Their (the Brownings') love-letters reveal a drama of noble passion
that excels in beauty and intensity the universally popular
examples of Heloise and Abelard, Aucassin and Nicolette, Paul and
Virginia.
And, again, in the story of the circumstances that led to Browning's
death:--
In order to prove to his son that nothing was the matter with him,
he ran rapidly up three flights of stairs, the son vainly trying to
restrain him. Nothing is more characteristic of the youthful folly
of aged folk than their impatient resentment of proffered hygienic
advice.
Even the interpretations of the poems sometimes take one's breath away,
as when, discussing _The Lost Mistress_, Professor Phelps observes that
the lover:--
instead of thinking of his own misery ... endeavours to make the
awkward situation easier for the girl by small talk about the
sparrows and the leaf-buds.
When one has marvelled one's fill at the professor's phrases and
misunderstandings, however, one is compelled to admit that he has
written what is probably the best popular introduction to Browning in
existence.
Professor Phelps's book is one of those rare essays in popular criticism
which will introduce an average reader to a world of new excitements.
One of its chief virtues is that it is an anthology as well as a
commentary. It contains more than fifty complete poems of Browning
quoted in the body of the book. And these include, not merely short
poems like _Meeting at Night_, but long poems, such as _Andrea del
Sarto, Caliban on Setebos_, and _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came._
This is the right kind of introduction to a great author. The poet is
allowed as far as possible to be his own interpreter.
At the outset Professor Phelps quotes in full _Transcendentalism_ and
_How it Strikes a Contemporary_ as Browning's confession of his aims as
an artist. The first of these is Browning's most energetic assertion
that the poet is no philosopher concerned with ideas rather than with
things--with abstractions rather than with actions. His disciples have
written a great many books that seem to reduce him from a poet to a
philosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dulling
of an imagination richer than a child's in adventures and in the passion
for the detailed and the concrete. In _Transcendentalism_ he bids a
younger poet answer whether there is more help to be got from Jacob
Boehme with his subtle meanings:--
Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,
John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about.
With how magnificent an image he then justifies the poet of "things" as
compared with the philosopher of "thoughts":--
He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,
Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all--
Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this poor house of life.
One of the things one constantly marvels at as one reads Browning is the
splendid aestheticism with which he lights up prosaic words and
pedestrian details with beauty.
The truth is, if we do not realize that he is a great singer and a great
painter as well as a, great humorist and realist, we shall have read him
in vain. No doubt his phrases are often as grotesque as jagged teeth, as
when the mourners are made to say in _A Grammarian's Funeral_:--
Look out if yonder be not day again.
Rimming the rock-row!
Reading the second of these lines one feels as if one of the mourners
had stubbed his foot against a sharp stone on the mountain-path. And
yet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own far common use, he
uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and passion. There may
often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the
poems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden river.
His poems have the movement of living things. They are lacking only in
smooth and static loveliness. They are full of the hoof-beats of
Pegasus.
We find in his poems, indeed, no fastidious escape from life, but an
exalted acceptance of it. Browning is one of the very few poets who,
echoing the Creator, have declared that the world is good. His sense of
the goodness of it even in foulness and in failure is written over half
of his poems. _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came_ is a fable of life
triumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostile
thing--a world, too, in which the hero is doomed to perish at devilish
hands. Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning's
genius, one has only to read _Childe Roland_ again to restore one's
faith. There never was a landscape so alive with horror as that amid
which the knight travelled in quest of the Dark Tower. As detail is
added to detail, it becomes horrible as suicide, a shrieking progress of
all the torments, till one is wrought up into a very nightmare of
apprehension and the Tower itself appears:--
The round squat tower, blind as the fool's heart.
Was there ever such a pause and gathering of courage as in the verses
that follow in which the last of the knights takes his resolve?:--
Not see? because of night perhaps?--why, day
Came back again for that! before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay--
"Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"
Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears,
Of all the lost adventurers my peers--
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
There they stood, ranged along the hillside, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set.
And blew. "_Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_."
There, if anywhere in literature, is the summit of tragic and triumphant
music. There, it seems to me, is as profound and imaginative expression
of the heroic spirit as is to be found in the English language.
To belittle Browning as an artist after such a poem is to blaspheme
against art. To belittle him as an optimist is to play the fool with
words. Browning was an optimist only in the sense that he believed in
what Stevenson called "the ultimate decency of things," and that he
believed in the capacity of the heroic spirit to face any test devised
for it by inquisitors or devils. He was not defiant in a fine attitude
like Byron. His defiance was rather a form of magnanimity. He is said,
on Robert Buchanan's authority, to have thundered "No," when in his
later years he was asked if he were a Christian. But his defiance was
the defiance of a Christian, the dauntlessness of a knight of the Holy
Ghost. Perhaps it is that he was more Christian than the Christians.
Like the Pope in _The Ring and the Book_, he loathed the association of
Christianity with respectability. Some readers are bewildered by his
respectability in trivial things, such as dress, into failing to see his
hatred of respectability when accepted as a standard in spiritual
things. He is more sympathetic towards the disreputable suicides in
_Apparent Failure_ than towards the vacillating and respectable lovers
in _The Statue and the Bust._ There was at least a hint of heroism in
the last madness of the doomed men. Browning again and again protests,
as Blake had done earlier, against the mean moral values of his age.
Energy to him as to Blake meant endless delight, and especially those
two great energies of the spirit--love and heroism. For, though his work
is not a philosophic expression of moral ideas, it is an imaginative
expression of moral ideas, as a result of which he is, above all, the
poet of lovers and heroes. Imagination is a caged bird in these days;
with Browning it was a soaring eagle. In some ways Mr. Conrad's is the
most heroic imagination in contemporary literature. But he does not take
this round globe of light and darkness into his purview as Browning did.
The whole earth is to him shadowed with futility. Browning was too
lyrical to resign himself to the shadows. He saw the earth through the
eyes of a lover till the end. He saw death itself as no more than an
interlude of pain, darkness, and cold before a lovers' meeting. It may
be that it is all a rapturous illusion, and that, after we have laid him
aside and slept a night's broken sleep, we sink back again naturally
into the little careful hopes and infidelities of everyday. But it seems
to me that here is a whole heroic literature to which the world will
always do well to turn in days of inexorable pain and horror such as
those through which it has but recently passed.