
query.
There is more serious trouble with others. The Grammarian's Funeral is
false to fact, and will appear so to posterity. The grammarian was not a
hero, and our calmer moments show us that the poem is not a great ode.
It gave certain people the glow of a great truth, but it remains a
paradox and a piece of exaggeration. The same must be said of a large
part of Browning. The New Testament is full of such paradoxes of
exaggeration, like the parable of the unjust steward, the rich man's
chance for heaven, the wedding garment; but in these, the truth is
apparent,--we are not betrayed. In Browning's paradoxes we are often led
on and involved in an emotion over some situation which does not
honestly call for the emotion.
The most noble quality in Browning is his temper. He does not proceed,
as liberators generally do, by railing and pulling down. He builds up;
he is positive, not negative. He is less bitter than Christianity
itself.
While there is no more doubt as to the permanent value of the content of
Browning than of the value of the spiritual truths of the New Testament,
there is very little likelihood that his poems will be understood in the
remote future. At present, they are following the waves of influence of
the education which they correct. They are built like Palladio's Theatre
at Vicenza, where the perspective converges toward a single seat. In
order to be subject to the illusion, the spectator must occupy the
duke's place. The colors are dropping from the poems already. The
feeblest of them lose it first. There was a steady falling off in power
accompanied by a constant increase in his peculiarities during the last
twenty years of his life, and we may make some surmise as to how
Balaustion's Adventure will strike posterity by reading Parleyings with
Certain People.
The distinctions between Browning's characters--which to us are so
vivid--will to others seem less so. Paracelsus and Rabbi Ben Ezra, Lippo
Lippi, Karshish, Caponsacchi, and Ferishtah will all appear to be run in
the same mould. They will seem to be the thinnest disguises which a poet
ever assumed. The lack of the dramatic element in Browning--a lack
which is concealed from us by our intense sympathy for him and by his
fondness for the trappings of the drama--will be apparent to the
after-comers. They will say that all the characters in The Blot on the
'Scutcheon take essentially the same view of the catastrophe of the
play; that Pippa and Pompilia and Phene are the same person in the same
state of mind. In fact, the family likeness is great. They will say that
the philosophic monologues are repetitions of each other. It cannot be
denied that there is much repetition,--much threshing out of old straw.
Those who have read Browning for years and are used to the monologues
are better pleased to find the old ideas than new ones, which they could
not understand so readily. When the later Browning takes us on one of
those long afternoon rambles through his mind,--over moor and fen,
through jungle, down precipice, past cataract,--we know just where we
are coming out in the end. We know the place better than he did himself.
Nor will posterity like Browning's manners,--the dig in the ribs, the
personal application, and _de te fabula_ of most of his talking. These
unpleasant things are part of his success with us to whom he means
life, not art. Posterity will want only art. We needed doctrine. If he
had not preached, we would not have listened to him. But posterity
evades the preachers and accepts only singers. Posterity is so dainty
that it lives on nothing but choice morsels. It will cull such out of
the body of Browning as the anthologists are beginning to do already,
and will leave the great mass of him to be rediscovered from time to
time by belated sufferers from the philosophy of the nineteenth century.
There is a class of persons who claim for Browning that his verse is
really good verse, and that he was a master of euphony. This cannot be
admitted except as to particular instances in which his success is due
to his conformity to law, not to his violation of it.
The rules of verse in English are merely a body of custom which has
grown up unconsciously, and most of which rests upon some simple
requirement of the ear.
In speaking of the power of poetry we are dealing with what is
essentially a mystery, the outcome of infinitely subtle, numerous, and
complex forces.
The rhythm of versification seems to serve the purpose of a prompter. It
lets us know in advance just what syllables are to receive the emphasis
which shall make the sense clear. There are many lines in poetry which
become obscure the instant they are written in prose, and probably the
advantages of poetry over prose, or, to express it modestly, the excuse
for poetry at all, is that the form facilitates the comprehension of the
matter. Rhyme is itself an indication that a turning-point has been
reached. It punctuates and sets off the sense, and relieves our
attention from the strain of suspended interest. All of the artifices of
poetical form seem designed to a like end. Naturalness of speech is
somewhat sacrificed, but we gain by the sacrifice a certain uniformity
of speech which rests and exhilarates. We need not, for the present,
examine the question of euphony any further, nor ask whether euphony be
not a positive element in verse,--an element which belongs to music.
The negative advantages of poetry over prose are probably sufficient to
account for most of its power. A few more considerations of the same
negative nature, and which affect the vividness of either prose or
verse, may be touched upon by way of preface to the inquiry, why
Browning is hard to understand and why his verse is bad.
Every one is more at ease in his mind when he reads a language which
observes the ordinary rules of grammar, proceeds by means of sentences
having subjects and predicates, and of which the adjectives and adverbs
fall easily into place. A doubt about the grammar is a doubt about the
sense. And this is so true that sometimes when our fears are allayed by
faultless grammar we may read absolute nonsense with satisfaction. We
sometimes hear it stated as a bitter epigram, that poetry is likely to
endure just in proportion as the form of it is superior to the content.
