_Browning’s Diction_
O lyric love, half-angel and half-bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire,--
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face,--
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart--
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reach’d thee amid thy chambers, blanch’d their blue,
And bared them of the glory--to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die,--
Not considering the content matter, but looking alone at the way of
writing, there is a clear resemblance between this celebrated passage
from Browning and any characteristic example of Tennyson’s maturer
manner. Tennyson might have hesitated at “red-ripe of the heart,”
and have avoided the repetition of “blue” at the end of a line,
but otherwise there is nothing either beyond or below his reach in
Browning’s full-bodied and admirably balanced blank verse. Nor was
Browning incapable of the richly-vestured lyric movement of which
Tennyson was a master--as this from _Paracelsus_ may show--
And strew faint sweetness from some old
Egyptian’s fine worm-eaten shroud
Which breaks to dust when once unroll’d;
Or shredded perfume, like a cloud
From closet long to quiet vow’d,
With moth’d and dropping arras hung,
Mouldering her lute and books among,
As when a queen, long dead, was young.
And then we pass from these, done so to speak by a master in the best
manner of his age, to--
I want to know a butcher paints,
A baker rhymes for his pursuit,
Candlestick-maker much acquaints
His soul with song, or, haply mute,
Blows out his brains upon the flute....
and we seem almost to be listening to a different voice. Many poets
have written in more than one manner. Tennyson himself had his familiar
style, the poem written in his old age to FitzGerald, for example,
which is as distinct from his graver manner as was the Keats of the
Mermaid lines from the Keats of the Odes, or Milton in the verses to
Hobson the carrier from himself in _Samson Agonistes_. But in
these other cases the more colloquial manner is deliberately assumed
for some occasion of lowered poetic pressure, not in the least
unworthy or trivial, but of less imaginative urgency than “this great
argument,” while with Browning it becomes, no less than this greater
ceremony, a serious poetic style, and one that as time went by more
and more governed his practice. But Browning did not stay at the point
indicated by “I want to know a butcher paints.” So far he was in some
measure, and more than any other major poet, following the example of
Byron, and replacing poetic elevation--using the word in its original
sense--by a racy conversationalism. He was, fairly enough, basing his
poetic style upon common idiom, but the common idiom of his use was
rather evangelised into poetic efficiency than distilled into poetic
purity. Before he could conceivably have written “blows out his brains
upon the flute” Tennyson would have been seen consciously putting his
singing robes aside, but it came from Browning in full dress. But the
unequivocal use of witty tap-room rhetoric, or call it what you will,
was not all, nor, be it said, was it in Browning’s handling an easy or
undistinguished thing. This was in no sense mere reporting. Before the
idiom got into his verse it was subjected to a very keen intellectual
scrutiny and ordering, but when it did get there it was still far more
recognisably itself than was common in poetry. When, however, we come
upon such lines as--
Hobbs hints blue,--straight he turtle eats:
Nobbs prints blue,--claret crowns his cup:
Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats,--
Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?
What porridge had John Keats?
which we frequently do, though this famous passage is admittedly an
extreme case, we have to deal with something more than the direct
removal of common idiom into verse. Apart from actual obscurity of
meaning, we have here a poetic style that is strangely elusive in
its origin. It is useless to dismiss it as being the mere vagary of
a great but wilful poet. Browning in this and many similar passages
was deliberately carrying out some technical purpose, and, directed by
some instinct or another, was shaping his material as he wished, and
not being beaten by it. At the beginning of this essay I suggested that
Browning’s distinctive choice of diction was controlled by a feeling,
dominating him more and more, that the poetical resources of the
language along traditional lines were for the moment exhausted--clearly
as he himself disproved the belief in such work as “O lyric love”
and “And strew faint sweetness.” For the sake of convenience in this
argument we may speak--quite arbitrarily I admit--of Browning’s
three characteristics as Tennysonian, Byronic, and the specifically
Browningesque,[5] not chronologically but in character. He was not
exclusively engaged in any one of these at a given time, but taking
the body of his mature work as a whole, it might be said that its
common measure is the second of these manners, often brightened by an
imaginative strain from the first, and sometimes complicated by the
third. This range and variety in his verse remained strictly within
his style--it was not a case of style too often subject to manneristic
contortions, as has sometimes been suggested. Browning in his manner
as well as in his investigation was a very cosmopolitan poet, and
he could pass in a single poem from one decided accent to another
without any sense of incongruity. This being so, it may be said that
the “Browningesque” quality in my category is less typically Browning
than the others; the definition should, perhaps, be qualified by
adding that it is a quality that he brings from a source of his own
unaided discovery into the texture of a style emphatically his own and
yet inseparable from tradition. _Shop_, from which the painting
butcher and rhyming baker come, shows the three strains blended into a
perfectly satisfactory whole. This is the end of the poem.
And whither went he? Ask himself,
Not me! To change of scene, I think.
Once sold the ware and pursed the pelf,
Chaffer was scarce his meat and drink,
Nor all his music--money-chink.
Because a man has shop to mind
In time and peace, since flesh must live,
Needs spirit lack all life behind,
All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive,
All loves except what trade can give?
I want to know a butcher paints,
A baker rhymes for his pursuits,
Candlestick-maker much acquaints
His soul with song, or, haply mute,
Blows out his brains upon the flute.
But--shop each day and all day long!
Friend, your good angel slept, your star
Suffered eclipse, fate did you wrong!
For where these sorts of treasures are
There should our hearts be--Christ, how far!
Here we have the romantic richness, the direct conversational
idiom, and the crabbed Hobbs-Nobbs figure all in one. And this
last in Browning’s work was, I think, a further development of his
dissatisfaction with the habit of verse as he found it in general use.
If the “elevated” manner seemed to him to be exhausted, the colloquial
manner that he adopted as an alternative may very well soon have
seemed to him to be too flat and commonplace, to lack the spring of
good poetic writing, and it was a natural thing for his genius to
enliven it not by a return to the accepted manner only--though he did
this as well--but also by inventing a new complex of the common idiom,
fantastic, involved, and striking, if sometimes only by its oddity,
yet always alert and personal. “I want to know a butcher paints”
is the idiom of ordinary speech lifted bodily into poetry with the
slightest of sea-changes; “O lyric love” is the same idiom ennobled and
intensified, transfigured in the traditional way by a poetic master;
in Nokes and Stokes and their azure feats is again the same idiom, but
now vexed into an attitude, not in the least insincerely, but by a poet
who has bravely but wilfully cut the old moorings and finds new ones
very far to seek. Nothing could be less just than to accuse Browning
of deliberate antics, but if, even for the most disinterested reasons,
you forsake solid earth for the tight-rope you cannot help performing
with the pole, and you are lucky if you get across even at that, which
it must be allowed Browning generally did. I said that the stanzas
from _Shop_ showed the three strains in his style satisfactorily
blended, but it would perhaps be nearer to the truth to say that they
show them in close association, each contributing to a satisfactory
whole, and kept by Browning’s art from striking any discord, shown by
him, in short, equally to be natural and congruous elements in the
unity of his style. As showing these elements more indistinguishably
combined worked into one texture, three stanzas may be given from _A
Toccata of Galuppi’s_--
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow do you say?
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,--
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O’er the breasts superb abundance where a man might base his head?
Well (and it was graceful of them), they’d break talk off and afford
--She, to bite her mask’s black velvet, he, to finger on his sword,
While you sat and play’d Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?
It will, perhaps, be found that this composite style of Browning’s
invention is of all in the Victorian age the one that has had most
influence upon the poetry of our own time.