Essays and studies: by members of the English Association/Browning
BROWNING[1]
I begin with some of the difficulties; it might be more prudent to suppress them. But it would be unjust and unlucky if I were to come here promising to say anything marvellously new or anything thoroughly satisfactory about the poetry of Browning. In the art of criticism, as in other dangerous trades, there are workmen's diseases, and one of the commonest is for the speaker to believe that he can 'do' a subject in an essay of thirty-two pages, or a discourse not longer than two ordinary sermons. This illusion is sometimes pleasant in the young; it is pleasantly described by Stevenson in the preface to his Familiar Studies: 'So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our generation acquires, in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial commission through the ages.' But this happy confidence should not be allowed to settle down into a mere steady, secure opinion, a fixed belief that the speaker, living in the cool element of prose, can interpret all the translunary spheres of poetry, and put all the tears of the universe into his bottle. It is well to know the limits, and to understand that poetry is its own interpretation. The best one can do, and it is no dishonourable office, is to get to the right point of view, to praise in the right way.
Here is another difficulty, or at any rate, a scruple. I never met Mr. Browning to speak to, yet I cannot help thinking of him as I saw him when he was still on this side of the picture, when he might be passed, any day, in London, walking in the crowd, perhaps quicker and more observant than most, yet one of the crowd of mortal men. Somehow, this makes him different from the poets one has never seen. It is easier and less invidious to talk about a row of volumes than a living man. I think of Mr. Browning as one who has stopped to speak to many of my friends, and I am more doubtful than ever about the beginning of this essay. I remember with sympathy Coleridge at Birmingham, when he was wakened up suddenly by the question whether he had seen a newspaper that day: 'Sir,' I replied, rubbing my eyes, 'I am far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read newspapers'—though he had come to the place to push the sale of his own paper, the Watchman; his remark, as he says, was incongruous with that purpose, but still, it may have expressed his true mind.
On the other hand, it is very pleasant to think of Mr. Browning 'as he strikes a contemporary'. I remember a gathering at Balliol, now about thirty years since, and the guests of the college as they met there, and Browning talking to Matthew Arnold at the foot of the steps of the hall; and, before that, an autumn evening in the Island of Arran, the year that Pacchiarotto was published, when Browning met us on the Lamlash Road going home, and I provoked some scepticism in my companions by saying that he was the greatest man in the world.
That was a long time ago, and I am reminded, thinking of the dates, what a difference there is in the perspective of the history of poetry between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century. Browning, who died in 1889, is at nearly the same distance from us in 1910 as Dr. Johnson from the generation that read Marmion. But the interval seems much less. The nineteenth century is much nearer to us than the eighteenth century to our ancestors a hundred years ago. We think of Fielding and Gray as very far back in time, far separated from the age of Scott and Byron. Yet they are as near that time, in dates, as Thackeray to us, and nearer than the early poems of Tennyson and Browning, which are still read by many young people, without compulsion or any sense of duty, or any uncomfortable feeling that the poems are antiquated now. For poetry, we have still to live in the nineteenth century. A hundred years ago things were otherwise. In Miss Austen's time people read Cowper still. But Cowper is already coming to be old-fashioned in the literary conversations at Lyme between Anne Elliot and Captain Benwick—'having talked of poetry, the richness of the present age, and gone through a brief comparison of opinion as to the first-rate poets, trying to ascertain whether Marmion or The Lady of the Lake were to be preferred, and how ranked the Giaour and The Bride of Abydos, and, moreover, how the Giaour was to be pronounced …' Cowper is old-fashioned, though his poems appeared in the eighties, and would correspond in date more nearly to Departmental Ditties than to Men and Women. The dates of Stevenson may be compared with the dates of Burns. When we read Scott's account of his meeting with Burns we think of Burns as a poet of a different age and world. Yet if you 'apply' the nineteenth-century dates to the eighteenth century, in the manner recommended by Euclid for triangles, 'so that the line AB may be upon the line DE it will appear that Stevenson was born nine years earlier than Burns, and died before him. And we are surprised to find that Burns is so far left behind in 1810, that Stevenson is so near to us now.
The fact is plain, that there has been no such poetic revolution in this century as there was in the last; and though we may complain of some injustice in the way that things are shared by the Muses, the stewards of Helicon, there is compensation in the longer life and more enduring value of the older authors, more particularly of Tennyson and Browning.
