Mr. Browning's choice of subject is determined by his belief that
individual feeling and motive are the only true life: hence the only
true material of dramatic art. He rejects no incident which admits of
development on the side of feeling and motive. He accepts none which
cannot be so developed. His range of subject covers, therefore, a great
deal that is painful, but nothing that is simply repulsive: because the
poetry of human life, that is of individual experience, is absent from
nothing which he portrays.
His treatment of his subject is realistic in so far that it is always
picturesque. It raises a distinct image of the person or action he
intends to describe; but the image is, so to speak, always saturated
with thought: and I shall later have occasion to notice the false
impression of Mr. Browning's genius which this circumstance creates.
Details, which with realists of a narrower kind would give only a
physical impression of the scene described, serve in his case to build
up its mental impression. They create a mental or emotional atmosphere
which makes us vaguely feel the intention of the story as we travel
through it, and flashes it upon us as we look back. In "Red Cotton
Night-cap Country" (as we shall presently see) he dwells so
significantly on the peacefulness of the neighbourhood in which the
tragedy has occurred, that we feel in it the quiet which precedes the
storm, and which in some measure invites it. In one of the Idyls, "Ivàn
Ivànovitch," he begins by describing the axe which will strike off the
woman's head, and raising a vague idea of its fitness for any possible
use. In another of them, "Martin Relph," the same process is carried on
in an opposite manner. We see a mental agony before we know its
substantial cause; and we only see the cause as reflected in it "Ned
Bratts," again, conveys in its first lines the sensation of a
tremendously hot day in which Nature seems to reel in a kind of riotous
stupefaction; and the grotesque tragedy on which the idyl turns, becomes
a matter of course. It would be easy to multiply examples.
Mr. Browning's verse is also subordinate to this intellectual theory of
poetic art. It is uniformly inspired by the principle that sense should
not be sacrificed to sound: and this principle constitutes his chief
ground of divergence from other poets. It is a case of
divergence--nothing more: since he is too deeply a musician to be
indifferent to sound in verse, and since no other poet deserving the
name would willingly sacrifice sense to it. But while all agree in
admitting that sense and sound in poetry are the natural complement of
each other, each will be practically more susceptible to one than to the
other, and will unconsciously seek it at the expense of the other. With
all his love for music, Mr. Browning is more susceptible to sense than
to sound. He values though more than expression; matter, more than form;
and, judging him from a strictly poetic point of view, he has lost his
balance in this direction, as so many have lost it in the opposite one.
He has never ignored beauty, but he has neglected it in the desire for
significance. He has never meant to be rugged, but he has become so, in
the exercise of strength. He has never intended to be obscure, but he
has become so from the condensation of style which was the excess of
significance and of strength. Habit grows on us by degrees till its
slight invisible links form an iron chain, till it overweights its
object, and even ends in crushing it out of sight; and Mr. Browning has
illustrated this natural law. The self-enslavement was the more
inevitable in his case that he was not only an earnest worker, but a
solitary one. His genius[3] removed him from the first from that sphere
of popular sympathy in which the tendency to excess would have been
corrected; and the distance, like the mental habit which created it, was
self-increasing.
It is thus that Mr. Browning explains the eccentricities of his style;
and his friends know that beyond the point of explaining, he does not
defend them. He has never blamed his public for accusing him of
obscurity or ugliness He has only thought those wrong who taxed him with
being wilfully ugly or obscure. He began early to defy public opinion
because his best endeavours had failed to conciliate it; and he would
never conciliate it at the expense of what he believed to be the true
principles of his art. But his first and greatest failure from a popular
point of view was the result of his willingness to accept any judgment,
however unfavourable, which coincided with this belief.
"Paracelsus," had recently been published, and declared
"unintelligible;" and Mr. Browning was pondering this fact and
concluding that he had failed to be intelligible because he had been too
concise, when an extract from a letter of Miss Caroline Fox was
forwarded to him by the lady to whom it had been addressed. The writer
stated that John Sterling had tried to read the poem and been repelled
by its _verbosity_; and she ended with this question: "_doth he know
that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of the
single word that is the one fit for his sonnet_?"
Mr. Browning was not personally acquainted with either John Sterling or
Caroline Fox, and what he knew of the former as a poet did not, to his
mind, bear out this marked objection to wordiness. Still, he gave the
joint criticism all the weight it deserved; and much more than it
deserved in the case of Miss Fox, whom he imagined, from her
self-confident manner, to be a woman of a certain age, instead of a girl
some years younger than himself; and often, he tells us, during the
period immediately following, he contented himself with two words where
he would rather have used ten. The harsh and involved passages in
"Sordello," which add so much to the remoteness of its thought, were the
first consequence of this lesson. "Pauline" and "Paracelsus" had been
deeply musical, and the music came back to their author's verse with the
dramas, lyrics, and romances by which "Sordello" was followed. But the
dread of being diffuse had doubly rooted itself in his mind, and was to
bear fruit again as soon as the more historical or argumentative mood
should prevail.
The determination never to sacrifice sense to sound is the secret of
whatever repels us in Mr. Browning's verse, and also of whatever
attracts. Wherever in it sense keeps company with sound, we have a music
far deeper than can arise from mere sound, or even from a flow of real
lyric emotion, which has its only counterpart _in_ sound. It is in the
idea, and of it. It is the brain picture beating itself into words.
The technical rules by which Mr. Browning works, carry out his principle
to the fullest extent.
I. He uses the smallest number of words which his meaning allows; is
particularly sparing in adjectives.
II. He uses the largest _relative_ number of Saxon (therefore
picturesque) words.[4]