Thirteen years after the publication, in 1855, of the Poems, in two
volumes, entitled "Men and Women," Browning reviewed his work and
made an interesting reclassification of it. He separated the
simpler pieces of a lyric or epic cast--such rhymed presentations
of an emotional moment, for example, as "Mesmerism" and "A Woman's
Last Word," or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an
experience, such as "Childe Roland" and "The Statue and the
Bust"--from their more complex companions, which were almost
altogether in blank verse, and, in general, markedly personified a
typical man in his environment, a Cleon or Fra Lippo, a Rudel or a
Blougram. These boldly sculptured figures he set apart from the
others as the fit components of the more closely related group which
ever since has constituted the division now known as "Men and
Women."
Possibly the poet took some pleasure in thus bringing to confusion
those critics who, beginning first to take any notice of his work
after the issue of these volumes of 1855, discovered therein poems
they praised chiefly by means of contrasting them with foregoing
work they found unnoticeable and later work they declared
inscrutable. Their bland discrimination, at any rate, in favor of
"Men and Women" became henceforth inapplicable, since the poet not
only cast out from the division they elected to honor the little
lyrical pieces that caught their eye, but also brought to the front,
from his earlier neglected work of the same kind as the monologues
retained, his Johannes Agricola of 1836, Pictor Ignotus of 1845, and
Rudel of 1842. Later criticism, moreover, that even yet assumes to
ring the old changes of discrimination against everything but "Men
and Women," is made not merely inapplicable by this re-arrangement,
but uninformed, a meaningless echo of a borrowed opinion which has
had the very ground from under it shifted.
The self-criticism of which this re-arrangement gives a hint is more
valuable.
All the shorter poems accumulated up to this period, various as they
are in theme and metrical form, are uniform in the fashioning of
their contour and color. As soon as this underlying uniformity of
make is recognized it may be seen to be the coloring and relief
belonging to any sort of poetic material, whether ordinarily
accounted dramatic material or not, which is imaginatively
externalized and made concrete. This peculiarity of make Browning
early acknowledged in his estimate of his shorter poems as
characteristic of his touch, when he called his lyrics and romances
dramatic. He became consciously sensitive later to slight variations
effected by his manipulation in shape and shade which it yet takes a
little thought to discern, even after his own redivision of his
work has given the clew to his self-judgments.
Not only events, deeds, and characters--the usual subject-matter
moulded and irradiated by dramatic power--but thoughts, impressions,
experiences, impulses, no matter how spiritualized or complex or
mobile, are transfused with the enlivening light of his creative
energy in his shorter poems. Perhaps the very path struck out
through them by the poet in his re-division may be traced between
the leaves silently closing together again behind him if it be
noticed that among these poems there are some with footholds firmly
rooted in the earth and others whose proper realm is air. These have
wings for alighting, for flitting thither and hither, or for
pursuing some sudden rapt whirl of flight in Heaven's face at
fancy's bidding. They are certainly not less original than those
other solider, earth-fast poems, but they are less unique. Being
motived in transient fancy, they are more akin to poems by other
hands, and could be classed more readily with them by any observer,
despite all differences, as little poetic romances or as a species
of lyric.
They were probably first found praiseworthy, not only because they
were simpler, but because, being more like work already understood
and approved, adventurous criticism was needed to taste their
quality. The other longer poems in blank verse, graver and more
dignified, yet even more vivid, and far more life-encompassing,
which bore the rounded impress of the living human being, instead of
the shadowy motion of the lively human fancy--these are the birth of
a process of imaginative brooding upon the development of man by
means of individuality throughout the slow, unceasing flow of human
history. Browning evidently grew aware that whatever these poems of
personality might prove to be worth to the world, these were the
ones deserving of a place apart, under the early title of "Men and
Women," which he thought especially suited to the more roundly
modelled and distinctively colored exemplars of his peculiar
faculty.
