Browning's reputation has not yet risen again beyond a half-tide. The
fact that two books about him were published during the war, however,
suggests that there is a revival of interest in his work. It would have
been surprising if this had not been so. He is one of the poets who
inspire confidence at a time when all the devils are loosed out of Hell.
Browning was the great challenger of the multitude of devils. He did not
achieve his optimism by ignoring Satan, but by defying him. His courage
was not merely of the stomach, but of the daring imagination. There is
no more detestable sign of literary humbug than the pretence that
Browning was an optimist simply because he did not experience sorrow and
indigestion as other people do. I do not mean to deny that he, enjoyed
good health. As Professor Phelps, of Yale, says in a recent book,
_Robert Browning: How to Know Him:--_
He had a truly wonderful digestion: it was his firm belief that one
should eat only what one really enjoyed, desire being the
infallible sign that the food was healthful. "My father was a man
of _bonne fourchette_," said Barett Browning to me "he was not very
fond of meat, but liked all kinds of Italian dishes, especially
with rich sauces. He always ate freely of rich and delicate things.
He would make a whole meal off mayonnaise."
Upon which the American professor comments with ingenuous humour of a
kind rare in professors in this hemisphere:--
It is pleasant to remember that Emerson, the other great optimist
of the century, used to eat pie for breakfast.
The man who does not suffer from pie will hardly suffer from pessimism;
but, as Professor Phelps insists, Browning faced greater terrors than
pie for breakfast, and his philosophy did not flinch. There was no other
English writer of the nineteenth century who to the same degree made all
human experiences his own. His is poems are not poems about little
children who win good-conduct prizes. They are poems of the agonies of
life, poems about tragic severance, poems about failure. They range
through the virtues and the vices with the magnificent boldness of
Dostoevsky's novels. The madman, the atheist, the adulterer, the
traitor, the murderer, the beast, are portrayed in them side by side
with the hero, the saint, and the perfect woman. There is every sort of
rogue here half-way between good and evil, and every sort of half-hero
who is either worse than his virtue or better than his sins. Nowhere
else in English poetry outside the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer is
there such a varied and humorous gallery of portraits. Landor's often
quoted comparison of Browning with Chaucer is a piece of perfect and
essential criticism:--
Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walked along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse.
For Browning was a portrait-painter by genius and a philosopher only by
accident. He was a historian even more than a moralist. He was born with
a passion for living in other people's experiences. So impartially and
eagerly did he make himself a voice of the evil as well as the good in
human nature that occasionally one has heard people speculating as to
whether he can have led so reputable a life as the biographers make one
believe. To speculate in this manner, however, is to blunder into
forgetfulness of Browning's own answer, in _How it Strikes a
Contemporary_, to all such calumnies on poets.
Of all the fields of human experience, it was love into which the
imagination of Browning most fully entered. It may seem an obvious thing
to say about almost any poet, but Browning differed from other poets in
being able to express, not only the love of his own heart, but the love
of the hearts of all sorts of people. He dramatized every kind of love
from the spiritual to the sensual. One might say of him that there never
was another poet in whom there was so much of the obsession of love and
so little of the obsession of sex. Love was for him the crisis and test
of a man's life. The disreputable lover has his say in Browning's
monologues no less than Count Gismond. Porphyria's lover, mad and a
murderer, lives in our imaginations as brightly as the idealistic lover
of Cristina.
The dramatic lyric and monologue in which Browning set forth the
varieties of passionate experience was an art-form of immense
possibilities, which it was a work of genius to discover. To say that
Browning, the inventor of this amazingly fine form, was indifferent to
form has always seemed to me the extreme of stupidity. At the same time,
its very newness puzzles many readers, even to-day. Some people cannot
read Browning without note or comment, because they are unable to throw
themselves imaginatively into the "I" of each new poem. Our artistic
sense is as yet so little developed that many persons are appalled by
the energy of imagination which is demanded of them before they are
reborn, as it were, into the setting of his dramatic studies. Professor
Phelps's book should be of especial service to such readers, because it
will train them in the right method of approach to Browning's best work.
It is a very admirable essay in popular literary interpretation. One is
astonished by its insight even more than by its recurrent banality.
There are sentences that will make the fastidious shrink, such as:--
The commercial worth of _Pauline_ was exactly zero.