As to the "inferiority" of the content, a moment's reflection shows that
the ideas and feelings which prevail from age to age, and in which we
may expect posterity to delight, are in their nature, and of necessity,
commonplace. And if by "superiority of form" it is meant that these
ideas shall be conveyed in flowing metres,--in words which are easy to
pronounce, put together according to the rules of grammar, and largely
drawn from the vulgar tongue,--we need not wonder that posterity should
enjoy it. In fact, it is just such verse as this which survives from age
to age.
Browning possesses one superlative excellence, and it is upon this that
he relies. It is upon this that he has emerged and attacked the heart
of man. It is upon this that he may possibly fight his way down to
posterity and live like a fire forever in the bosom of mankind.
His language is the language of common speech; his force, the immediate
force of life. His language makes no compromises of any sort. It is not
subdued to form. The emphasis demanded by the sense is very often not
the emphasis demanded by the metre. He cuts off his words and forces
them ruthlessly into lines as a giant might force his limbs into the
armor of a mortal. The joints and members of the speech fall in the
wrong places and have no relation to the joints and members of the
metre.
He writes like a lion devouring an antelope. He rends his subject,
breaks its bones, and tears out the heart of it. He is not made more,
but less, comprehensible by the verse-forms in which he writes. The
sign-posts of the metre lead us astray. He would be easier to understand
if his poems were printed in the form of prose. That is the reason why
Browning becomes easy when read aloud; for in reading aloud we give the
emphasis of speech, and throw over all effort to follow the emphasis of
the metre. This is also the reason why Browning is so unquotable--why he
has made so little effect upon the language--why so few of the phrases
and turns of thought and metaphor with which poets enrich a language
have been thrown into English by him. Let a man who does not read poetry
take up a volume of Familiar Quotations, and he will find page after
page of lines and phrases which he knows by heart--from Tennyson,
Milton, Wordsworth--things made familiar to him not by the poets, but by
the men whom the poets educated, and who adopted their speech. Of
Browning he will know not a word. And yet Browning's poetry is full of
words that glow and smite, and which have been burnt into and struck
into the most influential minds of the last fifty years.
But Browning's phrases are almost impossible to remember, because they
are speech not reduced to poetry. They do not sing, they do not carry.
They have no artificial buoys to float them in our memories.
It follows from this uncompromising nature of Browning that when, by the
grace of inspiration, the accents of his speech do fall into rhythm, his
words will have unimaginable sweetness. The music is so much a part of
the words--so truly spontaneous--that other verse seems tame and
manufactured beside his.
Rhyme is generally so used by Browning as not to subserve the true
function of rhyme. It is forced into a sort of superficial conformity,
but marks no epoch in the verse. The clusters of rhymes are clusters
only to the eye and not to the ear. The necessity of rhyming leads
Browning into inversions,--into expansions of sentences beyond the
natural close of the form,--into every sort of contortion. The rhymes
clog and distress the sentences.
As to grammar, Browning is negligent. Some of his most eloquent and
wonderful passages have no grammar whatever. In Sordello grammar does
not exist; and the want of it, the strain upon the mind caused by an
effort to make coherent sentences out of a fleeting, ever-changing,
iridescent maze of talk, wearies and exasperates the reader. Of course
no one but a school-master desires that poetry shall be capable of being
parsed; but every one has a right to expect that he shall be left
without a sense of grammatical deficiency.
The Invocation in The Ring and the Book is one of the most beautiful
openings that can be imagined.
"O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire--Boldest
of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face--
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart--
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory--to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die--
This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand--
That still, despite the distance and the dark
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile;--
Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on--so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness, which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall."
These sublime lines are marred by apparent grammatical obscurity. The
face of beauty is marred when one of the eyes seems sightless. We
re-read the lines to see if we are mistaken. If they were in a foreign
language, we should say we did not fully understand them.
In the dramatic monologues, as, for instance, in The Ring and the Book
and in the innumerable other narratives and contemplations where a
single speaker holds forth, we are especially called upon to forget
grammar. The speaker relates and reflects,--pours out his ideas in the
order in which they occur to him,--pursues two or three trains of
thought at the same time, claims every license which either poetry or
conversation could accord him. The effect of this method is so
startling, that when we are vigorous enough to follow the sense, we
forgive all faults of metre and grammar, and feel that this natural
Niagara of speech is the only way for the turbulent mind of man to get
complete utterance. We forget that it is possible for the same thing to
be done, and yet to be subdued, and stilled, and charmed into music.
Prospero is as natural and as individual as Bishop Blougram. His grammar
is as incomplete, yet we do not note it. He talks to himself, to
Miranda, to Ariel, all at once, weaving all together his passions, his
philosophy, his narrative, and his commands. His reflections are as
profuse and as metaphysical as anything in Browning, and yet all is
clear,--all is so managed that it lends magic. The characteristic and
unfathomable significance of this particular character Prospero comes
out of it.