In his next following collection, under the similar descriptive
title of "Dramatis Personae," he added to this class of work,
shaping in the mould of blank verse mainly used for "Men and Women"
his personifications of the Medium Mr. Sludge, the embryo theologian
Caliban, the ripened mystical saint of "A Death in the Desert";
while Abt Vogler, the creative musician, Rabbi ben Ezra, the
intuitional philosopher, and the chastened adept in loving, James
Lee's wife, although held within the embrace of their maker's
dramatic conception of them, as persons of his stage, were made to
pour out their speech in rhyme as Johannes Agricola in the earlier
volume uttered his creed and Rudel his love-message, as if the heat
of their emotion-moved personality required such an outlet. Some
such general notion as this of the scope of this volume, and of the
design of the poet in the construction, classification, and orderly
arrangement of so much of his briefer work as is here contained
seems to be borne out upon a closer examination. On the threshold
of this new poetic world of personality stands the Poet of the poem
significantly called "Transcendentalism," who is speaking to another
poet about the too easily obvious, metaphor-bare philosophy of his
opus in twelve books. That the admonishing poet is stationed there
at the very door-sill of the Gallery of Men and Women is surely not
accidental, even if Browning's habit of plotting his groups of poems
symmetrically by opening with a prologue-poem sounding the right
key, and rounding the theme with an epilogue, did not tend to prove
it intentional. It is an open secret that the last poem in "Men and
Women," for instance, is an epilogue of autobiographical interest,
gathering up the foregoing strains of his lyre, for a few last
chords, in so intimate a way that the actual fall of the fingers may
be felt, the pausing smile seen, as the performer turns towards the
one who inspired "One Word More." The appropriateness of
"Transcendentalism" as a prologue need be no more of a secret than
that of "One Word More" as an epilogue, although it is left to
betray itself. Other poets writing on the poet, Emerson for
example, and Tennyson, place the outright plain name of their
thought at the head of their verses, without any attempt to make
their titles dress their parts and keep as thoroughly true to their
roles as the poems themselves. But a complete impersonation of his
thought in name and style as well as matter is characteristic of
Browning, and his personified poets playing their parts together in
"Transcendentalism" combine to exhibit a little masque exemplifying
their writer's view of the Poet as veritably as if he had named it
specifically "The Poet." One poet shows the other, and brings him
visibly forward; but even in such a morsel of dramatic workmanship
as this, fifty-one lines all told, there is the complexity and
involution of life itself, and, as ever in Browning's monologues,
over the shoulder of the poet more obviously portrayed peers as
livingly the face of the poet portraying him. And this one--the
admonishing poet--is set there with his "sudden rose," as if to
indicate with that symbol of poetic magic what kind of spell was
sought to be exercised by their maker to conjure up in his house of
song the figures that people its niches. Could a poem be imagined
more cunningly devised to reveal a typical poetic personality, and a
typical theory of poetic method, through its way of revealing
another? What poet could have composed it but one who himself
employed the dramatic method of causing the abstract to be
realizable through the concrete image of it, instead of the contrary
mode of seeking to divest the objective of its concrete form in
order to lay bare its abstract essence? This opposite theory of the
poetic function is precisely the Boehme mode, against which the
veiled dramatic poet, who is speaking in favor of the Halberstadtian
magic, admonishes his brother, while he himself in practical
substantiation of his theory of poetics brings bodily in sight the
boy-face above the winged harp, vivified and beautiful himself,
although his poem is but a shapeless mist.
Not directly, then, but indirectly, as the dramatic poet ever
reveals himself, does the sophisticated face of the subtle poet of
"Men and Women" appear as the source of power behind both of the
poets of this poem, prepossessing the reader of the verity and
beauty of the theory of poetic art therein exemplified. Such an
interpretation of "Transcendentalism," and such a conception of it
as a key to the art of the volume it opens, chimes in harmoniously
with the note sounded in the next following poem, "How it Strikes a
Contemporary." Here again a typical poet is personified, not,
however, by means of his own poetic way of seeing, but of the
prosaic way in which he is seen by a contemporary, the whole, of
course, being poetically seen and presented by the
over-poet. Browning himself, and in such a manifold way that the
reader is enabled to conceive as vividly of the talker and his
mental atmosphere and social background--the people and habitudes of
the good old town of Valladolid--as of the betalked-of Corregidor
himself; while by the totality of these concrete images an
impression is conveyed of the dramatic mode of poetic expression
which is far more convincing than any explicit theoretic statement
of it could be, because so humanly animated.
