The lovers of a great poet are the people in the world who are most to
be forgiven a little wanton fancy about him, for they have before them,
in his genius and work, an irresistible example of the application of
the imaginative method to a thousand subjects. Certainly, therefore,
there are many confirmed admirers of Robert Browning to whom it will
not have failed to occur that the consignment of his ashes to the
great temple of fame of the English race was exactly one of those
occasions in which his own analytic spirit would have rejoiced and
his irrepressible faculty for looking at human events in all sorts of
slanting coloured lights have found a signal opportunity. If he had
been taken with it as a subject, if it had moved him to the confused
yet comprehensive utterance of which he was the great professor, we
can immediately guess at some of the sparks he would have scraped
from it, guess how splendidly, in the case, the pictorial sense would
have intertwined itself with the metaphysical. For such an occasion
would have lacked, for the author of “The Ring and the Book,” none of
the complexity and convertibility that were dear to him. Passion and
ingenuity, irony and solemnity, the impressive and the unexpected,
would each have forced their way through; in a word the author would
have been sure to take the special, circumstantial view (the inveterate
mark of all his speculation) even of so foregone a conclusion as that
England should pay her greatest honour to one of her greatest poets.
As they stood in the Abbey, at any rate, on Tuesday last, those of
his admirers and mourners who were disposed to profit by his warrant
for enquiring curiously may well have let their fancy range, with
its muffled step, in the direction which _his_ fancy would probably
not have shrunk from following, even perhaps to the dim corners where
humour and the whimsical lurk. Only, we hasten to add, it would have
taken Robert Browning himself to render the multifold impression.
One part of it on such occasion is of course irresistible—the sense
that these honours are the greatest that a generous nation has to
confer and that the emotion that accompanies them is one of the
high moments of a nation’s life. The attitude of the public, of the
multitude, at such hours, is a great expansion, a great openness
to ideas of aspiration and achievement; the pride of possession and
of bestowal, especially in the case of a career so complete as Mr.
Browning’s, is so present as to make regret a minor matter. We possess
a great man most when we begin to look at him through the glass plate
of death; and it is a simple truth, though containing an apparent
contradiction, that the Abbey never takes us so benignantly as when
we have a valued voice to commit to silence there. For the silence
is articulate after all, and in worthy instances the preservation
great. It is the other side of the question that would pull most the
strings of irresponsible reflection—all those conceivable postulates
and hypotheses of the poetic and satiric mind to which we owe the
picture of how the bishop ordered his tomb in St. Praxed’s. Macaulay’s
“temple of silence and reconciliation”—and none the less perhaps
because he himself is now a presence there—strikes us, as we stand
in it, not only as local but as social, a sort of corporate company;
so thick, under its high arches, its dim transepts and chapels, is
the population of its historic names and figures. They are a company
in possession, with a high standard of distinction, of immortality,
as it were; for there is something serenely inexpugnable even in the
position of the interlopers. As they look out, in the rich dusk, from
the cold eyes of statues and the careful identity of tablets, they
seem, with their converging faces, to scrutinise decorously the claims
of each new recumbent glory, to ask each other how he is to be judged
as an accession. How difficult to banish the idea that Robert Browning
would have enjoyed prefiguring and playing with the mystifications,
the reservations, even perhaps the slight buzz of scandal, in the
Poets’ Corner, to which his own obsequies might give rise! Would not
his great relish, in so characteristic an interview with his crucible,
have been his perception of the bewildering modernness, to much of the
society, of the new candidate for a niche? That is the interest and the
fascination, from what may be termed the inside point of view, of Mr.
Browning’s having received, in this direction of becoming a classic,
the only official assistance that is ever conferred upon English
writers.
[Illustration: THE ABBEY, FROM VICTORIA STREET]
It is as classics on one ground and another—some members of it perhaps
on that of not being anything else—that the numerous assembly in the
Abbey holds together, and it is as a tremendous and incomparable modern
that the author of “Men and Women” takes his place in it. He introduces
to his predecessors a kind of contemporary individualism which surely
for many a year they had not been reminded of with any such force.
The tradition of the poetic character as something high, detached, and
simple, which may be assumed to have prevailed among them for a good
while, is one that Browning has broken at every turn; so that we can
imagine his new associates to stand about him, till they have got used
to him, with rather a sense of failing measures. A good many oddities
and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey; but none
of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd.