Possibly the lapse of time may have made Browning easier; perhaps the poetry of George Meredith may have made Browning's verse less difficult in comparison. One does not hear so much now of the protests against Browning's obscurity, of grievances like those of Gilead Beck in the Golden Butterfly. Sordello may be spoken of without a groan, and Paracelsus can be read at a sitting. Yet the difficulties are there—difficulties which are not the same thing as obscurity. The charge of obscurity has been repelled by Mr. Swinburne in his essay on George Chapman. Obscurity is not the right word. 'He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity.' And later he speaks of the 'faculty of spiritual illumination rapid and intense and subtle as lightning, which brings to bear upon its central object by way of direct and vivid illustration every symbol and every detail on which its light is flashed in passing.'
Obscurity is not the word, but the difficulties remain. Browning recognized this himself, in the revision of Sordello, and the care he took to make the poem more easily intelligible by means of the head-lines, which give a summary of the argument. Why has this key been left out of the recent editions? It is an injustice, and it calls for remedy. The publishers do not reprint The Rose and the Ring without Thackeray's head-lines; why should they have retrenched the commentary on Sordello, the poet's own marginal gloss? The want of it, for one thing, leaves a passage unexplained where the acutest reader may require to be 'edified by the margent':
Now—not this time desert thy cloudy place
To scare me, thus employed, with that pure face!
I need not fear this audience, I make free
With them, but then this is no place for thee!
The thunder-phrase of the Athenian, grown
Up out of memories of Marathon,
Would echo like his own sword's griding screech
Braying a Persian shield the silver speech
Of Sidney's self, the starry paladin,
Turn intense as a trumpet sounding in
The knights to tilt—wert thou to hear! What heart
Have I to play my puppets, bear my part
Before these worthies?
Shelley is meant here, but it is only from the head-line on the next page—'Shelley departing, Verona appears'—that one can learn this.
The poet's gloss to Sordello may be taken as a justification of the work of commentators, an acknowledgement that the matter of poetry can be partly translated into prose. A book like Mr. Henry Jones's, on the Philosophy of Browning, if it needed an apology, might find one in this device of the author, where he provides an analysis of the story. There is nothing in sound poetry that need be afraid of the prose interpreter. The example of Dante, too, might be alleged if it were necessary to prove that poetry and criticism may go together and be used in turn by one and the same author. The analysis of Sordello is less minute than that which Dante gives for his lyrical poems in the Vita Nuova and Convivio.
Nevertheless, it is sometimes dangerous to extract the prose sense of a poem; dangerous, if the prose interpretation be taken in place of the poetry, or supposed to represent it fully. This is a danger incident to the most thoughtful poets, or rather to some of their readers. The poet comes to be valued for the amount of his work that can be translated, i. e. for that which is not poetry. This is blind and unreasonable; but it is not uncommon with serious-minded students. On the other hand, the readers who have no liking for analysis are often disgusted with the commentary or the paraphrase. While their objections are sometimes due to laziness and want of thought, they may also come from a true sense of what makes the life of a poem, the indissoluble harmony of elements which no commentary can replace. They do not want merely what Wordsworth called 'an extremely valuable chain of thoughts'.
In Browning it is possible to find a much more articulate theory of human nature and the universe than in Wordsworth; it submits more readily to be expressed in prose. It is found in Paracelsus and Sordello, in Old Pictures at Florence, and in the Grammarian's Funeral. It is a theory of progress; not of an endless advance merely, from point to point 'in unlimited series', but of the infinite Universe drawing the human adventurer to work out, in his own life, in knowledge and in power, everything that the universal world contains. There is a superficial likeness in Browning's theory to the 'Perfectibility' of some eighteenth-century philosophers; the difference is that Browning thinks of perfection as real, so that the imperfect human pilgrim is not a mere wanderer on from one stage to another, nor merely an instrument along with other finite things in building up the fabric of the Universe; he is thought of as one compelled by the Universe to put into his own small being all that the whole world means. This is the tragic absurdity of human life. Either it ventures the impossible, like Sordello, 'thrusting in time Eternity's concern,' or it cuts its ideals to fit the short human life allowed it, the ship's cabin of Bishop Blougram's allegory—an inglorious compromise. This theory as Browning held it may (I believe) be stated in prose as a philosophical argument. If this be so, there is in Browning a strong element of purely intellectual as distinct from poetical or purely imaginative thought, and this which is intellectual may perhaps be extricated or 'disentwined', (to use a word of Browning's own) from his poetry, without disgrace either to his poetry or to the philosophical analyst. With Wordsworth this is impossible. Wordsworth's knowledge, in which he is eminent above all other thinkers in the world, is so essentially part of his own life, so close to reality, that it will not bear translation into any language but his own. Nothing can take its place. Ahana and Pharphar will not do instead of the waters of Israel.