"Artemis Prologizes" seems to have been selected to close this
little opening sequence of poems on the poet, because that fragment
of a larger projected work could find place here almost as if it
were a poet's exercise in blank verse. Its smooth and spacious
rhythm, flawless and serene as the distant Greek myth of the hero
and the goddess it celebrates, is in striking contrast with the
rougher, but brighter and more humanly colloquial blank verse of
"Bishop Blougram's Apology," for example, or the stiff carefulness
of the "Epistle" of Karshish. It might alone suffice, by comparison
with the metrical craftsmanship of the other poems of "Men and
Women," to assure the observant reader that never was a good workman
more baselessly accused of metrical carelessness than the poet who
designedly varies his complicated verse-effects to suit every inner
impulse belonging to his dramatic subject. A golden finish being in
place in this statuesque, "Hyperion"-like monologue of Artemis,
behold here it is, and none the less perfect because not merely the
outcome of the desire to produce a polished piece of poetic
mechanism.
Browning, perhaps, linked his next poem, "The Strange Medical
Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician," with the calm
prologizing of the Hellenic goddess, by association of the "wise
pharmacies" of AEsculapius, with the inquisitive sagacity of
Karshish, "the not-incurious in God's handiwork." By this ordering
of the poems, the reader may now enjoy, at any rate, the contrasts
between three historic phases of wisdom in bodily ills: the phase
presented in the dependence of the old Greek healer upon simple
physical effects, soothing "with lavers the torn brow," and laying
"the stripes and jagged ends of flesh even once more"; and the
phases typified, on the one side, by the ingenious Arab, sire of the
modern scientist, whose patient correlation of facts and studious,
sceptical scrutiny of cause and effect are caught in the bud in the
diagnosis transmitted by Karshish to Abib, and, on the other side,
by the Nazarene physician, whose inspired secret of summoning out of
the believing soul of man the power to control his body--so baffled
and fascinated Karshish, drawing his attention in Lazarus to just
that connection of the known physical with the unknown psychical
nature which is still mystically alluring the curiosity of
investigators.
From the childlike, over-idealizing mood of Lazarus toward the God
who had succored him, inducing in him so fatalistic an indifference
to human concerns, there is but a step to the rapture of absolute
theology expressed in the person of Johannes Agricola. Such poems
as these put before the cool gaze of the present century the very
men of the elder day of religion. Their robes shine with an
unearthly light, and their abstracted eyes are hypnotized by the
effulgence of their own haloes. Yet the poet never fails to
insinuate some naive foible in their personification, a numbness of
the heart or an archaism of soul, which reveals the possessed one as
but a human brother, after all, shaped by his environment, and
embodying the spirit of an historic epoch out of which the current
of modern life is still streaming.