There are plenty of poets whose right to the title may be contested,
but there is no poetic head of equal power—crowned and recrowned by
almost importunate hands—from which so many people would withhold the
distinctive wreath. All this will give the marble phantoms at the base
of the great pillars, and the definite personalities of the honorary
slabs something to puzzle out until, by the quick operation of time,
the mere fact of his lying there among the classified and protected
makes even Robert Browning lose a portion of the bristling surface of
his actuality.
For the rest, judging from the outside and with his contemporaries,
we of the public can only feel that his very modernness—by which
we mean the all-touching, all-trying spirit of his work, permeated
with accumulations and playing with knowledge—achieves a kind of
conquest, or at least of extension, of the rigid pale. We cannot enter
here upon any account either of that or of any other element of his
genius, though surely no literary figure of our day seems to sit more
unconsciously for the painter. The very imperfections of this original
are fascinating, for they never present themselves as weaknesses;
they are boldnesses and overgrowths, rich roughnesses and humours,
and the patient critic need not despair of digging to the primary
soil from which so many disparities and contradictions spring. He may
finally even put his finger on some explanation of the great mystery,
the imperfect conquest of the poetic form by a genius in which the
poetic passion had such volume and range. He may successfully say how
it was that a poet without a lyre—for that is practically Browning’s
deficiency: he had the scroll, but not often the sounding strings—was
nevertheless, in his best hours, wonderfully rich in the magic of his
art, a magnificent master of poetic emotion. He will justify on behalf
of a multitude of devotees the great position assigned to a writer of
verse of which the nature or the fortune has been (in proportion to its
value and quantity) to be treated rarely as quotable. He will do all
this and a great deal more besides; but we need not wait for it to feel
that something of our latest sympathies, our latest and most restless
selves, passed the other day into the high part—the show-part, to speak
vulgarly—of our literature. To speak of Mr. Browning only as he was in
the last twenty years of his life, how quick such an imagination as his
would have been to recognise all the latent or mystical suitabilities
that, in the last resort, might link to the great Valhalla by the
Thames a figure that had become so conspicuously a figure of London!
He had grown to be intimately and inveterately of the London world; he
was so familiar and recurrent, so responsive to all its solicitations,
that, given the endless incarnations he stands for to-day, he would
have been missed from the congregation of worthies whose memorials are
the special pride of the Londoner. Just as his great sign to those who
knew him was that he was a force of health, of temperament, of tone, so
what he takes into the Abbey is an immense expression of life—of life
rendered with large liberty and free experiment, with an unprejudiced
intellectual eagerness to put himself in other people’s place, to
participate in complications and consequences; a restlessness of
psychological research that might well alarm any pale company for their
formal orthodoxies.
But the illustrious whom he rejoins may be reassured, as they will not
fail to discover: in so far as they are representative it will clear
itself up that, in spite of a surface unsuggestive of marble and a
reckless individualism of form, he is quite as representative as any
of them. For the great value of Browning is that at bottom, in all the
deep spiritual and human essentials, he is unmistakably in the great
tradition—is, with all his Italianisms and cosmopolitanisms, all his
victimisation by societies organised to talk about him, a magnificent
example of the best and least dilettantish English spirit. That
constitutes indeed the main chance for his eventual critic, who will
have to solve the refreshing problem of how, if subtleties be not what
the English spirit most delights in, the author of, for instance, “Any
Wife to Any Husband” made them his perpetual pasture, and yet remained
typically of his race. He was indeed a wonderful mixture of the
universal and the alembicated. But he played with the curious and the
special, they never submerged him, and it was a sign of his robustness
that he could play to the end. His voice sounds loudest, and also
clearest, for the things that, as a race, we like best—the fascination
of faith, the acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the
endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of
character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of the
great human passion. If Browning had spoken for us in no other way,
he ought to have been made sure of, tamed and chained as a classic,
on account of the extraordinary beauty of his treatment of the special
relation between man and woman. It is a complete and splendid picture
of the matter, which somehow places it at the same time in the region
of conduct and responsibility. But when we talk of Robert Browning’s
speaking “for us,” we go to the end of our privilege, we say all. With
a sense of security, perhaps even a certain complacency, we leave our
sophisticated modern conscience, and perhaps even our heterogeneous
modern vocabulary, in his charge among the illustrious. There will
possibly be moments in which these things will seem to us to have
widened the allowance, made the high abode more comfortable, for some
of those who are yet to enter it.
1890.
[Illustration]