Theories something like Wordsworth's have been expressed in prose, and sometimes in phrases that seem well fitted for large advertisements: e.g. 'Cosmic Consciousness,' 'In Tune with the Infinite.' It looks as if Wordsworth's knowledge might be shared in part with people who not only have no poetic utterance, but no decent language at all to say what they mean. Wordsworth himself in his unfinished philosophical poem sought to give as argument what he knew as vision. But what is only known in vision can only be conveyed to other minds by some different art from logic; by language like that of the stars, in momentary points of light; by the language of poetry, where poetry comes nearest to music and is furthest from prose. Which does not mean that Wordsworth's knowledge is simply feeling, but that it is different from the intelligence which argues and explains. Browning, on the other hand, was openly and by his own confession given to analysis. One might quote from Sordello the head-line 'Analyst who turns in due course synthetist', or compare that extraordinary poem Pacchiarotto, which was written as a travesty of Sordello, and flung in the face of the reviewers: 'harsh analytics' is Browning's phrase there for the kind of minute work which many reviewers condemned in Browning.
The analytical mind is the critical mind, and its work is commonly thought to be the opposite of creation, of imaginative art, of poetry. One variety of it is the satire. The satirist, the analyst, expounds his subject instead of making the characters live and speak in drama. Browning knew as well as any one the difference between the two processes, but he had something in him that made him unafraid of the dangers and hindrances of the analytic method. He knew (like Balzac, may we say?) that it was senseless to refuse the analytic method when it was part of his own mind. Browning's policy is disclosed in the head-line 'Analyst who turns in due course synthetist'. Let analysis do its best or its worst; if the mind be made of prose the results of analysis will be prose; if there be poetry in the mind the analysis may end in poetry. This is Browning's hope, and his Sordello note on the analyst-synthetist might serve as a label for The Ring and the Book, and for much else.
He begins often with an abstract instance, a case, a problem, instead of a character. But the poetic end need not be abstract or merely intellectual. Mr. Sludge the Medium may begin, abstractly, as a case: 'How understand the self-justification of a humbug?' And this problem is partly thought out in general terms. But the result is not abstract, and the proof is that it is amusing. The character embodies itself, like Chaucer's Pardoner, whose monologue or dramatic idyll (and the Wife of Bath's also) is in method very near Browning. Not far from Tennyson, either, we may say, remembering the Northern Farmer and the Village Wife, and others. But neither Chaucer nor Tennyson has the passion of a collector, like Browning; he goes far further than they in his chase after the varieties. No corner is left untried, no problem is too old or too modern for him. Ixion is for him a character, not an ornament out of the mythology. The Queen of Sheba is there, and Queen Christina by her side; Jochanan Hakkadosh, and Bubb Dodington. In the year after Sedan there appeared the revelation of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society.
The form of those studies is generally the same; the monologue in blank verse. Some readers have been inclined to take this (as Browning himself no doubt very often did), simply for a convenient instrument, not too poetical, not very different from prose, a thing to be accepted as part of the author's humour. If this be the right view to take, then all Browning's value is in his matter, and there is nothing in his poetic form; which would mean that he is not a poet at all. And so we may be led to consider his form and some of the interests of it; and when we say poetic form what we mean is poetry.
Browning himself admitted that he was difficult. He tried in The Ring and the Book to write easier for the British public—
British Public, you who like me not.
In Pacchiarotto, not without dust and heat, he met his critics and told them his mind—gave them 'nettle-broth', as he says in the Epilogue to the same volume. He sees the critics as a band of chimney-sweeps, dressed up for May Day, coming under his window with music of knuckle-bones and cleavers—
Us critics as sweeps out your chimbly.
They have a grievance against his obscurity:
The neighbours complain it's no joke, sir,
You ought to consume your own smoke, sir!