The group of art poems which follows similarly presents a dramatic
synthesis of the art of the Renaissance as represented by three
types of painters. The religious devotion of the monastic painter,
whose ecstatic spirit breathes in "Pictor Ignotus," probably gives
this poem its place adjoining Agricola and Lazarus. His artist's
hankering to create that beauty to bless the world with which his
soul refrains from grossly satisfying, unites the poem with the two
following ones. In the first of these the realistic artist, Fra
Lippo, is graphically pictured personally ushering in the high noon
of the Italian efflorescence. In the second, the gray of that day of
art is silvering the self-painted portrait of the prematurely
frigid and facile formalist, Andrea del Sarto. In "Pictor Ignotus"
not only the personality of the often unknown and unnamed
painting-brother of the monasteries is made clear, but also the
nature of his beautiful cold art and the enslavement of both art and
personality to ecclesiastical beliefs and ideals. In "Fra Lippo
Lippi" not alone the figure of the frolicsome monk appears caught in
his pleasure-loving escapade, amid that picturesque knot of
alert-witted Florentine guards, ready to appreciate all the good
points in his story of his life and the protection the arms of the
Church and the favor of the Medici have afforded his genius, but,
furthermore, is illustrated the irresistible tendency of the
art-impulse to expand beyond the bounds set for it either by laws of
Church or art itself, and to find beauty wheresoever in life it
chooses to turn the light of its gaze. So, also, in "Andrea del
Sarto," the easy cleverness of the unaspiring craftsman is not
embodied apart from the abject relationship which made his very soul
a bond-slave to the gross mandates of "the Cousin's whistle." Yet
in all three poems the biographic and historic conditions
contributing toward the individualizing of each artist are so
unobtrusively epitomized and vitally blended, that, while scarcely
any item of specific study of the art and artists of the Renaissance
would be out of place in illustrating the essential truth of the
portraiture and assisting in the better appreciation of the poem,
there is no detail of the workmanship which does not fall into the
background as a mere accessory to the dominant figure through whose
relationship to his art his station in the past is made clear.
This sort of dramatic synthesis of a salient, historical epoch is
again strikingly disclosed in the following poem of the Renaissance
period, "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church." In
this, again, the art-connoisseurship of the prelacy, so important
an element in the Italian movement towards art-expression, is
revealed to the life in the beauty-loving personality of the dying
bishop. And by means, also, of his social ties with his nephews,
called closer than they wish about him now; with her whom "men would
have to be their mother once"; with old Gandolf, whom he fancies
leering at him from his onion-stone tomb; and with all those strong
desires of the time for the delight of being envied, for marble
baths and horses and brown Greek manuscripts and mistresses, the
seeds of human decay planted in the plot of Time, known as the
Central Renaissance, by the same lingering fleshliness and
self-destroying self-indulgence as was at home in pagan days, are
livingly exposed to the historic sense.
Is the modern prelate portrayed in "Bishop Blougram's Apology," with
all his bland subtlety, complex culture, and ripened perceptions,
distant as the nineteenth century from the sixteenth, very different
at bottom from his Renaissance brother, in respect to his native
hankering for the pleasure of estimation above his fellows?
Gigadibs is his Gandolf, whom he would craftily overtop. He is the
one raised for the time above the commonalty by his criticism of the
bishop, to whom the prelate would fain show how little he was to be
despised, how far more honored and powerful he was among men. As
for Gigadibs, it is to be noticed that Browning quietly makes him do
more than leer enviously at his complacent competitor from a
tomb-top. The "sudden healthy vehemence" that struck him and made
him start to test his first plough in a new world, and read his last
chapter of St. John to better purpose than towards
self-glorification beyond his fellows, is a parable of the more
profitable life to be found in following the famous injunction of
that chapter in John's Gospel, "Feed my sheep!" than in causing
those sheep to motion one, as the bishop would have his obsequious
wethers of the flock motion him, to the choice places of the sward.
So, as vivid a picture of the materialism and monopolizing of the
present century sowing seeds of decay and self-destruction in the
movement of this age toward love of the truth, of the beauty of
genuineness in character and earnestness in aim, is portrayed
through the realistic personality of the great modern bishop, in his
easy-smiling after-dinner talk with Gigadibs, the literary man, as
is presented of the Central Renaissance period in the companion
picture of the Bishop of Saint Praxed's.
In Cleon, the man of composite art and culture, the last ripe
fruitage of Greek development, is personified and brought into
contact, at the moment of the dawn of Christianity in Europe, with
the ardent impulse the Christian ideal of spiritual life supplied to
human civilization. How close the wise and broad Greek culture came
to being all-sufficing, capable of effecting almost enough of
impetus for the aspiring progress of the world, and yet how much it
lacked a warmer element essential to be engrafted upon its lofty
beauty, the reader, upon whose imaginative vision the personality of
Cleon rises, can scarcely help but feel.