"_Prospero_. My brother and thy uncle, called Antonio--
I pray thee mark me,--that a brother should
Be so perfidious!--he whom next thyself,
Of all the world I lov'd, and to him put
The manage of my state; as at that time
Through all the seignories it was the first,
And Prospero, the Prime Duke, being so reputed
In dignity and for the liberal arts,
Without a parallel: those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And wrapped in secret studies. Thy false uncle--
Dost thou attend me?"
It is unnecessary to give examples from Browning of defective verse, of
passages which cannot be understood, which cannot be construed, which
cannot be parodied, and which can scarcely be pronounced. They are
mentioned only as throwing light on Browning's cast of mind and methods
of work. His inability to recast and correct his work cost the world a
master. He seems to have been condemned to create at white heat and to
stand before the astonishing draft, which his energy had flung out,
powerless to complete it.
We have a few examples of things which came forth perfect, but many of
even the most beautiful and most original of the shorter poems are
marred by some blotches that hurt us and which one feels might have
been struck out or corrected in half an hour. How many of the poems are
too long! It is not that Browning went on writing after he had completed
his thought,--for the burst of beauty is as likely to come at the end as
at the beginning,--but that his thought had to unwind itself like web
from a spider. He could not command it. He could only unwind and unwind.
Pan and Luna is a sketch, as luminous as a Correggio, but not finished.
Caliban upon Setebos, on the other hand, shows creative genius, beyond
all modern reach, but flounders and drags on too long. In the poems
which he revised, as, for instance, Hervé Riel, which exists in two or
more forms, the corrections are verbal, and were evidently done with the
same fierce haste with which the poems were written.
We must not for an instant imagine that Browning was indolent or
indifferent; it is known that he was a taskmaster to himself. But he
_could_ not write other than he did. When the music came and the verse
caught the flame, and his words became sweeter, and his thought clearer,
then he could sweep down like an archangel bringing new strains of
beauty to the earth. But the occasions when he did this are a handful
of passages in a body of writing as large as the Bible.
Just as Browning could not stop, so he found it hard to begin. His way
of beginning is to seize the end of the thread just where he can, and
write down the first sentence.
"She should never have looked at me,
If she meant I should not love her!"
"Water your damned flowerpots, do--"
"No! for I'll save it! Seven years since."
"But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow!"
"Fear Death? to feel the fog in my throat."
Sometimes his verse fell into coils as it came, but he himself, as he
wrote the first line of a poem, never knew in what form of verse the
poem would come forth. Hence the novel figures and strange counterpoint.
Having evolved the first group of lines at haphazard, he will sometimes
repeat the form (a very complex form, perhaps, which, in order to have
any organic effect, would have to be tuned to the ear most nicely), and
repeat it clumsily. Individual taste must be judge of his success in
these experiments. Sometimes the ear is worried by an attempt to trace
the logic of the rhymes which are concealed by the rough jolting of the
metre. Sometimes he makes no attempt to repeat the first verse, but
continues in irregular improvisation.
Browning never really stoops to literature; he makes perfunctory
obeisance to it. The truth is that Browning is expressed by his defects.
He would not be Robert Browning without them. In the technical part of
his art, as well as in his spirit, Browning represents a reaction of a
violent sort. He was too great an artist not to feel that his violations
of form helped him. The blemishes in The Grammarian's Funeral--_hoti's
business, the enclitic de_--were stimulants; they heightened his
effects. They helped him make clear his meaning, that life is greater
than art. These savageries spoke to the hearts of men tired of
smoothness and platitude, and who were relieved by just such a breaking
up of the ice. Men loved Browning not only for what he was, but also for
what he was not.
These blemishes were, under the circumstances, and for a limited
audience, strokes of art. It is not to be pretended that, even from this
point of view, they were always successful, only that they are organic.
The nineteenth century would have to be lived over again to wipe these
passages out of Browning's poetry.
In that century he stands as one of the great men of England. His
doctrines are the mere effulgence of his personality. He himself was the
truth which he taught. His life was the life of one of his own heroes;
and in the close of his life--by a coincidence which is not sad, but
full of meaning--may be seen one of those apparent paradoxes in which he
himself delighted.
Through youth and manhood Browning rose like a planet calmly following
the laws of his own being. From time to time he put forth his volumes
which the world did not understand. Neglect caused him to suffer, but
not to change. It was not until his work was all but finished, not till
after the publication of The Ring and the Book, that complete
recognition came to him. It was given him by men and women who had been
in the nursery when he began writing, who had passed their youth with
his minor poems, and who understood him.
In later life Browning's powers declined. The torrent of feeling could
no longer float the raft of doctrine, as it had done so lightly and for
so long. His poems, always difficult, grew dry as well.
But Browning was true to himself. He had all his life loved converse
with men and women, and still enjoyed it. He wrote constantly and to his
uttermost. It was not for him to know that his work was done. He wrote
on manfully to the end, showing, occasionally, his old power, and always
his old spirit. And on his death-bed it was not only his doctrine, but
his life that blazed out in the words:--
"One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph.
Held, we fall to rise--are baffled to fight better--
Sleep to wake."
* * * * *