In the Epilogue, in his parable of the vintage, he seems to admit a good deal of the charges against him. The critics say that his wine is rough; that the true poetic wine has both body and bouquet. In his answer he does not maintain that his poetry has all the qualities. His answer is that he does not believe they really like good wine; they talk about Shakespeare, but do they read him? As for his own vintage, he does not deny that it may be rough; he does not contend that it is both strong and mellow. What he is sure of is that it is strong and sound.
That volume of Pacchiarotto is very interesting for the history of Browning's own poetical life and his fortunes as an author. But it is not altogether pleasant. He does not 'make the malefactor die sweetly', in Dryden's phrase. 'A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a bare hanging, but to make a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her husband.' Browning's satire is a little old-fashioned, and has too much of the railing, 'flyting' as the Scots have it, which recalls the savage origin of the Old Comedy. And the worst of it (for no one need give much concern or pity to the dunces in this controversy)—the worst of it is that Browning does not seem to know what his own poetry is really like. It is not enough to say that his poetry is rough but honest (for that is what his Epilogue comes to) those who have lived on his poetry know that there is more in it than strength, and that the critical depreciation of Browning's verse is as futile as the rejection of Wordsworth's, or the older condemnation of Donne. As to this last, it should be remembered that Ben Jonson's sentence to Drummond: 'that Done for not keeping of accent deserved hanging', was spoken by the man who best understood and most valued Donne: 'He esteemeth John Done the first poet in the world in some things.' Lovers of Wordsworth and Browning might be allowed the same sort of freedom without impairing their regard for these poets' melodies. Wordsworth's verse is not to be judged by Andrew Jones or Ellen Irwin. There is ground enough in Browning for the Heptalogia parody:
Learn to bear with dead calms by remembering cyclones,
Snap strings short with sharp thumbnails till silence begets tones—
But it is wrong to take the harsh colliding consonants as a true sample of Browning's art. It is well to remember the music that he has added to the store of English poetry—poetical music in which he is not the opponent but the partner of Tennyson.
Many people doubtless have amused themselves with thinking of the great rival authors—Tennyson and Browning, Thackeray and Dickens, Macaulay and Carlyle—who seem, in that age, to represent in pairs the two opposite kinds of literature. For these two orders various names may be found—the obedient and the exorbitant, law and impulse, angels and devils, in Blake's meaning of these words, which is not on the side of the angels. But if you look closer at the great champions, though you will not find their differences less interesting, you will find that these are not so epigrammatically neat as they might at first appear. There is more likeness of Macaulay to Carlyle, and of Carlyle to Macaulay than one thought; Tennyson is not so angelic nor Browning so rebellious as he should be for the purposes of a rhetorical explosive contrast. Between Tennyson and Browning there are strong affinities, the same sort of power, largely the same ideas, the same policy. Compare Joannes Agricola and St. Simeon Stylites; consider again the way both poets took the dramatic monologue as vehicle for much of their most original thought, and the way the thought of Ulysses corresponds to the ruling passion of Browning. If Fra Lippo Lippi and Bishop Blougram's Apology, and still more Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau are diffuse beyond the limit of Tennyson's idyllic form, remember the other poems, so richly compact: Artemis Prologises and The Bishop orders his tomb in St. Praxed's.
The resemblance goes far deeper than this choice of a frame or these coincidences of thought. The poetic invention of Tennyson and Browning alike is shown in their rhyming forms. Their new melodies carry on the life that had been recovered by the poets before them; they are the successors of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Shelley and Keats, in the freedom and variety of their verse. Let no one think that this is merely an affair of prosody; or rather, let no one think that prosody is merely a science of patterns. Some people may see nothing more in the stanza than a figure on the printed page, like the figures of those old-fashioned metrical toys, the poems composed in the shape of an altar or a pair of wings. But the difference between the verse of Abt Vogler and Rabbi Ben Ezra is much more than this. The poetic measure, the stave or stanza, has a soul in it, a movement which is not only the utterance of life but the poetic life itself. It is not (except in mechanical work like some of the old Pindarics) a mere shape given to words and sentences. As it comes to the poet, before the poem is made, it is part of his inspiration, an unbodied melody with the life of the poem in it.