The aesthetic and religious or philosophical interests vitally
conceived and blended, which link together so many of the main poems
of "Men and Women," close with "Cleon." Rudel, the troubadour,
presenting, in the self-abandonment of his offering of love to the
Lady of Tripoli, an impersonation of the chivalric love
characteristic of the Provencal life of the twelfth century,
intervenes, appropriately, last of all, between the preceding poems
and the epilogue, which devotes heart and brain of the poet himself,
with the creatures of his hand, to his "Moon of Poets."
As these poetic creations now stand, they all seem, upon
examination, to incarnate the full-bodied life of distinctive types
of men, centred amid their relations with other men within a
specific social environment, and fulfilling the possibilities for
such unique, dramatic syntheses as were revealed but partially or in
embryo here and there among the other shorter poems of this period
of the poet's growth.
In one important particular the re-arrangement of the "Men and
Women" group of poems made its title inappropriate. The graceful
presence and love-lit eyes of the many women of the shorter
love-poems were withdrawn, and Artemis, Andrea del Sarto's wife, the
Prior's niece--"Saint Lucy, I would say," as Fra Lippo
explains--and, perhaps, the inspirer of Rudel's chivalry, too, the
shadowy yet learned and queenly Lady of Tripoli, alone were left to
represent the "women" of the title. As for minor inexactitudes,
what does it matter that the advantage gained by nicely selecting
the poems properly belonging together, both in conception and
artistic modelling, was won at the cost of making the reference
inaccurate, in the opening lines of "One Word More," to "my fifty
men and women, naming me the fifty poems finished"?--Or that the
mention of Roland in line 138 is no longer in place with Karshish,
Cleon, Lippo, and Andrea, now that the fantastic story of Childe
Roland's desperate loyalty is given closer companionship among the
varied experiences narrated in the "Dramatic Romances"? While as
for the mention of the Norbert of "In a Balcony"--which was
originally included as but one item along with the other contents of
"Men and Women"--that miniature drama, although it stands by itself
now, is still near enough at hand in the revised order to account
for the allusion. These are all trifles--mere sins against literal
accuracy. But the discrepancy in the title occasioned by the absence
of women is of more importance. It is of especial interest, in
calling attention to the fact that the creator of Pompilia,
Balaustion, and the heroine of the "Inn Album"--all central figures,
whence radiate the life and spiritual energy of the work they
ennoble--had, at this period, created no typical figures of women in
any degree corresponding to those of his men.
CHARLOTTE PORTER
HELEN A. CLARKE
"TRANSCENDENTALISM: A POEM IN TWELVE BOOKS"
1855
Stop playing, poet! May a brother speak?
'Tis you speak, that's your error. Song's our art:
Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts
Instead of draping them in sights and sounds.
--True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up!
But why such long prolusion and display,
Such turning and adjustment of the harp,
And taking it upon your breast, at length,
Only to speak dry words across its strings?
Stark-naked thought is in request enough: 10
Speak prose and hollo it till Europe hears!
The six-foot Swiss tube, braced about with bark,
Which helps the hunter's voice from Alp to Alp--
Exchange our harp for that--who hinders you?
But here's your fault; grown men want thought, you think;
Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse.
Boys seek for images and melody,
Men must have reason--so, you aim at men.
Quite otherwise! Objects throng our youth,'tis true;
We see and hear and do not wonder much: 20
If you could tell us what they mean, indeed!
As German Boehme never cared for plants
Until it happed, a-walking in the fields,
He noticed all at once that plants could speak,
Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.
That day the daisy had an eye indeed--
Colloquized with the cowslip on such themes!
We find them extant yet in Jacob's prose.
But by the time youth slips a stage or two
While reading prose in that tough book he wrote 30
(Collating and emendating the same
And settling on the sense most to our mind)
We shut the clasps and find life's summer past.
Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss--
Another Boehme with a tougher book
And subtler meanings of what roses say--
Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,
John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about?
He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, 40
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 shut house of life.
So come, the harp back to your heart again!
You are a poem, though your poem's naught.
The best of all you showed before, believe,
Was your own boy-face o'er the finer chords
Bent, following the cherub at the top 50
That points to God with his paired half-moon wings.