When Mr. Saintsbury's third volume appears, the art of Browning's verse will be better understood. It is not the same, but it is of the same kind as the art of Tennyson.
Browning's blank verse in its ordinary fashion is truly represented in Calverley's burlesque. The trick of it may be found—a sort of prophetic parody—in Elvira, or the worst not always true, a drama by a Person of Quality (the Earl of Bristol) in 1667:
Prythee, if thou lov'st me
Hold me no longer in suspense, Chichon.
Chi.Why then, for fear—the devil a bit for love—
I'll tell you, sir, that luckily I met
The drab Francisca at the Capuchin's,
Lodging behind her lady, I think on purpose;
For I perceived her eager sparrow-hawk's eye,
With her veil down (ne'er stirs a twinkling-while
From its sly peeping-hole), had found me straight.
I took my time i' the nick, but she outnicked me.
Both Browning and Tennyson are fond of licence and variations and resolution of feet in their blank verse. But Browning, like Tennyson, will have none of these variations in his most solemn passages:
O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire!
Nor is there any such licence admitted when he is thinking of pure beauty the Greek islands and their sweetness and light:
Cleon, the poet from the sprinkled isles,
Lily on lily that o'erlace the sea—
They are told that Browning is one of the greatest poets; they come on something that reminds them of the Ingoldsby Legends—the Tipton Slasher, Rarey drumming on Cruiser, Jane Lamb that we danced with at Vichy—comic rhymes:—ranunculus, 'Tommy make room for your uncle' us, and hundreds more of such offences. Even when there is a less outrageous style, there still remains a great heap of comic poetry, which to many sober and worthy readers is a violent and painful thing. 'Comic poet,' they think, is the next thing to profanity; one does not speak of a comic prophet. Possibly it is people of that sort who are intended in How it strikes a contemporary; the boy's mistake about the poet whom his father called the 'Corregidor':
Would point him out to me a dozen times;
'St—St,' he'd whisper, 'the Corregidor.'
I had been used to think that personage
Was one with lacquered breeches, lustrous belt,
And feathers like a forest in his hat,
Who blew a trumpet and proclaim'd the news,
Announced the bull-fights, gave each church its turn,
And memorized the miracle in vogue.
He had a great observance from us boys;
We were in error; that was not the man.
It is strange, and it is one of the great disappointments in Browning, that he should have made so poor a case for Aristophanes and his Comic Muse, in the book devoted to their Apology. But his own lyrical freedom is that Muse's gift, abundantly
And make them kiss.
If we must choose, the poem shall be Waring, a poem more personal than many of Browning's, springing from a suggestion in his own life like those that set Wordsworth on his poetical inventions. The friend has gone, and the brooding memory, in a sort of dream, mingles the true nature of the friend with all sorts of possibilities, fancies—the play of the mind, which seems arbitrary and casual in this poem, being really an accompaniment of the main thought, which is of Waring and his genius. The passage that brings out the music is where Iphigenia comes to the poet's mind. He is thinking of Russia—Russia makes him think of the Crimea, the Tauric Chersonese—then of Iphigenia in Tauris—and the verse changes from its loose variety into the sounding 'square' verse—the old heroic measure—:
Or who in Moscow, toward the Czar,
With the demurest of footfalls
Over the Kremlin's pavement, bright
With serpentine and syenite,
Steps with five other Generals
That simultaneously take snuff,
For each to have pretext enough,
And kerchief-wise unfold his sash,
Which, softness' self, is yet the stuff
To hold fast when a steel chain snaps,
And leave the grand white neck no gash.
Waring in Moscow, to those rough
Cold northern natures borne perhaps,
Like the lamb-white maiden dear
From the circle of mute kings
Unable to repress the tear,
Each as his sceptre down he flings,
To Dian's fane at Taurica,
Where now a captive priestess, she alway
Mingles her tender grave Hellenic speech
With theirs, tuned to the hailstone-beaten beach,
As pours some pigeon, from the myrrhy lands
Rapt by the whirlblast to fierce Scythian strands
Where breed the swallows, her melodious cry
Amid their barbarous twitter.
It would be pleasant to go on, to quote from Rudel, to repeat again the songs In a Gondola:
Which were best, to roam or rest,
The land's lap, or the water's breast
W. P. Ker.
- ↑ The Queen's Lecture, given at Queen's College, London, March 2, 1910.